Quality-of-life improvements aplenty.
Sega and Atlus have released a new update for RAIDOU Remastered: The Mystery of the Soulless Army on Switch and Switch 2, bringing the game up to version 1.10.
The update brings a whole bunch of quality-of-life improvements to game alongside some standard bug fixes. The remaster launched on 19th June 2025, shortly after the Switch 2 itself landed, and brought extensive improvements to the PS2 original.
Read the full article on nintendolife.com
It’s often tough to build on a formula that largely works as-is, but a short hands-off preview of Warhammer 40,000: Mechanicus II last week showed us that even small tweaks can feel monumental. Mechanicus II looks like an upgrade to its turned-based predecessor in all of the right ways, with some smart new additions that make its combat loop feel far more approachable to all kinds of players.
The game revolves around a single planetary conflict, a war between the Adeptus Mechanicus, a machine-worshipping cult, and the Necrons, a race of robotic skeletons that essentially woke up after millions of years and chose violence. Unlike the first Mechanicus, players can choose which faction they want to control and can switch at will between the two campaigns. The campaigns have the same core story arc, but the developer tells me there’ll be gameplay and narrative differences for each faction.
The sequel builds on Mechanicus, a meaty turn-based tactical affair where you play solely as the titular Adeptus Mechanicus faction. Here, you can take control of numerous factions, customize and upgrade their abilities, and make unique decisions that impact the outcome of the story. In Mechanicus II, the story’s conclusion also depends on player choice – the team is keeping the narrative under wraps, but does confirm that there is a canonical ending to the first game, which is the Videx ending, for those who’ve seen it.
The demo showcased a critical narrative siege seen from the perspective of both the Necrons and the Adeptus Mechanicus. Each faction has a roster of leaders, with the Mechanicus returning from the first game – but, this time around, they are all playable characters with their own unique skillsets. Their abilities can be tweaked to suit a particular playstyle – you can spec them out to deal massive damage on their own, or home in on more support-based actions that can buff your team as a whole, which looks great for supporting different approaches you may want to take.
There’s a faction spoiler coming up, so if want to go into Mechanicus II with as little information as possible, look away now!
Mechanicus II will also see other factions make an appearance in battle for the first time; our demo shows off some fiendishly powerful Space Marine allies, and we found out earlier this year that a relatively new Warhammer 40,000 faction – The Leagues of Votann – will also appear during the campaigns at some point. These groups are not playable, but they will perform smart, automatic actions in combat, either alongside you or against you.
One major change that Mechanicus II makes is within its Cognition system. Cognition points (or Dominion points, if you’re playing on the Necron side), are essentially a currency collected by your chosen faction that can be used to upgrade or unlock weapon actions or skills fire one-off attacks, or perform other useful actions in battle. Mechanicus II appears to offer much more flexibility in how you collect Cognition points – every individual unit can collect them by completing smaller objectives or taking certain actions. This change is small, but it allows for much less rigidity in how you approach a skirmish, and the units you use.
Everything looks so much nicer, too – unit models and their environments are crisp and vibrant, the maps are dynamic and can change throughout the course of the battle. There’s also a new cover system, which allows the Mechanicus units to protect themselves from oncoming fire, but these elements are destructible, which means their use is limited. It’s a nice touch that makes you consider your positioning differently to gain an edge, but it won’t last forever.
Mechanicus II looks like a promising iteration on the first title – bringing back its signature complex strategy gameplay, with thoughtful changes and additions that truly feel like the series is evolving with player choice at the forefront of its design. For new players, there’s a much more reasonable barrier to entry, and far more flexibility in how you choose to do battle. It’s an impressive direction, and one that Mechanicus fans – and Warhammer 40k enthusiasts in general – can look forward to.
The post Warhammer 40,000: Mechanicus II – A Sequel That Builds in All the Right Ways appeared first on Xbox Wire.
Remember when Blue Protocol died last year? And remember how it was brought back to life only a few months later as Blue Protocol: Star Resonance? It’s not often that such a turnaround happens, so you have to count your blessings when they do. And now, almost a year on from that, following a recent beta test, this retitled version of the game has a release date.
Hollow Knight: Silksong‘s second post-release patch is on the way.
While the first patch prioritized “critical issues,” this one focuses on other lingering problems, as well as “cleaning up some bugs around specific tools.” (We can only presume that’s a reference to video game bugs rather than the ones found in The Citadel!)
Before it rolls out to all, however, Team Cherry is testing the new version via the public-beta branch on Steam. This means anyone can select and download it, albeit on the proviso that while it includes fixes, it may also be unstable — so something to bear in mind. You can find out more about the public beta on the game’s Steam discussion page.
Based on the patch notes, below, Update 2 doesn’t include any earth-shattering balance changes, after Update 1 made the early game easier. However, it’s worth noting Team Cherry told fans to “expect a few more additions and tweaks” before full release, so perhaps the developer has some surprises up its sleeve.
We thought Hollow Knight: Silksong was ‘Amazing’, awarding it 9/10 and writing: “Silksong is packed full of sharp platforming, enticing exploration, and nail-biting combat that’s all unapologetically challenging in just the right way. However, Hell is Us creative director Jonathan Jacques-Belletête called Team Cherry’s last-minute release “a little callous.”
Playing Silksong? Here are some essential guides for your journey upwards: the Silksong Interactive Map, how to grind for Rosary Beads, our ever-expanding Walkthrough with boss videos and guides, how to get your first life bar upgrade (first four mask shards), and a great guide to the Simple Keys and the doors they open.
Vikki Blake is a reporter for IGN, as well as a critic, columnist, and consultant with 15+ years experience working with some of the world’s biggest gaming sites and publications. She’s also a Guardian, Spartan, Silent Hillian, Legend, and perpetually High Chaos. Find her at BlueSky.
Hollow Knight: Silksong‘s second patch is here ahead of an impeding full release, with Team Cherry having shared the notes and initiated Steam beta testing. No balancing tweaks this time around, just a bunch more handy bug fixes that’re well worth being aware of.
The cherry on top.
Hollow Knight: Silksong just got its first post-release patch last week — one which actually nerfed the difficulty of a few early game bosses — but Team Cherry is almost ready to put out a second one.
This time around, however, it’s all about bug fixes (haaa…) and tweaks to Tools. Sharing the details on Steam, the developer has detailed what these entail, with many of them focusing on enemies accidentally going out-of-bounds and certain Tools not doing the right amount of damage or not working as intended.
Read the full article on nintendolife.com
The new story expansion pack for Atomfall is available from today. Called The Red Strain, it contains a wealth of new content including a top-secret location, interesting characters, powerful enemies, new skills which change the way you play, and leads which reveal new endings to the Atomfall story.
For those of you who are new to Atomfall, it is a post-apocalyptic survival-action game set in the UK. It is inspired by the real life Windscale nuclear incident which occurred in northern England in the 1950s. You embark an on adventure set in a fictionalised Quarantine Zone where you will meet a cast of eccentric characters – some trustworthy, some not. You are trying to uncover the mystery of what really happened at Windscale, decide who to trust, and earn your escape.
The Red Strain takes you to a new region in the Quarantine Zone – Scafell Crag. Here you will find Test Site Moriah, a secret research site built by B.A.R.D on an old missile testing facility. Nestled in the hills away from prying eyes, it has been shrouded in mystery ever since it became operational.
A deadly virus has infected the region, and it is seeping out from a secret network of underground labs and bunkers. It’s up to you to explore the sprawling area and unravel the mystery of what really happened at Test Site Moriah – and try to find a way to eliminate the Red Strain.
While investigating the site you will uncover new leads that intertwine with the Atomfall narrative and may ultimately unlock new endings. New characters will help to guide you through the mystery, while a variety of infected and mechanical enemies could bring your adventure to an untimely end.
There are also new tools and weapons for you to discover, as well as additional skills to learn along the way, which can transform the way you play every region of the Quarantine Zone.
Firstly, you need to find Scafell Crag… The route there can be found by exploring the Slate Mine Cave, where you will find an old B.A.R.D. lift. You may well have found this location while playing the main game through access points in both Slatten Dale and Skethermoor. The cave is home to trader, Reg Stansfield.
We don’t want to spoil too much – but when you arrive in the new area you will find yourself at an abandoned train station where a mysterious voice will speak to you over the speaker system, giving you your first Lead and directing you to Test Site Moriah. Between the station and Moriah, you will find a nearby abandoned village to explore, complete with the ruins of shops and a pub – and the surrounding area is crawling with infected soldiers, villagers, and even worse, so you need to keep your wits about you.
Your first major challenge is going to be getting access to the site from the village. The gate is heavily guarded by B.A.R.D hardware, so be sure to pack your Rewiring Tool!
Once inside you will find several top-secret research facilities to explore, each giving you an insight into what happened at the test site, and what secretive project got out of control. From here the story of the Red Strain and the mission codenamed ‘High Albion’ begin to unfold.
Be prepared to face a barrage of new threats and enemies, including an upgraded robot, complete with an induction launcher which deals incredible damage once they lock on. However, by finding (or crafting!) training stimulants you will be able to unlock vital new skills, including the ability to equip the heavy weaponry wielded by the robots found throughout the Quarantine Zone, turning their awesome firepower against your enemies.
There is far more for you to discover as you explore Test Site Moriah in search of answers and a way to escape the Quarantine Zone – but we don’t want to spoil the fun by revealing too much!
Atomfall is playable today with Xbox Game Pass, PC Game Pass, and available for purchase through the Xbox Store. The new Red Strain expansion pack is also available to buy now.
To keep up to date with all the latest news from our studio be sure to follow Atomfall on our social channels: Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube.
Rebellion
Rebellion
• The Atomfall story continues with a thrilling game expansion, introducing a new location to explore, gameplay features, enemies, quests, characters, items, weapons, and more!
• “Basic Supply Bundle” – Supplies are scarce in the quarantine zone. Improve your chances for survival with additional items to find, including an exclusive melee weapon to help you in those brutal close-quarters engagements.
• Exclusive Melee Weapon Variant
• Additional Loot Caches
• Item Recipe
• “Enhanced Supply Bundle” – Nothing is given to you inside these walls, but this pack will help you find more great gear for yourself. You’ll be able to uncover an exclusive firearm, unearth hidden treasures with a custom skin for the metal detector, and unlock additional items and upgrades to help you survive.
• Exclusive Pistol Variant
• Metal Detector Skin
• Extra ‘Skill Manual’ for quicker character upgrades
A survival-action game inspired by real-life events, Atomfall is set five years after the Windscale nuclear disaster in Northern England.
Explore the fictional quarantine zone, scavenge, craft, barter, fight and talk your way through a British countryside setting filled with bizarre characters, mysticism, cults, and rogue government agencies.
From Rebellion, the studio behind Sniper Elite and Zombie Army, Atomfall will challenge you to solve the dark mystery of what really happened.
Player Driven Mystery: Unravel a tapestry of interwoven narratives through exploration, conversation, investigation, and combat, where every choice you make has consequences.
Explore this Green and Unpleasant Land: The picturesque British countryside, with rolling green hills, lush valleys, and rural villages belie the dangers that await you.
Search, Scavage, Survive: You’ll need to scavenge for supplies, craft weapons and items, and fight desperately to make it out alive!
Rebellion
Search, Scavage, Survive: You’ll need to scavenge for supplies, craft weapons and items, and fight desperately to make it out alive!
Desperate Combat: With weapons and ammunition scarce, each frenetic engagement will see you blend marksmanship with vicious hand-to-hand combat. Manage your heart rate to hold a steady aim and ensure you have the energy you need to reach for your cricket bat and land the killer blow.
Green and Unpleasant Land: The picturesque British countryside, with rolling green hills, lush valleys, and rural villages belie the dangers that await you. Navigate cult-controlled ruins, natural caves, nuclear bunkers and more as you explore this dense, foreboding world.
Reimagining Windscale: A fictional reimagining of a real-world event, Atomfall draws from science fiction, folk horror, and Cold War influences to create a world that is eerily familiar yet completely alien.
The post New Atomfall DLC is Available Today – Do You Dare to Face the Red Strain? appeared first on Xbox Wire.
Assassin’s Creed expansions come in two flavors: straightforward follow ups that elaborate on the drama and intrigue of the main game, or completely bonkers flights of fancy that turn everything upside down by adding unicorns or dragging you to Asgard. Shadows’ expansion, Claws of Awaji, is firmly the former, almost to a fault. Naoe gets some new combat tricks thanks to a whole new weapon type, and the general pace of exploration is made more hectic and tense as enemies are way more dangerous and way more motivated to bring the fight to you. But the land itself doesn’t feel much different than the rest of Japan, and the straightforward adventure is light on revelation and doesn’t make too great a case for its own existence.
The story that carries our heroes off of the mainland and onto the island is much like that of the main game, filled with colorful characters and a shadowy group of conspirators that need to be brought down systematically, but it’s a simple and predictable tale on the whole. It does pick up the threads of Naoe’s missing mother and the growing influence of the Templar order in Japan, but it doesn’t do much to tie those up in satisfying ways by the end. It also doesn’t make much of a case for seeing anymore of this world. For all Valhalla’s faults, each expansion felt like it was introducing a new dimension to the greater world that Eivor and friends occupied. Claws ends, and 16th century Japan doesn’t feel much bigger than it did 10 hours before it.
Awaji Island is just as beautiful as the rest of Japan, but it’s not so significantly different from the mainland that a person who hasn’t already spent 60+ hours playing would be able to spot the difference at first glance, unlike when Eivor went to Ireland in Valhalla, for instance. Awaji is a bit more mountainous, which is more noticeable when having to navigate up and down the length of the map because of the significant lack of fast travel points throughout. And there are some visual gems hidden away like a dark swamp with creepy foliage, or a big warship that’s under construction. But if you’ve seen a mountain caked in winter snow earlier this year, this will look exactly like that.
There’s more of the same kinds of side quests and activities to do on Awaji as well, which is good for gaining knowledge points to invest in the limited amount of new skills and upgrades available to Naoe and Yasuke, but still pretty optional and ignorable otherwise. Side quests seem even more tucked away than the main game – I didn’t come across any of them organically and had to put extra effort into finding people with problems I can solve.
Naoe gets her hands on a new weapon in Claws of Awaji, the bo staff. Fashioned as a hybrid of a long-ranged crowd controller and a single-target mix-up machine, I found it to be much better at the latter than the former. This is mostly because of its novel stance-based attacks, using high jabs to interrupt enemies and low sweeps to take them off their feet and open them up to big, reliable damage. On the off chance I got into extended brawls as the Shinobi, the bo was reliably my second slot choice.
There are new skills for both Yasuke and Naoe as well but I didn’t find them to be particularly spicy enough to unseat my tried-and-true staples tested under dozens of hours of chopping and stabbing. Some new equipment is available to plunder from castles but as it was in the base game, these aren’t really much of a carrot worth chasing unless you really love having all of the icons on the map cleared.
The island of Awaji is thick with opportunities to put all of your skills and gear to the test. It’s dense with folks who at best don’t trust you, or at worse would travel far and wide for a chance to kill you. I felt I was being hunted and conspired against much more than in the base game. Every horse trip longer than 100 meters left me exposed to road traps set by enemy ninja. City guards are much jumpier and more suspicious, and will not hesitate to start a melee in the middle of the market to take you down.
I liked how the general chaos of the island cleverly married with the main quest’s objectives to take down the three trusted taisho of the Templar leader in the region. For instance, those road side ninja? They work for Nowaki, a gun-toting hunter that is terrorizing the region for sport. Stopping to take them out instead of avoiding them gives you the chance to run their pockets for clues to where their master might be hiding. Those jumpy guards all answer to Tomeji, the beefy vanguard that enforces order with an iron fist. He’s very conspicuous in a castle surrounded by his elite guard but picking fights and causing general ruckus will compel him to send those guards out to stop you. And when they don’t return on account of you retiring them early, he’s left more and more vulnerable to your inevitable siege. Using your scouts to track down objectives will put the search zone on high alert thanks to the third big bad on the island: a shadowy spymaster of a thousand aliases. It’s a strange harmony that might have been obnoxious in the larger adventure but is a welcome challenge when considering Claws’ relative brevity.
When the main quest missions come to crescendos that require the team to work together more directly, Claws of Awaji still splits the tasks up between Yasuke and Naoe appropriately, leaving Yasuke to do much of the open combat, and Naoe to take stealth and assassination duty. The handful of new boss fights also do a good job of playing to the pair’s individual strengths, including a very cool stealth battle that kind of evokes Metal Gear Solid and demands all of Naoe’s skills to overcome.
Be very, very quiet. Yes, I know this is being yelled from a page on a video game website that at least five people have heard of, so it’s hardly hush-hush, but if Randy keeps shouting unhinged things at people about PC specs, I think we might slip under the radar.
There’s a Borderlands 4 build. It’s a bit broken, and can reportedly down bosses in a click of your fingers by doing a craptonne of damage. I am telling you this information now. The game’s director is aware of the quirk at the heart of this slapping-up setup, and I’ve a sneaking suspicion it might be tweaked soon.
I maintain that the bounties of Hollow Knight: Silksong’s drum-tight action and hyper-intricate world exploration ultimately outweigh its repeated acts of smirking sadism. It’s a fine dining restaurant where the waiters insist on bashing your kneecaps out with claw hammers before serving the most delightful, perfectly layered mille-feuille you’ve had in your life. It’sh delishush, you mumble through a full mouth and agonised tears.
Still, sometimes I’ll fancy a taste of the good stuff without necessarily having my skeleton destroyed. To that end, I’ve been taking regular breaks from Silksong’s usual heroics to pursue the simpler life of a package courier for Pharloom’s surviving insects.
