Why battle royales aren’t ever my games of the year

Apex Legends with some pals, but otherwise, all I did was watch an eclectic mix of anime and TV: Mob Psycho 100, Better Call Saul, and Somebody Feed Phil. Granted, my gaming tastes wax and wane over a year, with lengthy JRPG stints rolling inevitably into junk food like Assassin’s Creed Valhalla. No matter what, my one constant is an FPS or ‘competitive’ game, I suppose. Games like Apex, or Warzone, or even Fortnite.

And yet, for whatever reason, I don’t consider them as candidates for the Bestest Best games of any year. I might pour hundreds, possibly thousands of hours into them and they won’t even make it into my personal list of absolute faves. That’s reserved for games, not games.

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Overwatch 2’s Battle for Olympus event turns seven heroes into Greek gods today

Overwatch 2‘s second season has been all about Greek mythology, with several characters receiving skins based on iconic Greek gods. But now that the festive winter event has wrapped up, Overwatch 2 is debuting its next limited-time event Battle for Olympus later today, and it’s reimagining seven characters’ abilities. The free-for-all deathmatch mode begins today and will be around until January 19th.

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My Time At Sandrock’s multiplayer beta next week will be set in a simulation

Stardew Valley-like town simulator My Time At Sandrock is running its first open beta for multiplayer next week, allowing owners of the game to hop into a separate multiplayer area set in a “semi-fictional” version of Sandrock’s past that includes “compressed stories happening 50 years before single-player events”. A pseudo prequel is an interesting form for a multiplayer mode to take, especially considering this is the pseudo sequel to My Time At Portia.

The beta will run from January 12th – January 20th, after which any progress you’ve made will be wiped.

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Atomic Heart’s latest trailer shows off its ray-tracing chops

Atomic Heart seems chock-full of weird, mostly robotic things that want to kill you, and its latest trailer shows off all the ray-traced reflections and particle effects you can admire as they do so. We’ve seen a lot of this before, but it doesn’t half look pretty – and now at 4K, if you can handle that. I worry for my poor 1080p-tier GPU, though at least there’s also freshly-announced DLSS 3 support.

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