Just yesterday, Morgan observed that tanking a game’s Steam rating has become a reflexive response to PC gaming grievances big and small. Now, as Helldivers 2’s user review average recovers from its weekend PSN account linking fiasco, another game is being hit with a smaller, but still conspicuous, influx of negative Steam user reviews.

The recent reviews for space sim Elite Dangerous are sitting at a “Mixed” rating as some players express disappointment over new offers in the game’s store.

The latest update for the nearly decade-old Milky Way simulation adds a new ship, the Python Mk II, but only for those willing to spend at least 16,250 ARX, a currency that can be earned in-game (but with a 400 ARX per week maximum) or purchased with real money. The ship won’t be available for the non-purchasable in-game currency, called credits, until August 7.

Along with early access to the new ship, Elite developer Frontier has added powerful pre-built ships to the ARX store.…

We’re just over three weeks removed from the launch of smash hit roguelike Balatro, and I’ve already clocked over 45 hours in the game. I’m in deep—just last night I hit a 350 million point hand, and it’s still not enough. Others, too, are clearly smitten with the deckbuilder. Scores and strategies are still regularly discussed in PCG’s Slack channel, and the game itself sold over 500,000 copies in just its first 10 days on sale.

Despite making the best poker deckbuilding roguelike around, solo developer Localthunk told PC Gamer last month that he doesn’t play poker at all. Which is a surprise! But given how meticulously designed the game feels—and how neatly it sidesteps a lot of my frustrations with other games in its genre—surely he’s at least a deckbuilder fan? It turns out that, no, he hadn’t played those either.

“Balatro is the first deckbuilder I ever played!” says LocalThunk in a Reddit AMA he hosted yesterday on the r/games subreddit. Instead, …

Blobfish have announced that beloved roguelike arena shootfest Brotato will get a full-on DLC and a major feature update this year. The update will be free, and bring in four player local co-op. 

Expansion DLC Brotato: Abyssal Terrors will have more of… pretty much everything that Brotato already has. Abyssal Terrors will come some time “this summer,” says the trailer.

The paid DLC Abyssal terrors will bring 20 new waves of enemies and bosses, doubling the base game. There’ll also be 10+ new characters, with a wetsuit potato and a weird goggles potato and a kind of crazy-haired goatee potato in the trailer. There’s also 10+ new weapons, including a spear gun and some kind of magic wand, I think, and 30-some new items to snag and upgrade to boot.

The free local co-op update will be for up to four players, which is frankly pretty exciting. The update as a whole will also include game balance tweaks and bugfixes, as well as nebulous “new content” that we’ve no …

You ever want to roar across the dystopian wasteland of the future’s wastelands and cities on your incredibly slick-looking cyberpunk motorcycle? Yeah, me neither, but I’d love to do that in a videogame, and that’s what we’re here for.

Gripper is an upcoming action indie all about taking down tough bosses, ripping out their hearts, and using those to customize your absolutely enviable ride. Yeah, it’s a boss rush game, one of those where the whole point of the thing is throwing yourself up against tough bosses and figuring out how to tear them to pieces. 

Unlike other boss rushes, however, Gripper seems to be focused on customizability and playstyle. The core of the game is grabbing and tearing with your bike’s grappling hook—gripping and ripping, if you will—but it’ll also let you customize your bike. You’ll be able to add cosmetics or tweak your health, but also add gear “from energy boosters to spawnable drones, mines and gadgets.”

That’s not to…

Helldivers 2 has been out for a handful of months now—and it’s been monstrously popular, so popular in fact that people could barely play it. There’s also been another side effect of the game’s runaway success: you were actually supposed to make a PlayStation Network account like, months ago. The servers were just too busted to handle it.

As revealed in a recent statement by Sony via the Helldivers 2 Steam page, players will have to create and link a PlayStation Network account beginning May 6: “Due to technical issues at the launch of HELLDIVERS™ 2, we allowed the linking requirements for Steam accounts to a PlayStation Network account to be temporarily optional. That grace period will now expire.”

The reason for the change, the post states, is that Sony uses its internal systems as “our main way to protect players from griefing and abuse by enabling the banning of players that engage in that type of behaviour. It also allows those players that have been ban…

Something like two and a half years after I first saw the concept and thought “that looks neat” we’re finally gonna get it. We’re finally gonna get a game where you use a mech to plow a field grow and plant some seeds and water them and then harvest a big weird alien fruit.

Videogames, hell yeah.

Following a new trailer earlier his week, Lightyear Frontier developers Frame Break have announced that it’ll release into Early Access in March 2024. First teased quite some time ago, it’s a game about homesteading on an alien world with mechs and up to four players, cooperatively. It’s very exciting, because frankly, that’s a very exciting idea.

The new trailer has the very geared up farmers of the frontier stomping about in their mechs, tossing treats to birds, and otherwise doing farming tasks—and farming game tasks—as you’d expect them to. A mech buzzsaws down a tree while another stomps about plowing a field and a third whacks rocks with a comedically ove…

We haven’t heard much about the upcoming Subnautica 2, apart from the devs reassuring fans that it won’t be a live service game, so fans are understandably excited at the discovery of secret new screenshots of the sequel. 

An eagle-eyed Subnautica player spotted what looked like a strange new creature in a time capsule. The picture includes a few new rainbow tadpole-like creatures, which we haven’t seen before. “Hey um, found this on my way to the rocket,” the image’s description says. “Is this thing new? Never seen it before! :O” 

This kicked up quite a fuss as even veteran players couldn’t identify the odd sea creature leading some to believe that this has to be from some kind of mod: “That looks quite similar to that screenshot they shared a few months ago,” one player says. “Could just be mods and a weird perspective tho.”

However, it turns out that this isn’t from any mod, it’s actually a new screenshot from the upcoming Subnautica 2. While a couple …

All the help you need to solve today’s Wordle is on this very page, whether you’re after a quick brush-up of your general skills or an easy win. There are tips, a clue written for the September 12 (815) puzzle, and of course, today’s Wordle answer ready and waiting to go.

Today’s puzzle turned out to be a real rollercoaster of emotions for me, veering from utter despair to four green letters, then from four green letters to please be the answer please oh thank goodness. Never has being almost completely right been so very wrong. Let’s hope tomorrow’s Wordle isn’t quite so stressful.

Today’s Wordle hint

A Wordle hint for Tuesday, September 12

If you were cooking or baking and needed to beat lots of air into some eggs, you’d probably use today’s answer to do so. This word can also mean to quickly take someone or something away to another place too. There’s only a single vowel to find today. 

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The Steam Deck is a remarkably powerful piece of hardware, capable of doing all sorts of interesting things. But the Ukrainian military appears to have found one use that I’m pretty sure wasn’t anticipated in any of Valve’s design meetings: As a controller for a remote gun turret.

Photos of the Steam Deck purportedly being used to control a gun turret first turned up in mid-April, shared by TRO Media, but they looked a little suspect: There was nothing to indicate that the Steam Deck in question was being used as part of the weapon, and not just for a spot of Vampire Survivors during a reload. 

More recently, though, video from what appears to be the same event has turned up, and a Steam Deck is clearly being used to control the turret.

The purpose of a remotely-controlled turret is obvious: Get a gun on the front line without exposing the people using it to enemy fire. The auto-translated closed captioning in this separate YouTube video (which also shows the …

Valve’s been going pretty hard on Dota 2 this year, and the latest is targeting those who start fresh accounts in the free-to-play game so that they can play easy games and stomp rookies. Valve has also traced the accounts back to their main accounts, and says that from now on “a main account found associated with a smurf account could result in a wide range of punishments, from temporary adjustments to behavior scores to permanent account bans.”

Smurf accounts, for those of you who don’t know, are brand-new accounts used by experienced players to avoid playing at a proper matchmaking level—or to just cheat, grief, troll, and be broadly toxic without permanent consequence. 

For many players in competitive, free-to-play games, and for mobas in particular, smurfing has been a huge problem. It’s extremely frustrating to enjoy playing against people who’re either profoundly more skilled than you or just there to make the game worse for everyone else.

This is…

As spotted by GamesRadar, the Steamworks Development channel posted a video earlier this month explaining the ins and outs of how games snowball into surprise hits like Dave the Diver—which we gave a smashing 91 back in July. 

The talk’s given by Erik Peterson of Steam’s business team, and it’s an enlightening little journey through Steam’s design philosophy. “We don’t think Steam should be pay-to-win. Not selling ads levels the playing field and makes [its] recommendations better for players.”

“We’re surprised all the time by the games that find big success on Steam,” continues Peterson. “Every week, Steam automatically picks up on games that we haven’t even heard of, or games that we would’ve never predicted would be popular.” Those surprises are, to him and his team, an indication that the platform’s “working properly.”

According to the presentation (which has a full PDF to read at your leisure) there are two ways games get the Steam spotlight: algori…

Guarantee yourself a Wordle win with our help. Make today’s game a little easier for yourself with a freshly written clue for the November 7 (871) puzzle, break it completely with today’s answer, or just polish up your general skills with our tips and tricks. 

Some days the grey letters help more than the greens. My opening guess only revealed a single yellow, and I have to admit I was a bit disappointed about it—until I took a breath and remembered that if it definitely wasn’t those letters, then it must be one of these instead. With that helpful thought in mind, a win in three came quickly. 

Today’s Wordle hint

Wordle today: A hint for Tuesday, November 7

The word you need to find today is the upper edge or boundary beyond which someone or something mustn’t (or can’t) go. Speed, for example. A car will be restricted to a certain mph depending on the road it’s travelling on. 

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There’s been an awful lot of sometimes-cool, sometimes-odd crossovers in Call of Duty: Warzone 2—corrupt superheroes, Nicki Minaj, a bulletproof dog named Merlin who rides around on your belt—but this is my favorite: The super-shotgun from Doom 2, which will be added to the game as part of the Doom bundle that’s coming in October.

The super shotgun—technically the combat shotgun, but only old, pedantic nerds (like me) insist on calling it that—debuted in Doom 2, and it’s been a staple of the series, and virtually every other shotgun-toting FPS, ever since. They have an alarmingly slow rate of fire, but they make up for that shortcoming by hitting like a truck.

From the Doom 2 manual:

Combat shotguns are double-barrelled, sawed-off killing sticks. These gats are the ultimate in pellet warfare. Beware, two barrels not only deliver more firepower, but takes more time to reload.

Of course, you don’t have to worry about reloading i…

Need some help with Wordle today? Some days those yellows just don’t want to settle in, or they don’t until it’s too late. That’s where our daily Wordle help comes in. Keep on scrolling and you’ll find all sorts of tips for today’s game, as well as a helpful clue written just for the October 5 (838) puzzle, and the answer in plain text if you need it.

Wow, that was a slippery Wordle. I thought I had the answer every time—every available letter carefully considered, every possibility covered—only to find myself slightly less wrong than I was before. There was no doubt today’s winning word would turn up in time, but it always seemed closer in the moment than it actually was.

Today’s Wordle hint

Wordle today: A hint for Thursday, October 5

The word you’re looking for is the name of a loose group, stack, or collective of similar items. Bananas, papers, even people can all be described like this. 

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Whether you’re tired of running out of guesses for today’s Wordle, would like to see more green boxes more often, or simply want to win, then you’re in luck because we’ve got Wordle help tailored to your needs on this very page. Take a minute to read through our tips and guides, check out the clue for the March 28 (647) game, or click straight to today’s Wordle answer. Whatever you need, you’ll find it here.

That was a tough one. Everything seemed to turn up grey, and the greens I did have could pair up nicely with far more words than I had guesses left to use. I’d like to tell you I scraped by in the nick of time, but in truth, I ended up just one letter away from today’s Wordle answer at the end.

Wordle hint

A Wordle hint for Tuesday, March 28

The answer today is a “busy” word, describing the act of moving not just quickly but in a rush, trying to clear tasks or get around as fast as possible, and probably in a slight state of panic or irri…