Microsoft has confirmed the next batch of titles headed to Xbox Game Pass for the latter half of August: Atlas Fallen, Core Keeper, and Star Trucker.

Then there's that little known game called Call of Duty Black Ops 6. You'll be able to participate in the early access open beta when it kicks off for Xbox Game Pass subscribers on 30th August, 2024, with pre-downloading available from 28th August.

"Sure, it takes itself way too seriously and the loot chase can get monotonous, but everything outside of the monster-slaying is just an excuse to get right back to the monster-slaying. Or make the monster-slaying cooler with upgrades," we said in our Atlas Fallen review.

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Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 is one of Digital Foundry's most eagerly anticipated games, effectively hitting the beats that made the first series entry so enjoyable. The grand scale of the environments, the dense swarms of tyranids, the absolute carnage of combat - it's all back in Space Marine 2, enhanced by the impressive technical capabilities of the Swarm engine. Focus Entertainment recently shared a preview build of the PC version of the game, and we're eager to share our impressions with you. We're liking what we see - but Space Marine 2 pushes hardware, which poses interesting challenges to the current generation of consoles, especially on the CPU side.

Saber Interactive has taken on development duties for this game, and our first impression is that it's done a fantastic job of capturing the Warhammer 40,000 aesthetic: colossal, heroic figures, massive-scale gothic architecture stretching out into the far distance and an enviable wealth of animated detail in the immediate area. The sense of density is only heightened once you get your first taste of combat: dozens of tyranids rushing you, while hundreds (possibly even thousands more) can sometimes be seen massing in the background.

Density in detail at close range also impresses, though it's not quite to the same extremes as Warhammer 40,000: Darktide. That said, as third-person game up against a first-person experience, that's not actually a bad thing. It works exceptionally well. The emphasis on detail also means that something has to give elsewhere: Space Marine 2 doesn't seem to be using cutting-edge lighting or global illumination technology, but you do get accomplished versions of mature technologies like shadow maps, screen-space reflections and screen-space ambient occlusion, while the GI solution (which does seem pre-calculated or 'baked') does give a good impression of light bounce. The quality of the physically-based materials also works well.

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In the grim heatwave of the midsummer, everyone you know would love to come hunch over a table and roll dice for six hours, actually, but they’ve got that thing on. You remember that thing, right? Plus, no-one’s got a big enough table. Or the new errata. Also, Trevor’s been banging on about lady Custodes for five months straight and nobody wants to be around him right now. Thank the Omni-trevor, then, for the three-player co-op of Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2. “Warhammer with the boys?” said Horace as he stretchily dished out preview keys from an entirely different postcode. James, Edwin and Nic were initially all booked-up for the week, but Horace repeated himself, making it absolutely clear that it wasn’t a question.

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In the grim heatwave of the midsummer, everyone you know would love to come hunch over a table and roll dice for six hours, actually, but they’ve got that thing on. You remember that thing, right? Plus, no-one’s got a big enough table. Or the new errata. Also, Trevor’s been banging on about lady Custodes for five months straight and nobody wants to be around him right now. Thank the Omni-trevor, then, for the three-player co-op of Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2. “Warhammer with the boys?” said Horace as he stretchily dished out preview keys from an entirely different postcode. James, Edwin and Nic were initially all booked-up for the week, but Horace repeated himself, making it absolutely clear that it wasn’t a question.

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Yesterday, Nic took James and I on a tour of Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2's co-op campaign. A merry old time was had, romping through fortress cities like a small herd of crusader buffalo, using the game's absurd jetpack functionality to pancake invading Tyranids, and getting our screens so slathered in gore we couldn't work out who was killing what.

It looks like the gargantuan action game's PvP multiplayer will be even messier. Saber and Focus Home have released an extended trailer that walks you through two major modes - the PvE boss and wave-slaying frenzy of Operations, and the 12-player PvP carnage of Eternal War, which spans a range of match types. The ecstasy of dying for the Emperor aside, both give me frightful flashbacks to the early days of Gears Of War.

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Yesterday, Nic took James and I on a tour of Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2's co-op campaign. A merry old time was had, romping through fortress cities like a small herd of crusader buffalo, using the game's absurd jetpack functionality to pancake invading Tyranids, and getting our screens so slathered in gore we couldn't work out who was killing what.

It looks like the gargantuan action game's PvP multiplayer will be even messier. Saber and Focus Home have released an extended trailer that walks you through two major modes - the PvE boss and wave-slaying frenzy of Operations, and the 12-player PvP carnage of Eternal War, which spans a range of match types. The ecstasy of dying for the Emperor aside, both give me frightful flashbacks to the early days of Gears Of War.

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Another upcoming game for Game Pass may have been leaked. Prominent leaker eXtas1s has claimed on Twitter that Saber Interactive and Focus Entertainment’s all-terrain driving aim Expeditions: A MudRunner Game is coming to Game Pass this month. 

The leaker claims the game will be available for subscribers on both PC and Xbox. Though a specific date for its arrival is unknown, it is supposedly set to arrive this month. Previous leaks have claimed that Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy is also set to arrive for Game Pass on August 8, so if that is true, it’s possible that both titles get announced together. 

In our review of the game, we awarded it a score of 9/10, saying, “When it comes to the joy of off-road driving, few games can capture the feel as expertly or effortlessly as Expeditions: A MudRunner Game.” Read the full review through here.

Also coming to Game Pass later this month is Mafia: Definitive Edition, which will become available for subscribers on August 13. 

Sumo Group, the British video game collective which owns developers Sumo Digital, publishers Secret Mode and more - including Everybody's Gone to the Rapture devs The Chinese Room - is laying off hundreds of staff, cutting 15% of their workforce “to better navigate the upcoming challenges expected in the coming months”.

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Sumo Group, the British video game collective which owns developers Sumo Digital, publishers Secret Mode and more - including Everybody's Gone to the Rapture devs The Chinese Room - is laying off hundreds of staff, cutting 15% of their workforce “to better navigate the upcoming challenges expected in the coming months”.

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If you're a fan of Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun's retro-inspired first-person shooting action - and you might well be given how positively it was received - you've got a fresh chunk of the stuff to look forward to in a few short weeks now that developer Auroch Digital and publisher Focus Entertainment have announced an expansion is coming on 18th June.

Forges of Corruption, as Boltgun's first expansion is officially known, includes a brand-new campaign spanning five new environments. Three of those have been revealed so far - the Graia Battlefields, Manufactorum, and the heretic-infested Daemonic Forge - and there's also promise of new enemies inhabiting these dangerous locales.

Ultramarines stepping forth into Forges of Corruption can expect to encounter the vicious Black Havok Legion, the Helbrute, and the Terminator with its Lighting Claw. Luckily, there's a bit of (literal) extra bang for your expansion bucks in the form of two new weapons: the Multi-Melta and Missile Launcher.

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Hellblade 2 leads the new games coming to Xbox Game Pass this month, alongside Soulslike Lords of the Fallen.

The sequel to Senua's Sacrifice, Hellblade 2: Senua's Saga will be a nightmarish visual feast when it's added to Game Pass on day one, though it only runs at 30fps on Xbox consoles. PC specs have already been released.

Lords of the Fallen released in October last year and has since received a large number of updates to improve its performance on both PC and console. Its most recent, and final, update adds modifiers for a rogue-lite challenge.

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A Warhammer 40K: Space Marine 2 art book has leaked online, confirming the delayed game by Saber Interactive will include a PvP mode.

YouTuber prdalien0 shared a full flick through the book, giving us a detailed dive into the game's various modes and customisations months ahead of Space Marine 2's scheduled release in September 2024.

As well as confirming that the PvP mode will be Marine x Marine "only" and showing off its associated classes, the book also reveals that there's banner and clan customisation for PvP and a hub-type space from which you can pick up missions and upgrade your character.

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A Warhammer 40K: Space Marine 2 art book has leaked online, confirming the delayed game by Saber Interactive will include a PvP mode.

YouTuber prdalien0 shared a full flick through the book, giving us a detailed dive into the game's various modes and customisations months ahead of Space Marine 2's scheduled release in September 2024.

As well as confirming that the PvP mode will be Marine x Marine "only" and showing off its associated classes, the book also reveals that there's banner and clan customisation for PvP and a hub-type space from which you can pick up missions and upgrade your character.

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A Warhammer 40K: Space Marine 2 art book has leaked online, confirming the delayed game by Saber Interactive will include a PvP mode.

YouTuber prdalien0 shared a full flick through the book, giving us a detailed dive into the game's various modes and customisations months ahead of Space Marine 2's scheduled release in September 2024.

As well as confirming that the PvP mode will be Marine x Marine "only" and showing off its associated classes, the book also reveals that there's banner and clan customisation for PvP and a hub-type space from which you can pick up missions and upgrade your character.

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Gears of Warhammer sequel Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 will feature some kind of PvP multiplayer mode, similar to the first Warhammer 40k game, going by an early look at an art book for the upcoming third-person shooter.

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Xbox recently updated its Game Pass page, revealing three games that will be leaving the service soon.

Shredders, Ni no Kuni Wrath of the White Witch Remastered and Hardspace: Shipbreaker will all be removed from the Game Pass catalogue in the next two weeks.

If you want to keep playing any of these games once they have left the service, you will need to purchase them. Game Pass members will get a 20 percent discount.

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As someone who finds games about cars wot go fast only intermittently interesting, I'd expect a game about cars wot go slow to be positively soporific. Speed is, ultimately, the modus operandi of a car. It gets you where you need to go faster than a horse, and doesn't do annoying things like pooing on your patio or dying (also, potentially, on your patio). Surely, then, playing a game about cars moving at the speed of a dead patio horse defeats the point, like playing a first-person shooter where all the guns fire backwards.

Expeditions: A Mudrunner Game demonstrates this not to be the case. This bouncy, slimy off-roading simulator is the most fun I've had with an imaginary car since 2018's Jalopy. This is partly because it is as much a physics puzzler filled with limitless conundrums as it is a game about driving, but also because, like Jalopy, it envisions the car as something more than a way to boost egos by doing a big circle.

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Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water, Microsoft are bringing Maneater back to Game Pass. Yesterday they unveiled the next batches of Game Pass additions and two are returnees, with the delightful fighty platformer Indivisible accompanying brutal shark 'em up Maneater. What's more important is that it's adding the game with the cutest little Nurglings, grimdark retro-styled FPS Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun. The rhetoric of 'purging xenos and heretics' surely doesn't apply to these darling babies. Read on for all the games coming to (and going from) Game Pass over the next few weeks.

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A report by the French video game workers union has raised concerns from staff at Life is Strange and Vampyr developer Don't Nod.

Headquarted in Paris, the company released action role-player Banishers: Ghosts of Eden this week, following last year's well-received Jusant and Harmony: The Fall of Reverie.

Now, a report by French union Le Syndicat des Travailleurs et Travailleuses du Jeu Vidéo (STJV) has alleged that staff at Don't Nod are subject to mismanagement by the company due to the need to balance multiple projects with "frequently" changing deadlines, "contradictory" directions and "no long-term vision" for staff welfare.

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Commitment can be scarier than any ghost story. When I got married, I spent a lot of time leading up to the wedding borrowing grief from my future self. The prospect of 'til death do we part' brought forward the stark idea that one day one of us would have to say goodbye to the other. I was suddenly and unexpectedly wracked with anxiety about the mortality of my loved ones, and playing Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden reminded me of this uncomfortable feeling. Antea and Red have each other, to hold and confide in and joke with – but Antea is a ghost, and they have to get ready to say goodbye. That's the commitment they make to each other.

Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden sees Red and Antea, ghost hunters and life partners, called to settle a curse that's fallen on the early Massachusetts settler colony of New Eden. The tight-knit, suspicious puritan community aren't all convinced that the pair can help, seeing their arrival as too little too late – or insufficiently godly – after the loss of their community pillar to the ghost at the centre of the curse.

New Eden Town introduces you to life as a banisher: fighting violent spectres that have forgotten who they were, convincing benevolent ghosts to leave people to grieve in peace, and snooping in people's belongings to get better answers to your questions. When the pair inadvertently walk into a trap, the townspeople's suspicions are proved correct – Antea is killed, and the survivors scatter. To help her peacefully pass on, it will be a long journey to loosen the curse's hold on the area to retrieve her body – and there's the unthinkable option of taking that same journey to instead resurrect her, going against everything they believe as banishers. Death to the dead, and life to the living.

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The studio behind Homeworld 3, Homeworld: Deserts Of Kharak, and Hardspace: Shipbreaker have cut a number of jobs, explaining this is "part of a realignment plan that's necessary because of new projects that were shelved by some of our partners". Blackbird Interactive haven't confirmed the number of people who lost their jobs, nor have they said what the mystery projects were. It's been a grim year for people working in the video games industry, with thousands losing their jobs, and we're only halfway through February.

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"Banishers took a while to kick in," I wrote in the RPS group chat last week, "but I fought a monster made of angry witch-hunting jam last night." It was a pivotal boss fight about half way through Don't Nod's ghost hunting action-adventure RPG Banishers: Ghosts Of New Eden, and typical of the over-the-top, slightly ridiculous, but entirely earnest drama of the game that joyfully pulls you along. Don't Nod - who I am starting to suspect make their magic teen angsthologies to fund their real passion for "grimdark grown-up fantasy that you sort of suspect should be a book series" - have followed up 2018's third-person action effort Vampyr with this new semi-epic.

Banishers has a lot in common with the interwar bloodsucker, including methodical investigations and stacking moral choices, but is a much more accomplished effort. Banishers combines a sweeping, tragic love story with some very decent swashbuckling, shooting possessed skeletons in the face, and being disappointed at Puritans. A perfect game, some may say. I'd elevator-pitch it to you as a sort of goth Uncharted where you find-and-replace "treasure" with "ghosts".

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