You can tell that a medium has reached some form of maturity once things start getting meta and titles appear that draw attention to the process of being constructed and the dilemmas that are faced by their creators. Countless great modern novels and films that are as lauded as Citizen Kane are clear examples of this and, whilst not in the same league as these, The Prisoning: Fletcher’s Quest is of a similar vein. You play as a burned out developer who undergoes hypnotism in a therapy session only to find himself trapped inside his own creation, a search adventure game with procedurally generated layouts.

The pixel-art aesthetic in Fletcher’s Quest is really nicely done and the various areas of the game look distinct whilst enemies and characters are well designed. Bosses are particularly memorable and everything benefits from a bright and colourful approach. Music is solid enough with a few standout tracks, again often in boss fights.

The game’s narrative is clearly nonsense and is all presented in a suitably tongue-in-cheek fashion. This is perhaps most obviously seen by the fact that the early rooms of the game have to be traversed not just devoid of weapons or skills but also of clothing. The pixel graphics mean that you are saved the detail of such nudity, whether you’d like it or not, but characters do comment on it. Your first mission, therefore, is to find clothes and a means of defending yourself.

While billed as a Metroidvania (I prefer ‘search adventure’ myself) the game actually reminded me more of classic home computer titles such as Jet Set Willy and Manic Miner. The flip-screen traversal and assortment of ludicrous enemy types brought me right back to my earliest days of gaming in the mid to late-1980s, but without the extreme frustration that accompanied those often nigh-on-impossible games. The main difference, however, is actually an unintended consequence of the choice to use procedural generation – rooms and areas are relatively forgettable, lacking the intricate design that the genre really requires to succeed.

The generated layout is completely functional with areas blocked until you beat bosses and unlock new skills, but many rooms feel interchangeable and the extreme frequency of save and travel points mean that backtracking is rarely required. Indeed, on the default difficulty it was generally quicker to collect items and then die to return to the last save point. As collection progress is maintained, the game seems to actively encourage you to avoid playing it. If I’m being generous this might be a deliberate move in keeping with the meta view of the genre, but I think it’s just another result of the use of procedural generation.

In terms of skills, you play through the whole game with just a pistol, and one that initially is a real pea-shooter. You can fire one bullet at a time and if you miss then you have to wait until the bullet disappears from view before you can fire another. This adds a level of strategy and reward for accuracy that does help to keep things interesting. As you defeat each boss you’ll be granted an additional bullet (a fact that I forgot, which made the second main boss unnecessarily difficult) as well as a traversal skill like double-jump and butt bounce.

As well as standard single screen platforming challenges, The Prisoning occasionally breaks things up with horizontal shooter sections and the final boss is an auto-runner minigame that treads a fine line between challenging and downright annoying. That said, given my first playthrough was under three hours, the variety is restricted by the short length of the game. This, again, helps to make the game feel like a lost retro title.

The four boss fights are the most memorable part of the game, not coincidentally because they are clearly the most hand-crafted moments. You’ll find yourself up against a giant robot, a skateboarding shark and more, with all offering distinct challenges and necessitating different approaches. The one that stood out for me was the shark, both because of the uniqueness of the antagonist, but also the slippery slope of forced humour it introduced.

The whole game has a lot of lol random’ humour that is very hit or miss. The nudity is the most obvious example but the shark boss features a lot of dialogue about how badly it is designed and frustratingly difficult it is. This kind of meta-joke is so often undermined by the content being as annoying as the joke pokes fun at. Admittedly this boss was rendered more challenging by my forgetfulness, but the battle goes on for a long time with you only having two hits before death.

Heretical is a game that wasn’t on my radar at all until TSA’s Reviews Editor, Dom, put me onto it, and I thought, “Oh yeah, that looks cool!” It’s one that I hadn’t noticed, despite the fact that it’s so specifically built for me that Steam not recommending it to me is a total failing of the system designed to promote games to me. Seriously people, what are we doing if this doesn’t end up on my recommended games list?

My Steam-related woes aside, Heretical is an action roguelike with some seriously Soulsy vibes in both setting and the feel of combat. Death is everywhere, one of the NPCs is a skeleton with an eldritch horror for legs that’s praying a lot, and everyone is sad. This game is incredibly hard, and while progression is constant, it’s not immediately obvious. Each character you can play as has their own stats and a special skill, along with equipment preferences.

Combat is generally just you attacking, using an alternate weapon, or dodging, and all of your skills will be going off as you go. Some of those will be on a timer, some will be a set number of attacks, and some might be passive buffs. You can upgrade those as you level up, and along with that, new equipment drops constantly, so you get to pick between what you have and what you’ve picked up, with the loser of that competition immediately turning into gold.

It’s all very simple theoretically, but the reality is that you’re making builds that need to work together with each skill coming together as one, and ideally matching your character as well. You also get stat points to spend which you permanently unlock, and can apply at the beginning of each run to each character. That’s a lot of fun, because you can try out different builds pretty comfortably.

Combat isn’t complex, but it is a lot of fun, with most enemies being more than capable of ruining a run in an instant, especially as things get harder the longer a run goes on. For every 50 kills you manage, the difficulty goes up, and you get some special currencies to spend on shrines that will give you buffs and debuffs, but you can usually work off the debuffs. It makes for a constant stream of risk and reward, and while getting stronger is nearly always a good thing, it sure can come back to bite you in the butt if your build can’t keep up.

On top of all of that though, you get prophecies to complete. Each of these is a mission of sorts which will unlock something. Some of those are new skill slots, new skills, new characters, new items, and just about anything else. It means that every run, even the failed ones, often end up leading you towards something a little bit cooler. Not only that, but while it is a roguelike, the world itself is pretty set in stone. Bosses are always in the same place, and your progression speeds up as you learn the layout, but also as you unlock new shortcuts by kicking down ladders, or killing a boss enough times to permanently unlock a magical gate or something.

It just feels fantastic, and while it’s undoubtedly very punishing, every little unlock is a joy to achieve, and the enemies are wonderfully varied, and the starting characters feel meaningfully different. It also looks amazing, I really like the music, and I just think that if any of this sounds appealing to you, you should probably play it, because it’s a damn good game.

Another week, another indie horror game and once again, it’s from a solo developer. Fortunately, this one feels less derivative and phoned in than Ebola Village, but it still suffers from optimisation issues and a story that takes a turn into the weird, albeit not in a good way. As a first game from a solo developer, there is promise, however, so hopefully the criticism here can be taken as constructive.

The 9^th Charnel takes its name from a mysterious cult that is trying to connect with their idea of God in order to find out the hidden truths of the universe. This is slowly revealed to the player through multiple protagonists in an interesting design choice that doesn’t quite work out. The main player character, Michael, has sections that involve puzzle-solving and exploration (and eventually combat), but Jacques is stuck wandering around a familiar-looking Unreal 5 house, waiting for doors to open on cutscene triggers. I think the game would have been better if the Jaques parts were removed completely, although it’s clear that the developer, Saikat Deb, has ambitions to be a film director in the lengthy and unskippable cutscenes.

Graphically, the 9^th Charnel is inconsistent. Player models have that uncanny Unreal sheen, and there is little to no attempt to make lip sync match the dialogue. The close-up focus on character faces only serves to exacerbate this, and it is often difficult to take the story seriously due to the visual style. Levels are a little more successful, even if a lot of the game defaults to different corridors. Enemies are relatively varied, but I don’t know if they are original designs or assets, as is often the case with low-budget Unreal Engine games.

There is little in the way of audio to comment on. No memorable tunes, enemy screams that are horrific for all the wrong reasons, footsteps that don’t seem to match your movement and voice acting that ranges from functional to downright awful. The script doesn’t give the actors a lot to work with, to be honest, but some of the performances are comical rather than dramatic.

Midway through the game, the two protagonists meet, with an interesting twist to the tale when they do. Unfortunately, the narrative takes a nosedive from that point on. Once combat becomes an option, the game turns into one long corridor until the end. The Charnels are in fact the genetically enhanced individuals that the cult uses to further their search for God, and there was potential for an interesting critique of the lengths that people will go to in order to assuage their guilt and despair. Instead, the final act of the game seems to turn into a Christian sermon on forgiveness and repentance. I mean, all power to those who will benefit from such a tale, but it doesn’t really flow from the story itself.

The first two-thirds of the game involve a mixture of environmental puzzles and hiding from dangerous enemies. Medpacks are relatively common but only restore 15% of your health, and the various stalker types hit hard. This would make for a tense experience were it not for the fact that the stalkers have all had lobotomies, as they will stand there and let you enter a hiding space right in front of them before wandering off. It is still possible to get killed if you get stuck in a corner, but it never feels like you’ve been outwitted rather than made a mistake.

A high point are the puzzles, which are well-designed and range from finding keys and levers to more developed logic puzzles and looking for clues. A couple of tile-based puzzles were genuinely enjoyable, and I think the game would have benefited from leaning into this aspect more than the flawed stealth. Once combat becomes an option, then sadly the game abandons puzzles and morphs into a janky action game. Enemies take an inconsistent number of shots to go down, but tend towards being bullet sponges, ruining the good work elsewhere. The noise they make when dying is horrific and jarring, which doesn’t help matters.

Self-improvement, growth, development. Ideally, these are tenets to live life by. Whether that’s setting aside time to train and exercise in some weird sport you’ve seen online, learn a new language with a pushy owl, or expand your horizons through travel, though only if you’re not just there for the sake of the ‘gram. Gamesir are a company with this same outlook. They started out with some peripherals of questionable quality, but have spent the following years crafting a wealth of incredible devices that tend to feature cutting-edge technology with seriously competitive pricing.

The G7 Pro was one of 2025’s best peripherals. One so good, it was fractions away from being perfect. Gamesir seem to have known that, and with the Wuchang Fallen Feathers Edition of the G7, they’ve made what is arguably the pro controller to beat, at least if you’re an Xbox or PC gamer.

The G7 already had a spec list to die for – well, if you lust after extra controller inputs, mechanical buttons, trigger lockouts and frictionless TMR sticks – but the one omission was a wireless connection to Xbox consoles. That’s the main addition for this release, thanks to the included 2.4Ghz dongle, and it completes the feature set perfectly.

This gamepad is also stunning. The Wuchang edition is boldly decked out in blue and gold, a colour scheme that’s carried through to the charging base as well, with Chinese iconography and artistic brush strokes sweeping between the two. There’s gold feathering – matching with Wuchang- Fallen Feathers’ malady that affects protagonist Bai Wuchang – that runs across both of the controller feet, doubling up as a textured grip. It immediately feels like a well thought out and intentional collaboration, rather than just a different colourway, and every time you reach for it, there’s a sense of occasion and impact that you’re definitely not getting elsewhere.

In the hand, the G7 Pro Wuchang Edition’ 272g has just the right heft to feel premium and purposeful, but it’s not wearying like the Xbox Elite line can be. Its mechanical microswitch-equipped D-pad is also one of the best out there at the moment, and I love the definition, speed, and the corresponding click that comes with every press.

TMR sticks are the newest frontier in analogue stick tech, and they’re the next step after Hall Effect. Just like Hall Effect, they operate without physical components rubbing together, avoiding the wear and tear that old-school potentiometer sticks could develop, and stopping controller-killing stick drift. TMR sticks use electromagnetic technology, making them more precise than Hall Effect, and they’re tuned to feel closer to traditional analogue sticks. Gamesir’s versions in the G7 Pro feel awesome, and through multiple rounds of Overwatch, they’ve proved blindingly responsive.

A couple of months ago, there was a clear audio lag when using wired headphones via the G7 Pro wirelessly with Xbox Series X|S. The most recent firmware has definitely improved matters, but it still feels like there’s a small measure of latency between the on-screen action and the audio being delivered to you. That can be a dealbreaker for a committed competitive gamer, but if you’re that committed, then you’re going to have your controller wired up too, making it a non-issue. Even so, we hope that Gamesir can squash latency down further for those wireless gamepad folks.

There are other amazing pro controllers out there, but the G7 Pro Wuchang Edition has them absolutely trounced on price. I love the Nacon Revolution X Unlimited, but its list price is £70 more than the G7 Pro (or even more, with the G7 Pro’s regular appearance on AliExpress) While it does have features that Gamesir’s offering doesn’t, I’m not sold that the OLED information screen is worth the sizeable premium.

I play a lot of horror demos during each and every Steam Next Fest, and more often than not, games that I am unaware of make their way into my Wishlist. Crisol: Theater of Idols was a strange case that went the other way as Blumhouse’s latest game looked superb, but the demo emphasised an unkillable stalker enemy that felt at odds with the gunplay and atmosphere of the game. I kind of took my eyes off Crisol after that, but I am very happy to declare that I was wrong to do so. Having now spent the past few days absolutely immersed in the world of Crisol, I consider it to be one of my favourite action horror games in years, and one that feels an absolute steal at its bargain retail price.

The story and world-building of Crisol is absolutely superb, and genuinely feels up there with the best of Resident Evil and FromSoft. You begin as Gabriel, a stranded captain on a mysterious shore, entrusted with a mission by the God of the Sun to seal the evil power of the God of the Sea. Gabriel is a devout soldier but one who seems tormented by the conflicting voices of doubt and conviction – conveyed through some fabulous audio design that rewards wearing headphones. Soon after beginning his adventure, Gabriel is confronted by automaton mannequins that seem invulnerable to his pistol and he is swiftly dealt with.

What should be the end, however, proves to just be the beginning as the God of Sun offers his power to Gabriel in the form of a grotesque link between his blood and his weapons. Normal firearms become magical guns when they are absorbed by his magical blood and can hurt the uncanny foes that stalk the streets and buildings of Hispania. It is not just the nature of the weapons that is transformed, though, as the ammunition they fire is manifested from your blood as well. What follows is a unique twist on the conventional risk and reward of survival horror as you must manage your health and ammo from one pool.

Hispania is a darkly beautiful setting, with ruined streets and interiors that defy periodisation as the game could be taking place any time from the late 19^th century to the current day (the only clear nod to a more modern date being a radio that you use to communicate with friends and sometimes antagonists). The architecture evokes the timeless splendour of Spanish cities, whilst reminding me a lot of the world of Resident Evil 4 – a game that is a clear influence here. Voice acting is mostly very strong – although I will be playing again in Spanish to really set the mood. There have been some complaints about your companion Mediodia being too upbeat for the tone but I quite liked the contrast this enables. Music is excellent and songs can be unlocked by collecting hidden vinyl records in the game.

Your starting pistol is relatively underpowered even when bloodily enhanced but you can level it up as you progress. In the middle of the game it was my primary weapon with a great balance between power and blood cost for ammunition. A shotgun and a rifle are found later in the game and are hugely effective but come at a much higher blood cost. You also have a knife which can be used to parry attacks but has a limited durability to manage. I struggled to time the parry in my playthrough but will practice in future ones – hopefully the window is patched to be a bit more forgiving.

Combat is brutal and visceral as the mannequin enemies are unrelenting in their attacks. Their rigid, inhuman movements are terrifying in the gloom of many areas, and their horrifying appearance is exacerbated by the fact that they keep on coming even when decapitated or dismembered. Managing your ammo and targets when multiple foes are lurching, crawling or even firing ranged weapons at you is truly thrilling in a way that few games manage aside from Leon Kennedy’s best adventures. There is some welcome variety in enemy as the game progresses, with a later crystal/glass foe being particularly difficult to counter.

The aforementioned invincible stalker is far more cohesive in the full game than I found in the early demo. Delores is a twisted mix of robot and statue with a tendency to taunt you as she stomps unerringly towards you. The stealth sections featuring her are not my favourite parts of the game but they were not frequent enough to disrupt my enjoyment and actually offered a great change of pace from the more action-orientated moments.

The final aspect of the game is a focus on puzzles that goes even beyond the influence of Capcom’s legendary series. Aside from finding key items and environmental puzzles involving gears and timed gates, there are regular logic puzzles that range from enjoyable to truly infuriating without ever being too frustrating. Some of these are takes on the familiar but all benefit from fitting the unique aesthetic to perfection. I will admit that one particular late game example involving making up an image from two concentric circles made me pause the game and take a break for a while.

The core concept of Aerial Knight’s Dropshot is utterly bonkers. You and your opponents leap from a plane, circling hundreds of miles above the ground. None of you have parachutes though, and instead you willingly freefall to your doom. As you plummet, you must shoot your fellow plummeters with your magic finger gun – yes, really. Your objective is to kill them all before you hit the ground. Oh, and your player character is called Smoke Wallace. He has purple skin and magical powers because he was bitten by the same radioactive dragon that ate all of his family. You see? Bonkers.

Bright and garish, the visuals are all acid-soaked kaleidoscopic weirdness. It’s not my kind of thing, but this game certainly has a striking and attention-grabbing look. Gameplay is structured around small levels that last for sixty seconds, Dropshot is gaming for the TikTok generation. Each level is intended as a dopamine hit but to be quickly forgotten. As you fall from a first-person perspective, you’ll need to dodge floating islands, laser traps and your opponents’ return fire to stay alive, and with only two lives, this can be challenging. Kill efficiently and stylishly and you’ll rack up points and a high grade, the idea being to return to each level numerous times to hit a high score and achieve a perfect run. The problem is, that despite the bonkers premise and over the top visuals, the gameplay itself is rather pedestrian, leaving me with little interest in returning to a level once it was done.

The biggest issue is speed; there’s little sense of any. As you hurtle through the sky, it should be an adrenaline rush, like knee-sliding in Platinum Games’ Vanquish, or hurtling round a tight corner far too fast in F-Zero. Instead, it’s more akin to strolling to the shops to buy some bread. This is an oddly muted experience, rather than dodging floating islands and traps by the skin of your teeth, you seem to have a veritable age to gently steer yourself out of the way.

Achieving a high score amounts to little more than the eye-straining task of having to spot your tiny freefalling opponents in the distance, slowly line up a shot, and take them out. You’ll likely fail to spot them all on the first attempt, forcing you to attempt the level numerous times to catch them. Often your foes will kill you first, but you’ll have little idea that a bullet is coming. One moment you’re alive, the next you’re dead, with little to no visual clues that an attack is incoming. Worse, the collision detection isn’t great – possibly due to the challenges of basing the game around a first-person view – meaning sometimes you die, sometimes you survive, and you’re really not sure why.

There are two other game modes. The first is a boss battle that sees you fighting an enormous dragon, a nasty fella who can absorb a whole lot of damage, forcing you to conserve your ammo and keep a look out for ammunition drops to fall through. This is certainly more enjoyable than the main game. Primarily because it resolves the issue of the irritating unseen enemy attacks, as the dragon blasts you with big obvious fireballs that must be quickly shot from the sky, bringing some old-school light gun game shenanigans to proceedings.

The final mode is a straight up race between you and your rival to catch a golden egg before you hit the ground. This does, finally, get the pulse racing, as due to numerous speed boosters things end up fast and frantic. Darting through arrays of laser beams, narrowly avoiding chunks of rock, finally I can see what the development team were going for. If these thrills and spills could be replicated throughout the rest of the game, then Aerial Knight’s Dropshot would be an absolute indie banger. As it is, there’s just too many of the boring levels getting in the way of the good stuff.

Inazuma Eleven: Victory Road is a football game that feels, almost wholeheartedly, like it’s not really about football. This is a sports drama through and through, focusing on the interpersonal relationships, the individual journeys, and the yearning for acceptance that epitomises our teenage years, rather than sporting glory. You play as Destin Bellows, a young man with a heart condition, who appears to hate football and attends South Cirrus Academy, a school where football is banned. None of this really screams the word ‘football’ – or ‘soccer’ if you’re so inclined – and yet, Inazuma Eleven: Victory Road also revels in the joy, the purity, and the companionship that football can bring. This juxtaposition also makes it one of the best sports RPGs you’ll find.

I’m a sucker for sports dramas. Maybe it started with The Mighty Ducks, a movie that took a rag-tag team of unlikely players who went from being woeful nobodies to the best team in the league. With Emilio Estevez! While there’s no Young Guns alumni here, there’s that same sense of camaraderie and overcoming adversity throughout Victory Road, starting from incredibly meagre beginnings, before working your way towards rebuilding the school’s football club and setting forth on a path to sporting greatness. It’s the characters that pull you through this drama though, rather than the extraneous bumps in the road, and you’ll quickly embrace Destin and his myriad teammates wholeheartedly.

Level-5 have made this character focus easy, because you won’t be playing football any time soon, at least not in the central story mode. My save file had clocked up an oddly impressive 4 hours before I played my first 5-a-side game against an ageing group of shopkeepers, and I kind of love the investment that’s been built into Victory Road’s narrative. To a certain extent, you won’t care that there’s no football, and when it does arrive, with its quirky stop-and-start gameplay, special moves and occasionally clunky controls, you’ll want to persevere, learn and get a grasp of it so you can lead the team you’ve built to victory. It’s something that wasn’t ably captured in Victory Road’s early beta testing, and it feels a lot more natural within its proper context.

The original Inazuma games were mostly exclusive to Nintendo’s DS and 3DS, using the stylus to move your players around the pitch, and selecting special moves as you went. It was a system that I loved across multiple games, and I was sad to see it go, but Victory Road’s updated take does a good job of replicating and replacing it, with more action and reaction than you needed before.

It’s best to think of Victory Road’s matches as a series of RPG encounters, strung together in quick succession, rather than a football match. Every time your player meets an opposing player, whether you’re playing offence or defence, it begins an encounter. Depending on the player, you’ll have basic options like passing, shooting, or dashing past, but you may also have special moves available to you, each wilder and more unbelievable than the last. That can mean creating clones of yourself to confuse defenders, or unleashing a shot that’s the result of a thousand kicks, but, with the level of variety on offer, it makes matches continually action-packed and exciting. It’s definitely not regular football, but it’s a hell of a lot of fun.

Destin’s tale is easy-going, and occasionally a little slow, but it’s all so amiable, and the characters are so likeable, that I found I didn’t mind all too much. Destin loves to investigate and collect data, so there’s a fair bit of running back and forth, and that’s interspersed with funny turn-based RPG battles/conversations that use rock-paper-scissors mechanics as you try to argue your way to victory. I preferred the original Japanese voices over the English dub, but only marginally so, and if you prefer to play in your native language, it’s perfectly satisfactory.

While the central story mode strings you along without any matches, there’s a secondary story that gets you into the action much quicker. Chronicle Mode brings a time-travelling tale to the Inazuma timeline, sending you back in time to form the ultimate eleven, in the hope of preventing a world-ending apocalypse. Newcomers might raise an eyebrow at first, but returning fans have been here before. Chronicle Mode manages to perform a whole bunch of functions at once: introducing people to the series’ extensive history, getting into the football sections quicker, and bringing an Ultimate Team-like experience to the game to boot. It’s a winning formula, and one that shows how strong the revised gameplay formula is.

Level-5 have given players an absolute avalanche of places to play in Victory Road. From the two story modes, you can then set forth with your created team into a tournament, in either single player, multiplayer or online modes, or there’s another mode where you can play with full-powered historical teams from each of the previous games. If you need a break from all that, you can even create your own Inazuma Bond Town where you can meet up with friends online, filling them with all sorts of decorations, buildings, people, cats or giant statues of Mark Evans. To be fair, it’s probably the weirdest inclusion here, and yet, it feels thoroughly Inazuma.

All of this is wrapped up in a lovely 3D anime aesthetic that ties really well with the traditional cartoon cutscenes. It often feels like you’re playing an interactive cartoon – a fact heightened by the story modes’ many cutscenes, and chapter-by-chapter framing – with Level-5’s design department clearly working at the height of its powers. It definitely bodes extremely well for this year’s Professor Layton and the New World of Steam.

Gamers are always looking for the next level. A bigger sword, a more powerful gun, magic that turns your foes into globs of pink mush. But what about levelling up your gaming setup? A headset would always be my first call, and then maybe a pro controller or high end mouse, but what then?

Woojer have their own ideas on that, and they’ve been toting their haptic-infused devices for several years. While the Woojer Vest – now on its fourth generation – is the headline grabber, the Woojer Strap is the more accessible option, giving gamers and music lovers an extra layer of immersion by strapping a single device to your body, its haptics shocking, rumbling and thumping in time with the action.

Priced at £124 – with a healthy holiday season discount down to £95 – the Woojer Strap 4 is the latest iteration of the single-unit device. In the box, you’re getting the Woojer Strap 4 central unit, an elasticated strap to wrap around your body, a USB-C to USB-C charging cable, and a double-ended 3.5mm cable to physically connect your audio devices.

As gaming devices go, the Strap 4 is pretty straightforward. The unit itself has some weight to it and feels incredibly robust in your hand, crafted from solid plastic throughout, and available in a series of different colours. To the front, there’s a customisable LED ring with rubberised physical volume and intensity controls within it.

The top edge features the power button and Bluetooth pairing button, while the bottom includes a USB-C charging port and two 3.5mm audio sockets, one for input and the other as a dedicated output. I thought the older model’s copper finish looked great, but the addition of RGB allows the Strap 4 to match your gaming setup, and the extra layer of customisation gives you some individuality too. If you’re not an RGB fan? You can just turn it all off.

You’ll need a mobile device for the Strap 4 setup, and it proves pleasingly simple to connect the device to the Woojer app, where it takes you through pairing to your device, and then the secondary pairing of your headphones to the Strap 4. This all worked first time, which almost never happens, and you then find yourself with the main control page, which gives you an input and output display, as well as power remaining and the current latency setting, which you can alter if you find that the Strap 4’s haptic output doesn’t quite match up with whatever visuals you’re looking at.

Besides that, you can directly control the volume and the intensity, though there’s physical buttons for these as well, and, if needed, you can dive into the haptic sensation mode, which alters the behaviour of the haptics through Broad, Focused and Gaming settings.

The app also gives you decent control over the LED lights. There’s a full spectrum colour wheel to dial in the exact tone you want, adjust the brightness, and choose between a series of different effects to keep things interesting. While you’re playing, it’s not exactly something that adds all that much to the experience, but it’s certainly more futuristic, and if you’re out and about listening to music, you’ll certainly turn a few heads.

The Strap 4 experience is definitely easier to get into than the Woojer Vest. It’s small and portable, doesn’t take up much space, and requires minimal setup. You can just throw it on, and start watching, playing or listening to whatever you want, and I really liked how simple it felt. In turn, it immediately lifts your experience, with the added haptic feedback from your audio immersing you deeper in your content than ever before.

You can wear it in a variety of ways, though Woojer seem to recommend particular setups for particular input types, so for music you’d wear it around your waist, or horizontally while playing VR . Fundamentally, you can go for whatever feels best and most natural to you, and I gravitated most towards wearing it across my body, with the strap over one shoulder and the unit in the centre of my chest. This makes the haptic sensation fire directly into your chest, and explosions and heavy hits thump and rumble straight into you. Just like the rumble motors in a controller, it brings the action to life that bit further, and I find it hard to go back to playing without the extra layer it provides.

I loved using the Strap 4 for regular flat-screen gaming, listening to music and rewatching the most recent Star Trek movies, but VR is where it truly makes a major difference. With your senses cut off from the outside world, the rumble feels more nuanced and powerful, and whether you’re playing Beat Saber and throwing yourself directly into the music, or going for something more action-heavy like the new Deadpool VR, the Strap 4 brings a new level of immersion for a relatively low entry price.

While it can’t compare to the full experience you feel with the Woojer Vest, in terms of value for money, I think the Strap 4 hits the sweet spot between what it brings to your experience and the asking price. If you’ve already got a great headset, a pro controller, and a VR setup, the Strap 4 is practically a no-brainer as the next step in your gaming setup.

The only limitation, and this goes for all Woojer devices, is that this is a physical representation of audio output. That means your experience relies on how the audio is delivered, getting the levels right, and it will change on a game-by-game or song-by-song basis. It means there’s a certain degree of variation and inconsistency that some users might find disappointing, and hopefully Woojer can find a way to tap into the rumble and gamepad haptic signals in future. Once you’ve become accustomed to that abstraction, though, I still don’t think you’ll look back.

Role-playing video games have been around almost as long as D&D itself, but for every step they take towards modernity, many of the fundamentals remain the same. Octopath Traveler 0 is a game that’s more aware of that than any other AAA release this year. It readily leans on RPG fundamentals like turn-based combat, grinding for experience and epic storytelling, while aping the 16-bit visuals of classics like Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy VI. It’s also a reworking of the mobile title, Champions of the Continent, but, for all of that, Octopath Traveler 0 looks and feels every inch the modern RPG.

Admittedly, we’ve been here before. The first two Octopath games took eight separate characters, and interlinked their eight narratives to great effect, but it was the HD-2D visuals that instantly won them an avalanche of pixel-art admirers. Octopath 0 immediately pulls the same trick by being undeniably stunning to behold, updating the look of the classics with a shimmering, living filter that brings every scene to life in remarkable fashion. I don’t think I could ever get bored of this art style, and three games in (and with a bunch of other HD-2D games alongside) that looks likely to pan out.

While the visual style remains the same, the overarching structure and narrative framing have changed, this time putting a created character at the centre of everything. Your silent protagonist gets their own name, look, and even a favourite food, but they don’t say much of anything at all, while other characters readily monologue through conversations to their heart’s content. You get used to it, but I did miss the individual characters of the last two games.

That said, the teams at Square Enix and DokiDoki Groove Works have crafted an interesting and companionable bunch of characters to surround yourself with, and there’s a huge number of them, and their backstories, to involve yourself in. Whether touched by tragedy, or seeking knowledge and influence, there’s hundreds of narrative threads to pull on, some of which go nowhere, while others contribute to your own, world-altering quest.

Outside of the thirty recruitable characters, virtually every person you come across can be spoken to, investigated, bartered with, or hired, whether through your persuasive talents or by beating them in combat. It’s an enjoyable, and often productive, diversion, and it makes every town and village feel as though it’s brimming with life and character, even when these backstories are often just a few lines.

The core narrative is split into three strands: Power, Fame and Wealth. At the outset, each of these is headed by a particularly hateful lead antagonist, from the murderous playwright Auguste – who’s definitely stolen the Guardians of the Galaxy’s Collector’s schtick – to the beautiful Herminia whose drug cartel stands to corrupt half the population of the continent. You can tackle these in any order, with the other strands remaining frozen while you work your way through the others.

Your hometown, Wishvale, finds itself decimated at the hands of these evil-doers, setting you and your friends off on a quest to collect the eight divine rings, and you find yourself chasing each of them down, enacting your revenge while also rebuilding your homestead.

Town building is a big part of Octopath 0’s gameplay, and it’s well done, even if you might find it a little limited and straightforward. You can build various homesteads, shops and facilities and gain certain boons by inviting people to live there, while the layout and expansion of Wishvale is up to you, albeit within the framework that you’re given to work with.

You’ll find yourself decorating and tinkering for hours, and getting to see your creation in the beautiful game engine is well worth it. There’s a small fly in the ointment for Switch 2 players, who don’t get to use quite as many objects as PS5 or Xbox Series X|S owners (400 compared to 500), but there’s still enough customisation to truly make this place feel like your own.

Octopath Traveler 0 evolves the series’ turn-based combat, though it does feel fundamentally the same as its predecessors. Boosting attacks and breaking enemies is the key to success, wearing down their defences by discovering what weapon types they’re weak to. This time, you can have a massive 8 different characters in your party, with half of those in the back line providing support, while you can also recruit helpers to throw in with you.

It’s a shame that the difficulty level often bounces between ridiculously easy and teeth-gnashingly tough, but it does even out the further you go. If you’re a fan of turn-based combat, Octopath 0’s rendition remains interesting throughout, with the multiple characters bringing some of the mobile-centric chaos and carnage that you’d expect with multiple effects and attacks going on, while failure means you often have to strategise and plan to progress.

If you head into the menus, there’s plenty of the traditional levelling and equipping you’d expect to find, and you can unlock skills in the order you want, which is a nice touch, although you have to bear in mind how much SP they cost to cast when you’re starting out. There’s a huge amount of customisation available, with characters able to learn others’ skills, while your central protagonist can also change jobs – choosing from eight, obviously – learning new skills and improving their stats as they do, and letting you experience some of that variation the previous games had with multiple characters.

One of the biggest worries with Octopath Traveler 0 was whether it was going to feel like a mobile port, and thankfully, it doesn’t. From the huge cast of voice actors, through the multiple quests and asides, to the town-building and exceptional production values, Octopath Traveler 0 feels every bit the full console game. It definitely has a different flavour to the previous titles, and I can see some fans struggling with the shift, but in many ways, it feels fresh and unique when placed alongside its predecessors.

Marvel Cosmic Invasion is a nostalgia-soaked love letter to nine-year-old you. A side-scrolling beat ‘em up that looks like it just stepped out of a 90’s arcade, Cosmic Invasion features the character design of Marvel’s comic heyday, pixel-art visuals that ape Capcom’s Super Hero fighting series, and a tag team mechanic that is pure X-Men vs. Street Fighter. In short, with this much 90’s nostalgia powering it, how can Marvel Cosmic Invasion possibly fail?

Marvel big bad Annihilus wants to take over the universe and it’s up to you and three friends – either online or local in very slick drop-in drop-out multiplayer – to stop him. The story is suitably silly and slight. The, thankfully skippable, static cutscenes bracketing each level are completely incomprehensible scrolling beat ‘em up hokum, but the opening animated intro and accompanying theme-song is an unadulterated delight, perfectly capturing the essence of the iconic X-Men cartoon. You’ll be listening to it on repeat on your chosen music streaming platform of choice, let me tell you.

With an impressive character roster of 15 heroes, Cosmic Invasion certainly offers a stacked cast of Marvel do-gooders. There’s the expected A-listers like Spider-Man, Wolverine and Iron Man, but also a few more niche picks, such as Beta-Ray Bill, Cosmic Ghost Rider, and Phyla-Vell. Whilst I would have personally liked developer Tribute Games to delve a little deeper in the weeds of the Marvel character back catalogue – Marvel Rivals did this  with Jeff the Land Shark, turning the diminutive hero into a fan favourite and star of numerous comics in the process – the overall depth and breadth of the line-up really can’t be faulted.

What can be faulted is the variance in how much fun the characters are to play as. Flying characters suffer the most, the cost of being able to hover around the place a bit is seemingly being lumbered with a vastly reduced move-set. Storm is a total snore-fest, with only a handful of attacks on offer, whilst Silver Surfer, Iron Man, Phoenix and Phyla-Vell struggled to get much play time, simply because they can’t do very much. A couple of basic attacks, a range attack and a special? It’s not much terribly exciting. Plus, the insistence on flying heroes and enemies is unnecessarily fiddly, it’s often difficult to tell where you and your enemy are, resulting in a lot of accidental punching of thin air.

Wolverine and Black Panther are both superb, however, with varied combos and juggles putting their flying counterparts to shame. She Hulk’s range of pro-wrestling themed moves are brilliant fun to unleash, and Venom and Spider-Man deliver all the web-based antics a fan could hope for. The impressive sounding 15 character roster is quickly reduced down to five heroes you’ll actually want to play as, with the rest acting in a support role, leaping into the action with a brief bonus attack at the touch of a button.

If the heroes are well catered for, the villains they’ll be punching are not. Considering the vast universe of characters Tribute Games could call upon to include, they picked some lame ducks here. Most of the time you’ll be beating-up the exact same bug-like minions, only they’ll be painted in slightly different colours from level to level. Sure, there’s a few Sentinels to take on and some symbiotes, but mostly you’ll spend your time battling big mutated bees. Where’s the Kree? The Skrulls? The Chitauri? For a game set in the galaxy-spanning Marvel Cosmic comics, the lack of decent bad guys to duff up feels like the waste of an iconic licence.

Boss fights are also quite boring, even if they do feature a decent range of Marvel villains. No matter if you’re facing Knull, The Phoenix, or MODOK, your enemy will launch the same limited range of attacks and will soon be defeated without much effort. Indeed, for a game aping a 90’s coin-up, Marvel Cosmic Invasion is unexpectedly easy, offering little challenge and only occasionally pushing back against the player. My partner and I only had one or two re-starts and saw off the entire game in a couple of hours. We had little use for the tag-team mechanic either. Sure, you can swap in and out characters to deliver a massive juggling combo – so long as you don’t pick a flyer as a partner – buy why bother when a few punches will kill most opponents?

Worse, the levels themselves are oddly dull and repetitive. Scrolling beat ‘em ups are hardly known for their variety when it comes to level design, but Streets of Rage 4, Absolum, and Tribute Games own Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge prove it can be done. With no weapon pick-ups, no vehicles to drive or mounts to ride, no new moves to unlock, and the aforementioned limited range of enemies, Marvel Cosmic Invasion, even with its short run time, ultimately becomes a bit of a slog.

Despite all of the over-the-top visuals with nostalgia dripping loveliness then, playing Marvel Cosmic Invasion is just a bit, well, boring.

Duskpunk is a dice-based RPG putting you in a world where misery roams the streets of the city of Dredgeport, thanks to a combination of a seemingly never-ending war, criminal gangs, and the sway of the most powerful including the Emperor. You are a nobody who somehow escaped the butchery of the Front, but need to find your footing in a city where luck is thin and where relationships can turn sour quickly.

You have a choice of four classes in Duskpunk – Veteran, Writer, Criminal and Engineer – each of which has different starting stats. The veteran is a solid pick if you want to fight your way out of situations, with the disadvantage of not having the charisma or intuitiveness to find other solutions. The criminal class is for those who want to sneak around and use intuition. Engineers can construct workarounds for problems but are useless in a fight, while writers use their words to win arguments and bring people round. As you progress through Duskpunk you will earn ability points by completing tasks to up each skill, so can raise all of the stats to deal with most situations, as well as earning additional abilities.

Duskpunk’s gameplay is similar to Citizen Sleeper, but with different issues to keep track of and worry about.  Groat, the game currency that you use, is a big one as it will determine if you can buy food, shelter, and drugs to deal with stress. Groats go as quickly as they come, so you won’t ever feel financially comfortable. Stress can be raised by pushing beyond your character’s limits and through nightmares. As the stress meter builds, dice faces break, meaning your rolls as less likely to give you good outcomes. Initially, the only way to reduce stress is to take a drug which is expensive and hard to acquire, but as you explore more of Dredgeport different ways to reduce stress open up including meditation and talking to others. A wanted level can also appear depending on your actions, so you have to figure out ways to evade the authorities before they catch you. Health is another attribute to watch and if it reaches zero then a skill becomes broken. These skills can be fixed by recuperating, but that costs time and Duskpunk is a game where time matters a lot.

You will find yourself mixing with different factions through Dredgeport, each with their own goals, from controlling the drug business, unionising, all the way to toppling the government. As you become familiar with these groups you will be given aims, aka missions, to undertake which can vary wildly from handing out pamphlets to digging up corpses. A majority of the aims are time sensitive and it doesn’t seem possible to complete them all, so you need to decide which factions appeal to your character more.

The representatives of each of these factions, such as Zai of the Machinists and Dresden of the Lich Dealers, are decently written but, for me, did not quite have the depth to pull me in to build a real connection with them. There are some powerful groups in Duskpunk, but the decisions you make are what really impacts the wider world, even through inaction or not completing an aim. While there are a number of choices to make, there are only a few real endings that your actions can lead to. It offers some replayability, but also shows that some actions you take will not have an overbearing impact on the final outcome, though they can impact the fate of individual characters.

A bit more of the world treating you as a just one person where events happen without your involvement would have been good too, making Dredgeport feel more like a real city that moves around you and not because of you. The story is pretty engaging and does explore a number of themes including workers rights, the balance of power in society, isolation, segregation, and survival. Again it is not the most in-depth look at these themes, but Duskpunk does provide an accessible way to learn about these issues and tie them to our own experiences.

For much of Duskpunk, you will either be looking at a map of Dredgeport to pick locations to visit, or reading the conversations you have with the different characters to advance the game. I like the user interface of Duskpunk, finding it easy to navigate and understand. You have the map, the aim journal, and an inventory to show what you are carrying. Aside from groats, you can also trade rumours, tip-offs, and rare goods for money or influence. The characters are nicely drawn too with each one having a really distinctive look, while the map has small details like birds flying around, the flow of the river, and smoke rising from the factories. A lot of work has gone into making the world seem alive, even if it is a map.

As a known lover of card games, it wasn’t especially surprising that Cross Blitz really appealed to me back when I first tried its Early Access launch. Two whole years later, does it still feel as good now that it’s fully released? To put it simply, yes.

Look, we’re all busy people, I’m not going to lead you on, so if that’s all you wanted to know, then you’re done here, but do feel free to leave the page open for a few minutes to help our metrics, and maybe open a couple of other articles too. Thanks!

Cross Blitz is an RPG deckbuilder with multiple modes and multiple stories to play through as campaigns, thanks to its cast of different characters. Each of these characters have their own starting decks, and different potential build options as you progress as well. You’re bound to find a character or two you love the most, but at the end of the day, I think they’re all very well-designed and a lot of fun. It’s incredibly cool to nip around maps getting not only upgrades, but also more story about them all as well.

Along with that though, there’s also a roguelike mode, and it’s what can give Cross Blitz a near unlimited lifespan, whether you’ve finished the stories and find yourself wanting a bit more, or just want to snack on the gameplay and aren’t in the mood for reading. Yes, reading is very good for all of us, but some of us get four hours sleep, work too much, and just wanna demolish some enemies, you know?

One thing that didn’t quite hit me in with the Early Access release is just how much Cross Blitz feels like a really polished Game Boy Advance game. I think it’s the visual style mostly, but the whole vibe could easily have been from 20 years ago, and I mean that as a truly gargantuan compliment. Cross Blitz just feels like it’s laser-focused on its core gameplay and deck-building, doing a lot without wasting excess tech on stuff it doesn’t need. It masters mechanics to allow you to min-max, and it wants you to do so to push through some of the hardest battles as well.

Cross Blitz is an even better game now as it has even more to do, which is usually how these things go. The full release brings with it a new story campaign, which is in a similar vein to what’s come before, and it remains a lot of fun. The result is a more complete experience with even more cards and mechanics to mes around with, and just so much variety. It feels like you’re getting into the weeds with a really good TCG, but you don’t need to pay for all of it.

The name Creative means a great deal in gaming and audio circles. Known as the creator of the Soundblaster range of PC audio cards, their range has expanded to include audio products of all kinds, from the excellent Creative Pebble series of speakers through to gaming headphones with SXFI technology. The Creative Aurvana Ace 3 is the newest edition of their ANC-equipped true wireless earbuds, offering a cost-effective alternative to Apple’s AirPods Pro 3 and the Galaxy Buds Pro 3.

The Aurvana Ace 3 are stem-style true wireless earbuds, available in an eye-catching translucent purple colourway, that’s matched through the charging case and each earbud. There is something quite retro about their look, with a mid-noughties vibe that brings an unexpected wave of nostalgia with it. When it’s paired with the silver band running down each stem, they’re certainly unique-looking, but if you’re hoping for a more understated option, this isn’t it.

They feel light in the hand, which diminishes that premium sensation, but it does mean that you can easily wear them for hours without any fatigue. The earbuds are rated for 7 hours, which is an hour less than the AirPods Pro 3 but an hour more than the AirPods Pro 2, with a total of 26 hours of playback with the charging case, all of which played out pretty effectively in our testing.

The charging case lid hinge is a little flimsy, but the body of the case itself feels solid and is the perfect size for chucking in your pocket. It also includes wireless charging, which is a very welcome inclusion. At half the price of their top-end rivals, it’s a good start for the Aurvana Ace 3.

The audio pairing and setup is a little more convoluted than its core competitors, though, as there’s a suite of features to set up to make the most of the Ace 3. The Creative app handles nearly everything here, but you also need the separate SXFi app, which seems unnecessary.

First, and perhaps most importantly, you use Mimi sound personalisation to create a listening profile. This involves a short hearing test – best done in a quiet space – and the results then tailor the output to your own ears. It’s a stark difference, particularly factoring in my 40+ year old hearing, and the years of damage I’ve done to them by, well, listening to headphones that I’ve turned up too loud.

After that, you can choose your EQ presets to tailor the audio to your personal taste, or delve deeper into a custom EQ setup. Even if you’re not clued up about audio, frequencies and kHz, it’s all easy enough to mess around with in search of the roght sound.

The Aurvana Ace sound very good indeed, even without any tuning. Part of that is the ability to utilise the best audio codecs out there, translating LDAC, AptX Lossless and AptX Adaptive into a seamless listening experience. The Ace 3 are equipped with Snapdragon Sound, so if your Android device meets the right specification, not only will you benefit from the high resolution audio, you’ll experience fewer connection issues, and benefit from exceptionally low latency, making your mobile gaming just that bit more enjoyable.

Putting them to the test with some of my favourite tracks, I was immediately surprised by just how detailed the audio was from the Ace 3. Billy Eilish’s No Time To Die sounded suitably epic, with her vocals sounding so precise that it felt as though she was singing directly to me.

Changing tack, the brutal cacaphony of Pupil Slicer’s Heather was delivered in spades, losing none of its venom on its way into your ears. It’s always incredibly satisfying to hear new elements in songs, and the Ace 3s combined technologies make that a certainty. The dual xMEMS drivers here certainly help with audio separation, and bass response in particular is fantastic, being rounded and full, without becoming overwhelming.

The hybrid ANC proved moderately effective at blocking out background noise, though it is a clear step behind the Airpods Pro 3 and Bose Quietcomfort Ultra, and on a windy walk to work, they struggled against the wind quite a bit. Still, at this price point, it’s effective enough, and with the quality of the audio itself being so high, I don’t think anyone will be too disappointed with their performance.

As with many less expensive earbuds, the touch controls aren’t quite as reliable as their more expensive brethren. The Aurvana Ace 3 does keep things pretty simple, and there’s only one touch point on the main body of each earbud, rather than a panel or squeezable section. That does make changing the volume less efficient, requiring a long press on each earbud to move the volume up and down, and if you’re running that’s a real pain, but it does work, once you’ve adapted to it.

Phone call quality is good, possibly helped by the ability to use Snapdragon Sound via the connection to my Honor Magic V5, and family members confirmed that my voice was clear and easy to hear during calls. It helps to wrap up a compelling package from Creative, and if you’re looking for an excellent-sounding pair of earbuds at a mid-range pricepoint, you’d be hard pressed to find better.

The Aurvana Ace 3 are amongst the easiest earbuds to live with in this price bracket, and though their RRP is £140, you can currently snag them for a slightly bonkers £90 via the Creative website. The Nothing Ear (3) are also worth considering, currently coming in at £139.99, though they have worse battery life than the Ace 3 and are noticeably heavier too.

Sweet Surrender is a VR roguelike, and it comes with everything that label brings. You’ll be making your way through the environment picking off enemies, looking for weapons, cash, and upgrades, and swearing every time an enemy shaves off a bit of your health and you come closer to the end of a run. But it’s all in VR, and it’s cool throwing daggers that are somehow poisonous to robots. Oh yeah, everything is a robot – including you.

Originally launching in 2021 for Quest and PC VR, this PSVR 2 port has come after a bunch of upgrades and additions tot the game. There’s some great twists to the roguelike format and general gameplay, thanks to Sweet Surrender being in VR. The upgrades you can find throughout a level are chips that are fitted into slots by your wrists, for example, but the boosts they provide will only apply to the weapons in that hand, forcing you to really think about what upgrades you’re choosing and where you put them. A revolver that usually only shoots one, very powerful bullet before reloading on an arm with upgrades that triple its capacity and double its damage is a force to be reckoned with, but maybe something that heals you when you find cash would be smarter, to make up for the inevitable health loss.

The weapons themselves are mostly the standard fare – pistol, shotgun, SMG, and so on – but there are more interesting options, such as a katana that burns with plasma when you pull the trigger, or a spear that can shoot electricity. Melee weapons are particularly risky to use, as they force you to get into melee range, giving enemies a good opportunity to shoot you full of holes. Thankfully there are also a bunch of other items you can find, such as grenades, boosters that increase damage, and a holographic shield that feels pretty satisfying to use. At least, until you misjudge it and it runs out of energy in time for a bunch of bullets to the face.

When all this comes together the combat is pretty satisfying, rewarding accuracy for targeting weakspots on the various robot enemies. It’s fast and frenetic, and you can quickly lose a lot of health by getting surrounded. In classic shooter fashion, I found that the best way to fight is to find a bottleneck and take enemies out as they come into view. It does make you feel a bit like a robotic assassin, which is cool, but after a while the temptation to wade in with a plasma sword and a shield comes back because it’s more fun. It’s just that it’s more fun for less time, because you’ll die quicker.

Once you’ve had a few runs, Sweet Surrender starts to feel a bit limited and repetitive. You do have to expect repetition in a roguelike, but you will start to see the same rooms and layouts repeating themselves very quickly. The upgrades and weapons you find can also duplicate and repeat themselves within a run, so there’s limits to how far you can really extend your build.

It doesn’t help that this game has very little of the meta progression that has come to define run-based gaming in recent years – it’s a more classic rogulike than a modern roguelite. There are different classes to unlock – Medic, Grenadier, Sniper and Reaper – but there’s no overarching upgrades beyond that, and they don’t actually change the experience all that much beyond some boosts to certain types of damage or more healing. I’ve settled into building my character with one arm for shooting and the other for healing every single time I play, regardless of the class I’ve chosen. Beyond that, you can get shortcuts to let you skip areas, which is nice, but does mean you’re skipping past the items in those areas as well.

Then there are a bunch of immersion breakers and frustraters. Whilst implanting chips into your arm for your upgrades is cool, the experience of actually doing it is a bit of a pain. Just viewing the UI to see your current upgrades is fiddly, requiring a precise twist of your arm that can sometimes trigger in combat and get in the way. I’ve also found the controls to be very finicky for accessing hip holsters, shoulder holsters, and chest item storage. I’m constantly grabbing the wrong thing, including the rifle on your back when you’re trying to get the pistol from your hip, a good foot away from where your hand is.

There’s also a lot of dropping things, as the game doesn’t use the PSVR’s touch sensitive buttons, so you’re only holding an item if you’re specifically pressing the button properly. This becomes uncomfortable, but if you switch it to toggle it becomes nearly impossible to throw things properly, so you just have to live with it. Two handed guns like the assault rifle can be a bit awkward to aim down the sight on as there’s some jitter to the tracking, though you can just use them one handed like a pistol anyway.

Sweet Surrender does look pretty good, with a pseudo-cel shaded art style that allows explosions and things like electricity to stand out a bit. It’s not going to astonish you, but it suits the style of the game pretty well. There some nice attention to detail as well, such as there being an actual trigger on the plasma sword that is pulled when you trigger the plasma. The sound is decent as well, with the best bits being the gun sounds and the warning sounds of nearby traps. Again, nothing to amaze, but it does its job well enough.

Robot apocalypses are two a penny in video games, and ARC Raiders follows this fine tradition of having the world dominated by deadly machines who will attack and kill humans on sight. We’re a fairly hardy bunch, though, so we’ve burrowed underground to found the city of Speranza, with a select few coming out to the surface to scavenge from what remains of our civilisation. These fearless individuals, known as Raiders, are risking their lives and their possessions every time they head to the surface, with danger coming from the robotic ARC as well as the other Raiders who are fighting over the scraps.

At least, that’s what the developers wanted to happen; in reality, something rather more wonderful has occurred. Strangers are working together, sharing loot, and helping each other out in firefights against the ARC. You can go and shoot someone in the head if you want to be a dick, and there are still players who do that, but from my experience, most players are friendly and want to work together.  This is even more impressive when you consider just how fractured and divided the real world is. It also makes the times when some butthead with a sniper rifle picks you off from a roof 500 metres away even more depressing. Welcome to the future.

ARC Raiders is an extraction shooter, so you get to keep anything you can carry back out of a mission, and if you die? Well, you’ll come back empty handed, an even loose whatever kit you took in. That makes setting your loadout for a run on the surface and how much you’ll risk a key decision point.

There are two weapon slots with twenty weapons available, some of which can be bought and some which can be crafted, and its the usual mix of shotguns, pistols and rifles.  Each weapon can be upgraded three times to improve its performance, and you can further customise it with stocks, larger magazines and sights. Guns chosen, it’s time to select an Augment which increases carry space, weight capacity, and shield compatibility. Yes, despite wearing rags and having to recycle ice cream scoops for metal, you have a Dune-style full-body shield to absorb damage. Grab some appropriate ammo, of which there are four types, and your final job is to add some grenades and healing items into the quick access slots.

There are five playable maps in ARC Raiders: Dam Battlegrounds, Buried City, Spaceport, The Blue Gate, and the new Stella Montis map, which was unlocked after the game launched. While it’s hard to make an apocalyptic landscape visually exciting, there is enough difference between them all to make them interesting.

The gameplay loop consists of sneaking around and scavenging items from buildings whilst avoiding the larger ArC enemies. For the first few runs, the smaller enemies are quite a threat and can end your scavenging run very quickly but you soon learn their weak spots or how to evade them altogether. Initially, I did think this was rather boring; you are essentially opening loot boxes under duress. It’s like ripping apart a pack of Pokémon cards while a stick of dynamite fizzles nearby, and most of the time, all you get is a garlic press. Thankfully, the team back at your base has a constant supply of missions which encourage you to go to new areas, and there are remixed versions of each map with modifiers that reduce the number of exits or add fierce lightning storms to spice things up.

ARC Raiders also has a couple of Destiny-style world events such as the Harvester, which requires you to sneak past a Queen – that’s a giant crab robot, not a contestant on Drag Race. Inside the Harvester there’s puzzles to solve while under the threat of being toasted alive, so you need good timing as well as a good aim. It’s a nice little diversion but the game really could do with more of these, and hopefully Embark can add some soon.

Extract successfully from the map via one of the exit stations, and it’s back to your home base to sort through your loot of toasters, ARC parts and rags. There appear to be hundreds of items you can find, some of which are useful, some of which can be recycled into parts, and some of which can be sold. If you enjoy flicking through pages of junk and deciding what to keep, then Arc Raiders is definitely the game for you. Managing your stash and working out what to do with each item is a painfully slow process on a console and the impatient among us – it’s me, hi, I’m the problem, it’s me – would benefit from three nice buttons labelled “Sell the trinkets”, “Recycle the junk” and “Keep the good stuff”. Of course, this is less of a problem on PC, where you can zip around menus and sort your stash much more quickly thanks to having a mouse. It’s just much slower and more fiddly on consoles with a gamepad.

On top of your stash you gradually unlock six workbenches that can be used to craft new weapons, health items, shields and other useful tools, all of which require specific materials to upgrade, and tasks from vendors that require specific objects. Tracking what you need for each task is a chore at best and like all apocalyptic games, none of it makes sense. Your chicken – yes, chicken – that scavenges extra resources for you while you are out needs a dog collar and then a cat bed as upgrades. As you only get to see the next step of the upgrade path after your completed the current one there is a good chance you recycled that cat bed to make a bandage a couple of hours ago, which is very frustrating.

After wading through your stash, redeeming some XP in a skill tree, upgrading your weapons and buying a few extra supplies, it is time to head back out to the fun part of the game. How that plays out really depends on if you are going solo or as a team, with the game prioritising matchmaking within those queues. Matched in with solo players I have found the game to be slower and more reliant on stealth, but almost every player I met was friendly and helped out if needed. Go in with two friends as a team and the game plays rather differently, there seems to be many more PvP battles, though there are still some friendlies. Going in as a team also makes the game so much easier, as you can cover each other’s back and the smaller ARC bots really don’t stand a chance when taking fire from multiple directions.

I rather liked the two seemingly unintentional game modes that this created. Jumping in with team gives you are more gung-ho approach where you can be rather more brazen in your exploits, while scurrying around by yourself and meeting the occasional strangers who are also trying survive really enforces the apocalyptic feel of the game.

However, that sense of camaraderie with other Raiders is doing a lot of the heavy lifting as without it, ARC Raiders is fairly generic. The ruined wasteland and scrappy costumes have been seen in a thousands games since Fallout, the crafting and item degradation is nothing new and has been around since, well, Fallout, and the enemy design is really lacking in imagination. Three of the ARCs are just balls that roll around, another three are flying drones, and there are four variants of crabs, ranging from small scuttling creatures to house-sized behemoths who constantly launch missiles at your face.

I have also encountered a couple of technical issues on PS5. Most notably is the pop-in which is really quite noticeable as objects and textures do just appear from thin air even when you are quite close. I have also had a couple of runs where the game either refuses to accept half of the button presses on the DualSense, or decided my character is going to walk in a certain direction no matter what. Quitting out the game completely is the only way to solve these issues, which is really annoying if you have spent ages building up a decent loadout and then have to lose it because of a bug.

Finally, a quick word about Embark’s use of AI voices for the vendors in the game. Your opinions on AI are your own, and I’m not going to tell you otherwise, but I can tell you that, even with Embark hiring actors to create their AI voice banks, the NPC’s sound rubbish. Embark may have saved a few krona using AI, but the end result is nowhere near as good as getting people back into the recording booth.

Xenopurge may be one of the most tense auto-battler strategy games I have played, and that is in no small part to the influences it takes from Aliens. You are a commander on a remote and secure base, but your job is to issue commands to your squad on the ground as they infiltrate Xeno bases to kill aliens, rescue important people, and gather intelligence. Yet, apart from their portraits on the side of the screen, and hearing their voices through the radio, your squad are nothing more than small health bar and a designation number on your screen.

Humanity is at war with aliens and you are a member of MACE, the human military machine that is trying to fight back. The information you have is limited even as a Commander, but Xenopurge has a story threading through your encounters with the aliens, making you question what is really going on.

The game is played from a first person perspective as you view multiple screens to set up and manage your run and your squad. Four different squads eventually become available to you, but you will start with the Sentinel Squad which is a classic brute force squad that start with health packs and other boosts that improve speed and attack power. As you make your way through the ranks you eventually unlock the Huntsman, Synthetic, and Bioweave squad types. The Huntsman are more tactical, using turrets and mines to keep the enemy at bay, but they do not start with any health packs. Synthetics are all androids who have no healing ability, so have to be repaired between missions, but they can hack things like doors to stop enemies from getting through them for a time. The Bioweave are the weakest class to start off with, but each kill awards biomass which allows Bioweave units to upgrade themselves to become stronger.

Whichever squad you choose, you will only have limited input on their actions when on missions. Starting commands include prompting them to us a health stim, set up a turret, bioweave to create armour, or hack doors, though these depend on which squad you are using. As you progress through a run you may unlock new commands to use, hopefully selecting the most useful ones that complement your squad. Runs themselves consist of missions and stops at gear or upgrade points, where you can improve melee damage, get new weapons, upgrade soldier logic, or hire another soldier, boosting your squad size up to the maximum of four. Xenopurge is pretty generous with its rewards for successful missions, so you can always get some better gear, but not all of it in one hit.

All of this is viewed on a basic monitor in-game, where little green health bars engage with red health bars. You cannot direct where your squad will go, unless you get the ‘go to room’ command, and have to watch as they make their own decisions on how to proceed unless you give them a specific job to do, like collect a package. This is where some of that tension comes in for Xenopurge. For example, when one squad member is backed into a corner as enemies converge on them there is no way to get your other soldiers to run to their aid unless they are going in that direction themselves. The music really adds to the atmosphere, especially as the countdown gets closer to zero to triggering the next wave. Watching doors open on the screen where you have no line of sight is also tense, because you do not know what kind of enemy is coming for you. And hearing your soldiers shouting for help is another thing that really sells the immersion of being a commander who is helpless at times.

One issue I had with the AI was when ordering soldiers to extract, as they would just try and run past enemies or ignore fights that another soldier was engaged in, unless they get attacked themselves. I would imagine in real life, soldiers would still engage with enemies as they head to extraction points and help fellow squad mates. Another was that when all the rooms have been uncovered and most objectives cleared, units will stay in place even if they can hear another soldier shouting for backup. As I do not have the command to send soldiers to help their comrade, I would have hoped hearing it over the radio would spur them into action.

Despite those annoyances, Xenopurge has hooked me. There are a lot of run variations you can take on, with an achievement for completing each one, and squads can be altered with variants that give unique soldiers, such as one named Ripley who has a motion scanner. There are different zones across Xenopurge to explore with the later zones providing a much more difficult challenge due to being deep in Xeno space. Outside of the monitor, your commander can leave their seat and explore the cabin to read emails and watch news reports to learn of what is really happening. Here, the development team leave clues that something isn’t right and as you explore your little cabin and eventually what is beyond the door you too question the realities of the war.

I’ve been fascinated with headphones from an early age. My dad was a broadcast journalist and a real geek, filling our house with space-age tech like reel-to-reel players, condenser microphones, and CB radios. Most important, though, were the headphones. Huge, unwieldy things for my tiny head, they still opened my eyes – and ears – to just how good music could sound, and that fascination has stayed with me ever since.

So my interest was piqued by SIVGA’s latest, the Robin SV021, a closed-back, wired audiophile pair of over-ear headphones, which boast earcups crafted from wood. While they look genuinely beautiful, the sound they produce is even better.

Each of the Robin SV021’s earcups are handmade from Rosewood. If you want a pair of headphones that’s immediately different from the metal and black plastic-toting ones elsewhere, it’s a great place to start. Imprinted with the SIVGA logo, the external surface is perfectly smooth, and the wood carries a warmth and softness that plastic and metal simply can’t. I did worry about their durability, but after cramming the Robin into my bag on more than one occasion, they remained unblemished.

Elsewhere, the headband is wrapped in leather, with a thin slice of memory foam beneath it, while the frame, extenders and hinges are made from rigid, burnished metal. It’s all finished off by a pair of the plushest, softest ear cushions I’ve come across in a while, and they feel absolutely fantastic, moulding around your ears and providing a decent level of passive noise cancellation as well. The Robin SV021 look and feel utterly premium, and they definitely punch above their £150 price point.

Audio is handled by dual wiring to each earcup, with the two ends of the braided cable leading down to a single gold-plated 3.5mm jack. While the braided section is noise-free, the single cabling to each earcup will produce cable noise if rubbing against clothing, which does make it less appealing for listening while on the go.

That’s not its main draw, though. The Robin SV021 are reassuringly universal, and I’ve spent my time hopping between a MacBook, Nintendo Switch 2 and my PC. It has a relatively low impedance at 32 Ohms, and it performed well with every device I tried, with plenty of volume while retaining an excellent level of detail.

The SIVGA Robin SV021 sound excellent. The 50mm drivers are capable of moving plenty of air around, and there’s a wonderfully wide soundstage here, giving instrumentation and audio some real room to breathe. I’ve been playing a huge amount of Octopath Traveler 0 on its way to review, and the orchestral soundtrack has been delivered exquisitely by the Robin SV021, with that wider soundstage making it feel as though you’re experiencing a live recording.

They’re absolutely perfect for gaming, thanks to their lightweight design and ultra-soft ear cushions. I was able to wear them for hours, and they may well be the most comfortable headphones I’ve reviewed this year.

Checking in with my music collection, I loved how enveloping Gunship’s Tech Noir sounded, with the throbbing synth tones delivered with an exacting level of detail. The intro’s sci-fi spoken word sits clearly apart from the ominous notes beneath, while the bass response is excellent, with plenty of warmth and clarity. The Robin SV021 are certainly warmer-sounding rather than clinical, and they’re easy to live with across a range of different genres and content types. Crucially, they make you want to listen to music.

At £150, the Robin SV021 are aimed at the mid-range audiophile who’s looking for something a little different. Despite their closed-back design, they boast a wide soundstage, and their well-balanced tuning provides a hugely enjoyable listening experience no matter what you’re using them for.

If we rated things based solely on looks, the Gioteck WX5+ would immediately score top marks. This wireless controller for Switch, Switch 2 and PC boasts Hall Effect sticks and triggers and a pair of pro back buttons, but it’s the visual design that immediately grabs you. The delightful ‘Crayons’ livery is tied to RGB lighting, making this one of the most visually appealing controllers we’ve seen in a very long time.

At £24.99, Gioteck has also made one of the cheapest wireless controllers out there, especially considering all the features that Gioteck have crammed in. In terms of value, you’re simply not getting Hall Effect, programmable back buttons, RGB, a 3.5mm headphone socket, gyro and vibration anywhere else at this price point.

That budget pricing isn’t even immediately obvious when you pick it up. It is quite light in the hand, but the plastic that’s been used feels solid, and the textured grips help to keep it set in place.

While the Crayons livery is my personal favourite – who doesn’t want their controller to look like melted cake? – the other options are equally eye-catching, especially the 60s-flavoured Spiral and the multi-coloured mess of Doodle. If you’re a more serious type – or a teenage boy – there’s Dark Camo which is much more understated. There’s probably more chance of losing it, though.

Each of the analogue sticks houses colourful RGB rings as well, but it’s the performance of these Hall Effect sticks that’s most impactful. They’re pleasingly taut, returning to centre with a reassuring certainty, and they feel excellent in use. The Hall Effect tech should also mean that they are exceedingly long-lasting, outperforming standard potentiometer-equipped controllers that are more likely to suffer from stick drift.

The triggers are also Hall Effect, meaning that they’re a touch more accurate, while also benefiting from the frictionless tech. You can also switch them between analogue and digital performance, potentially cutting out a few more milliseconds of reaction time when playing shooters and other competitive titles, even without physical lockouts, which are ultimately the only thing the WX5+ is really missing. If you’re playing on Switch or Switch 2, the whole analogue trigger thing will be lost on you, but in a multi-platform house it’s a nice thing to have.

The only component that I’m not entirely sold on here is the cross-shaped D-pad. It feels too large under your thumb, and the left and right response feels slightly different. It didn’t cause any problems while playing, but there’s something about it that doesn’t feel as well-made as the rest of the WX5+. The other face buttons, and the shoulder buttons too, are reliable and responsive, and it’s just a bit odd that the D-pad feels as different as it does.

Around the back of the controller, there’s two programmable ‘pro’ buttons. These sit well under your middle fingers when you’re naturally gripping the controller, but with enough resistance to ensure you don’t accidentally activate them when you’re getting increasingly frustrated with purple shells ruining your peerless driving in Mario Kart World.

The Gioteck WX5+ is practically a no-brainer in a household that’s looking for a great-value second controller, and it even makes a compelling cost-effective argument against the official Switch 2 Pro Controller as a daily driver. In the hand, there is an obvious difference in terms of quality, particularly in the plastics used, but when you’re in the midst of the action, the WX5+ is a deeply reliable performer.