The opening to Firaxis' big Civilization 7 presentation is wonderfully on-brand: a quickfire history lesson from Ed Beach, lead designer, on the many historical layers of the City of London. Beach is one of the rare cases of a lead designer on Civilization staying in charge across multiple entries, having overseen Civ 6 before Civ 7, and who's worked on the series since long before that. A physicist turned game designer – Beach also worked on the launch of the Hubble telescope, a key part of the Civ 6 scientific victory – he's also a self-confessed history nerd. As quickly evidenced.

Stood in front of a room of eager press waiting to hear the first bit of real information about a new entry to the series, Beach instead opts to pull up a map of London, under Roman rule, sourced from Encyclopaedia Britannica. Pointing to the ancient town's strategic position on the river, he wonders aloud about how the Ludgate, in the settlement's western wall, might have acquired its name. "We're not sure what it's named for. We think it might be called Ludgate because there was a Welsh king who lived out that direction called King Lud."

Then, it's a progression into mediaeval times, with Beach pointing out a river previously outside the Ludgate and how it's now changed to be within the city boundary. "They've actually taken the Fleet River and sort of diverted it, to make a cool little moat around their mediaeval prison…" Then, a slide showing the factories and railway lines rapidly developed during the 19th century, the river-moat now fully built over, as Victorian Britain clamoured for more usable land. "It's not even visible anymore, because they needed to respect what was going on with the Industrial Revolution."

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Hello! You might be seeing a few Black Myth: Wukong reviews going live at the moment, and so we wanted to let you know where ours was.

In brief: we need a bit more time with this one. It's a big ol' game, and we haven't had very long with it, meaning we've not had enough time to make significant enough progress for a full review.

There are a couple of other factors worth bearing in mind. There are some quite tight embargo restrictions for what we could talk about in an early review for this one - though that's increasingly the norm these days really - and also, we've been informed there is no PlayStation 5 code available for the game at all until on or after launch. That doesn't necessarily mean anything should be read into there - code for one platform is often available before another - but it is just one more small reason for us to sit tight a little longer.

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Somehow, a combination of League of Legends and Vampire Survivors has produced something strangely relaxing. The infamously intense MOBA is getting a new mode this summer - just temporarily, at least for now - called Swarm, taking characters from League and design elements of the recently formed "bullet heaven" wave survival genre. But the big twist is that for all the on-screen carnage - and there is a lot of on-screen carnage - the result is something strangely chilled out.

Like all things League of Legends these days, Swarm has been fleshed out with reams of worldbuilding backstory. The mode is set within the alternate universe world of Anima Squad - for those understandably not in the know, Riot Games themes its many of its paid-for character skins in League of Legends around alternate realities or short fictional stories, like the cyberpunk-themed PROJEKT skin line, or the K/DA skins that tied champions to Riot's virtual pop group of the same name.

The vibe with Anima Squad is a kind of peppy, futuristic anime-sci-fi, where a group of heroes - with animal-enhanced abilities - defend the remnants of earth from an alien invasion. For the new mode, Riot has built out that universe further, with a range of enemy types introduced from the invading Primordians - purple, shark-like grunts and their bosses of various sizes, who believe themselves to be the "white blood cells" wiping out the virus of humanity - and the mode's various maps set in different parts of a post-apocalyptic Runeterra.

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Joy is a bit underrated, I reckon, but at Summer Game Fest this year it felt like the closest thing to a running theme. Astro Bot and Lego Horizon Adventures were both a breeze, playful, ebullient family games that put all their focus on simply being a good time. The Plucky Squire, an action game with a domestic dimension hopping twist, however, probably just pipped them to the position of first, in the race to be the most joyful experience I had all week.

In fact, it was one of the most joyful I've had in video games for a little while. The Plucky Squire is a delight.

The setup here involved an opening sequence in a 2D part of The Plucky Squire, the main storybook. What's striking is how the edges of the pages, while always visible, seem to just melt away here. You are in this, playing a top-down Zelda-like adventure, whacking little enemy blobs with your sword or using a nice little throw-and-recall system for it like a manually-summoned boomerang. You hop ledges and chasms from set, green swirls in the ground, which take you to corresponding green swirls on the other side. Then you hit an obstacle - a big spinning mincer that seems rather gnarly and, frankly, suspiciously out of place for this twee little pastel-hued tale - and hop on another swirl and - oh! - you've jumped right out of the page.

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Last year, Ubisoft's unveiling of Star Wars Outlaws was one of my highlights of the not-E3 period. In a lengthy hands-off demo, we saw protagonist Kay Vess and her little helper Nix sneak through an enemy base, blast her way out into the open world, rip across it on a speeder and scrape her way through conversations with a crime lord.

It was about as close as we've been to a proper Han Solo video game, but it was also about the promise that comes with Ubisoft Massive, the team best known for The Division, applying the Ubisoft touch to a world that's always seemed a perfect fit for it. Yes, the "Ubi formula" for open worlds and their icon-littered maps has become tired to the point of parody, but there's a lovable simplicity to them too, the old cliché of certain games being "fast food" returning again - sometimes I want a burger, and if you stamp a little Republic logo on it my simple-minded inner child is still just about alive enough to crack a smile. A bit more simply: I'm not proud of it, but I do quite fancy the idea of a big, busywork-filled map of Star Wars activities, which is probably why EA's Star Wars Jedi games were, if not hugely inventive, at least very good fun.

Having played Star Wars Outlaws for a good hour or so ahead of the Ubisoft Forward show, however, I've come away with a renewed appreciation for Jedi Fallen Order and Jedi Survivor. In fact no, a bit more than that - in comparison to Outlaws' admittedly early, work-in-progress demo, they stand as singular pieces of revolutionary high art. Outlaws' early gameplay feels positively ancient - not only mechanically but in execution, in its near total lack of character, flair, invention, detail, or style. In trying to describe it, the closest comparison I can draw is with Uncharted: Golden Abyss, which launched in 2011 on the PS VIta.

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When Avowed was first unveiled back at the Xbox summer showcase of 2021, a dark and moody CGI trailer of burning arrows and fantasy spell-and-sword dual wielding - all from the studio behind the likes of Pillars of Eternity and Fallout: New Vegas - positioned it as something of a first-party Skyrim for Xbox.

In the years since however, it's become increasingly clear that's simply not the game we should now expect from Avowed. It's bright and colourful, it's seemingly dialogue-heavy, and as we learned in further explanations of the game's combat it is, if anything, only quite loosely an RPG. As Avowed's director, Carrie Patel, put it to Eurogamer last year after a slightly unconvincing first demo of its combat, "the reference point we've been trying to point people to is The Outer Worlds."

Since then, things have been a little quiet on the Avowed front, but over the weekend Xbox showed another trailer, this time with emphasis on the game's overarching story - though again it was a little light on anything truly new. Thankfully, we also had a short roundtable interview with Carrie Patel again after the showcase ended, who spoke alongside the game's art director Matt Hansen and was able to outline just a little more of what we can expect.

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I am very sorry to report that, no, you cannot play as former UK Prime Minister, Conservative party leader and unanimously beloved human being Margaret Thatcher in Call of Duty: Black Ops 6.

Despite promising signs in the initial reveal trailer from developer Treyarch, where big Maggie features alongside the similarly well-liked Saddam Hussein, George Bush Senior, and Bill Clinton - and the fact that Ronald Reagan was playable in the previous entry, Black Ops Cold War - Treyarch confirmed to Eurogamer during an interview earlier this week that she won't be playable, ever.

"No," said Yale Miller, senior director of production at Treyarch on Black Ops 6, when Eurogamer asked.

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The 90s may be back, as Call of Duty: Black Ops 6's roster of provocative policial characters makes clear, but at Treyarch it might be a bit closer to 2013. Just as Battlefield 4 had Levolution and Forza had its Drivatars, Black Ops 6 is reviving the once-popular trend of making up silly words for neat, new, though not exactly groundbreaking ideas.

In COD's case, it's 'omnimovement', Black Ops 6's headline new feature that means instead of only being able to sprint when moving forwards, you can now sprint backwards, side to side, and any other direction in 360 degrees, with admittedly very nice animations to match. In a presentation given ahead of the big Call of Duty showcase on Xbox's stage this weekend, developers from Treyarch explained this was based on a combination of real "elite" military experts' abilities, a tonal approach for Black Ops 6 that focused on action movie-star moments, and an overall push for fidelity across the board.

Black Ops 6's narrative setup is decidedly Call of Duty. The Gulf War and global tensions of the early 90s are a "backdrop" to a concocted story of enjoyably outlandish espionage. The CIA has been infiltrated by a "shadowy organisation" right at the very top, and so you and a ragtag team - including Russel Adler, Black Ops 2's antagonistic haircut, who's also gone full Kurt Russell-in-Big-Trouble-in-Little-China parody action hero here - must go it alone, acting rogue and with full licence to break whatever rules you like. Thankfully, there are absolutely no global events whatsoever occurring right now that might make pitching a game on your ability to do war crimes at will a cause for concern.

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The 360 years feel like a lifetime ago. This week, Xbox stunned the industry by announcing it had closed three studios, and repurposed a fourth into another service game support team. This follows the 1900 people laid off across Xbox at the start of this year, and those Xbox employees quietly caught up in the 10,000 layoffs Microsoft made the year before. It has been a disastrous piece of PR self-sabotage, particularly with the reputations of these studios in mind.

Arkane Austin struggled with the uncharacteristic co-op, online shooter elements of Redfall, but before that made the excellent 2017 reboot of Prey and the first, fantastic Dishonored that led to the immersive sim's modern mini-revival. Tango Gameworks, Microsoft's only Japan-based studio that was led, until earlier this year, by horror legend Shinji Mikami, made The Evil Within games and the critically acclaimed, BAFTA-winning breakout Hi-Fi Rush. Roundhouse Studios was founded by the makers of the original Prey, but is now presumably destined to make different coloured leather boots for The Elder Scrolls Online. Alpha Dog made mobile games, an area where Microsoft has been specifically looking to expand. More broadly, for two console generations now, Xbox has floundered under a clear and obvious lack of inventive, attention-grabbing exclusive games. It just bought these studios in 2021.

If it weren't for the people involved, in 2024, these closures would almost feel routine. This is far from the end of Xbox, of course - in Los Angeles next month, it'll hold yet another make-or-break press conference, that maps out yet another plan for rescuing a lost generation. But be it through exasperation or exhaustion - or the wider industry's sheer, pent-up rage - this feels like something of a nadir. Xbox has spun its wheels for more than a decade, lurching from U-turn to U-turn, strategic reboot to strategic reboot, acquisition to acquisition, closure to closure. The good times have always felt just over the horizon. Project Scorpio will set the tone; Game Pass is the future; the Series X will have the games; Starfield will jump-start Game Pass now it's stalled. The growing sentiment today is that they'll probably never come.

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The 360 years feel like a lifetime ago. This week, Xbox stunned the industry by announcing it had closed three studios, and repurposed a fourth into another service game support team. This follows the 1900 people laid off across Xbox at the start of this year, and those Xbox employees quietly caught up in the 10,000 layoffs Microsoft made the year before. It has been a disastrous piece of PR self-sabotage, particularly with the reputations of these studios in mind.

Arkane Austin struggled with the uncharacteristic co-op, online shooter elements of Redfall, but before that made the excellent 2017 reboot of Prey and the first, fantastic Dishonored that led to the immersive sim's modern mini-revival. Tango Gameworks, Microsoft's only Japan-based studio that was led, until earlier this year, by horror legend Shinji Mikami, made The Evil Within games and the critically acclaimed, BAFTA-winning breakout Hi-Fi Rush. Roundhouse Studios was founded by the makers of the original Prey, but is now presumably destined to make different coloured leather boots for The Elder Scrolls Online. Alpha Dog made mobile games, an area where Microsoft has been specifically looking to expand. More broadly, for two console generations now, Xbox has floundered under a clear and obvious lack of inventive, attention-grabbing exclusive games. It just bought these studios in 2021.

If it weren't for the people involved, in 2024, these closures would almost feel routine. This is far from the end of Xbox, of course - in Los Angeles next month, it'll hold yet another make-or-break press conference, that maps out yet another plan for rescuing a lost generation. But be it through exasperation or exhaustion - or the wider industry's sheer, pent-up rage - this feels like something of a nadir. Xbox has spun its wheels for more than a decade, lurching from U-turn to U-turn, strategic reboot to strategic reboot, acquisition to acquisition, closure to closure. The good times have always felt just over the horizon. Project Scorpio will set the tone; Game Pass is the future; the Series X will have the games; Starfield will jump-start Game Pass now it's stalled. The growing sentiment today is that they'll probably never come.

Read more

The 360 years feel like a lifetime ago. This week, Xbox stunned the industry by announcing it had closed three studios, and repurposed a fourth into another service game support team. This follows the 1900 people laid off across Xbox at the start of this year, and those Xbox employees quietly caught up in the 10,000 layoffs Microsoft made the year before. It has been a disastrous piece of PR self-sabotage, particularly with the reputations of these studios in mind.

Arkane Austin struggled with the uncharacteristic co-op, online shooter elements of Redfall, but before that made the excellent 2017 reboot of Prey and the first, fantastic Dishonored that led to the immersive sim's modern mini-revival. Tango Gameworks, Microsoft's only Japan-based studio that was led, until earlier this year, by horror legend Shinji Mikami, made The Evil Within games and the critically acclaimed, BAFTA-winning breakout Hi-Fi Rush. Roundhouse Studios was founded by the makers of the original Prey, but is now presumably destined to make different coloured leather boots for The Elder Scrolls Online. Alpha Dog made mobile games, an area where Microsoft has been specifically looking to expand. More broadly, for two console generations now, Xbox has floundered under a clear and obvious lack of inventive, attention-grabbing exclusive games. It just bought these studios in 2021.

If it weren't for the people involved, in 2024, these closures would almost feel routine. This is far from the end of Xbox, of course - in Los Angeles next month, it'll hold yet another make-or-break press conference, that maps out yet another plan for rescuing a lost generation. But be it through exasperation or exhaustion - or the wider industry's sheer, pent-up rage - this feels like something of a nadir. Xbox has spun its wheels for more than a decade, lurching from U-turn to U-turn, strategic reboot to strategic reboot, acquisition to acquisition, closure to closure. The good times have always felt just over the horizon. Project Scorpio will set the tone; Game Pass is the future; the Series X will have the games; Starfield will jump-start Game Pass now it's stalled. The growing sentiment today is that they'll probably never come.

Read more

Hello and welcome back to What To Play! We've returned from a little hiatus, which you definitely noticed and have been very sad about, of course. It's finally edging towards spring here in the UK, but don't let that tempt you into going outside, there's video games to be a-playin'!

As ever, this is where we'll round up the best games from the month gone by, and the things we're most excited to play from the month ahead - plus, any other suggestions for what might complement it. Here's What To Play This May 2024.

Availability: Out now on PC, Switch, Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S.

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A short way into an extended hands-off presentation of Flintlock: The Siege of Dawn, and my main thought was: this feels a lot like a mix between God of War and Souls games, at which point creative director Simon Dasan described it as… more or less exactly that. "A massive thing for us was to try and take that real Soulslike field of action, and then make it more accessible, kind of bring it all together to the masses," he explained, to the sound of main character Nor slashing theatrically through an enemy grunt.

Flintlock, the next game from the New Zealand studio behind Ashen, is breezy and fluid, emphasising movement and offence where typical Souslikes might nudge you towards a more staid defensive dance. But the switch to proactivity is countered by the usual trappings of the genre: a semi-linear world, small numbers of enemies, and combat that, while flashier and faster, still seems to reward precision above all.

Arriving in a crumbling castle courtyard around a third of the way into the game, you find the area subjugated by a god. Battling through some initially typical Soulslike enemies - think zombified dudes in armour - Dasan and co demonstrated a few variations on how exactly that combat works.

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What if a game was intentionally quite boring? This feels like the premise with Harold Halibut, and at first it's kind of brilliant. You take on the role of the eponymous janitor here, a kind of lab-assistant-slash-gofer and general multipurpose dogsbody aboard the Fedora. A crashed colony spaceship that set off from Earth some time in the late 70s or early 80s, the Fedora has now been stuck, for about 60 years, deep beneath the ocean on a predominantly liquid planet, becoming a kind of self-contained commune that only partially longs for home.

It's a wonderful setup, enabling debut developer Slow Bros to do some of its best work. The Fedora is an extraordinarily realised piece of human craft, with the game built of hand-made, intricately worn and weathered models and sets that have been digitised for animation. Combined with the choice of era you get this kind of Aardman-style visual effect and a deeply retro-Brit kind of humour, centred on bureaucratic Post Office procedures and varying forms of jobsworth. The ship itself, for instance - green-hued, sub-aquatic and slightly industrial, like a miniature village built inside a spirit level - has been subsumed by the unremarkable small-town corporation All Water, with little CRT tellies around the place intermittently buzzed with corporate infomercials and announcements.

During these - and similar opportunities for squiggly-lined, wobbly-audioed video feeds or moments of rickety old-school lab computing - Harold Halibut is probably at its best. Animations, decorations and nice little buttons, even in deeply rudimentary puzzles, are completely enchanting. The humour, when it lands, zeros in on a niche but ever-present part of the collective British psyche, the selfishly entrepreneurial mindset of a very specific kind of small-minded, curtain-twitching, 80s-era middle class. Unfortunately, those moments are quite rare, and the better parts of the rest of the game are weakened by how relentlessly, brutally, interminably slow things are to move forward.

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Sandworms play a major part in Dune: Awakening, the big survival MMO coming some time soon from Funcom, the developers behind Conan: Exiles - but the game won't feature the novel's famous sandworm-riding come launch. And, presumably much more importantly for Conan fans, there'll be no penis sliders either.

There will be sand-walking, though, and there's no ruling out of sandworm-riding down the line. We spoke with Dune: Awakening's creative director Joel Bylos at some length in our preview, and he explained the decision like this:

"We actually looked into it. It's just a very strong technical cost, and also a very - it needs a purpose. And we haven't got what the movie has, which is like, 'Go through the southern sandstorms, get to the southern part [of Arrakis]'. So yeah, we don't have that yet."

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It's hard to think of a science fiction universe as inseparable from its canon as Dune. And yet at the same time, it's a universe where so much can vary from one interpretation to the next (as you'll be swiftly reminded any time you catch a stray set photo of a greased-up Sting.)

With that in mind it probably makes a lot of sense for Dune: Awakening, the survival MMO from Conan: Exiles developer Funcom, to take its "alternate history" approach. Dune: Awakening takes place "a few years" before the events of the books, but those events are entirely different timelines, with Awakening imagining a scenario where a "significant moment" in the books, where someone makes a decision of some kind, is decided differently.

Joel Bylos, Funcom's chief creative officer and creative director on Dune: Awakening, was coy about what decision that was, let alone what the consequences of it might be. "It's not Paul that makes the decision," he would at least say, referring to protagonist Paul Atreides. This was after I'd asked whether it might be his drinking of the Water of Life that decision was referring to - the moment where Atreides effectively chooses the path of war in Frank Herbert's novels, and now Denis Villeneuve's films.

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The other day I read an old interview with Hidetaka Miyazaki, the FromSoftware director behind Dark Souls and Elden Ring, and it seems particularly relevant here. "I'm a huge masochist, so when I make games like these… this is how I want to be treated," he said. "'I want to be killed this way!' That's how I make it! It's just that sometimes other people don't understand it; it's for my pleasure." His interviewer interjects: "Really? You want to be killed deep in the forest, getting punched by a huge mushroom?"

"Yes, yes. And the curse area… When I get cursed–"

Interviewer: "You want to die from a barrage of arrows?!"

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I never love defining one game with another, and not least a game like Harold Halibut, which wears its influences openly - stop-motion, Wallace and Gromit-style Aardman animations, mixed with maybe a bit of Wes Anderson and in all seriousness, Postman Pat - but which also so clearly deserves to be seen as its own thing.

In this case though it's hard to ignore: the setup for Harold Halibut is very similar to First Contact, arguably the most interesting mission in Starfield (and one itself heavily influenced by a Star Trek: The Next Generation episode called The Neutral Zone), where - spoilers! - you discover a seemingly alien ship lurking in a planet's orbit, emitting weird garbled noises over the radio. You soon discover this is actually a ship from Earth - only one that's taken several hundred years to actually get here, leaving it populated by a load of slightly entitled generational descendents of the original explorers, who's only world is the ship's interior, and only understanding of humanity that which they can read about in the selected history books and classes they have on board.

As for Harold Halibut, Harold is a lab assistant-cum-janitor on a similarly stranded spaceship that has instead become an underwater enclave, after arriving at a presumed Goldilocks planet that actually turned out to have no inhabitable land. Having set off in the late '70s and since been totally submerged beneath this new planet's oceans, though, the ship has become a kind of strange, alternate-universe time capsule, filled with fuzzy CRT monitors, intercoms with wobbly sound, and very specific kinds of little England jobsworths. (Much of Harold Halibut, a narrative adventure game about completing largely mundane tasks as a wider, more existential mystery unfolds, feels like a trip to the local Post Office, where you're informed you can't send that letter because you've placed your stamp slightly too close to the label. And that's the wrong kind of envelope.)

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The other day I read an old interview with Hidetaka Miyazaki, the FromSoftware director behind Dark Souls and Elden Ring, and it seems particularly relevant here. "I'm a huge masochist, so when I make games like these… this is how I want to be treated," he said. "'I want to be killed this way!' That's how I make it! It's just that sometimes other people don't understand it; it's for my pleasure." His interviewer interjects: "Really? You want to be killed deep in the forest, getting punched by a huge mushroom?"

"Yes, yes. And the curse area… When I get cursed–"

Interviewer: "You want to die from a barrage of arrows?!"

Read more

I never love defining one game with another, and not least a game like Harold Halibut, which wears its influences openly - stop-motion, Wallace and Gromit-style Aardman animations, mixed with maybe a bit of Wes Anderson and in all seriousness, Postman Pat - but which also so clearly deserves to be seen as its own thing.

In this case though it's hard to ignore: the setup for Harold Halibut is very similar to First Contact, arguably the most interesting mission in Starfield (and one itself heavily influenced by a Star Trek: The Next Generation episode called The Neutral Zone), where - spoilers! - you discover a seemingly alien ship lurking in a planet's orbit, emitting weird garbled noises over the radio. You soon discover this is actually a ship from Earth - only one that's taken several hundred years to actually get here, leaving it populated by a load of slightly entitled generational descendents of the original explorers, who's only world is the ship's interior, and only understanding of humanity that which they can read about in the selected history books and classes they have on board.

As for Harold Halibut, Harold is a lab assistant-cum-janitor on a similarly stranded spaceship that has instead become an underwater enclave, after arriving at a presumed Goldilocks planet that actually turned out to have no inhabitable land. Having set off in the late '70s and since been totally submerged beneath this new planet's oceans, though, the ship has become a kind of strange, alternate-universe time capsule, filled with fuzzy CRT monitors, intercoms with wobbly sound, and very specific kinds of little England jobsworths. (Much of Harold Halibut, a narrative adventure game about completing largely mundane tasks as a wider, more existential mystery unfolds, feels like a trip to the local Post Office, where you're informed you can't send that letter because you've placed your stamp slightly too close to the label. And that's the wrong kind of envelope.)

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