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Season 1 of Halo Infinite’s battle pass will be called “Heroes Of Reach”, as announced back in June, and will feature cosmetic item rewards drawn from Halo: Reach. This works by letting you unlock an armor core - the base you plug other cosmetic items into - and then start customising it with mix-and-matched items drawn from Reach’s cast of soldiers. “For us, the system that’s been created with the [armor] core at the center, and then all of the attachments that players can choose to add,” head of design Jerry Hook tells IGN....

Halo community manager John Junyszek revealed the next steps on Twitter overnight. He noted that when they made those initial changes, “we promised that we’d monitor the data and make additional changes if needed. Now, it’s time to follow up on that.” He goes onto explain, “After seeing how XP was earned with those changes, we noticed that players were starting their sessions with slower payouts than we’d like. To address this, we will be increasing the XP payout for the first 6 matches of each day....

A Infinite isn’t quite a clean break from the (admittedly naff) plot of Haloes 4 and 5, but it’s able to position itself as a soft-reset courtesy of a generous time-jump. Since moment one 343 have pitched this as a throwback to Bungie’s trilogy, with this week’s box art tease very much aping the cover of Halo: Combat Evolved. That homage plays out as soon as Chief steps out of the front door....

Hardspace: Shipbreaker gives us a whole lot of spacedebt and the tools to work it off: a cutting torch, some tether lines, and a basic awareness of how to strip spaceship wrecks for parts. We’ll head in to carefully extract the valuable bits, cracking, peeling ships, and gutting ships - while trying not to do anything that might cause a disaster and ruin our salvage. A game about looking at a spaceship, figuring out how best to take it apart, then following through on that plan without accidentally e....

It plays a lot like Reigns, in that you’re confronted with a Tinder like interface and have to make binary decisions about how to run the country. In my game I nationalised Google. Then the rest of the world told me they weren’t wild about America essentially owning the internet, and so I agreed to INTERnationalise Google. I think people liked that. It’s a little game that’s good at representing a lot....

Before I touched the game, I thought it was just 2D Minecraft. If you, like younger, sillier me, think this is the case, you are mistaken. Minecraft lets you off the leash in a voxel sandbox, then just walks off. Terraria pops you in an equally expansive world, helpfully gifts you a few tools, then gently pushes you forwards. As I’m a big, impatient baby, this is perfect. Terraria constantly drip feeds you a dizzying array of new ores, or mysterious NPCs, or bizarre new biomes and trusts you’ll make sense of how it’s all linked together....

We weren’t able to get it working properly here in the office. I’ve no idea why and it’s a real shame, because when I played it at home with my friend Deborah, it was chaos. There are many games that are tense but exhausting and faintly unpleasant for me. Tictacdoteyeoh’s short games, frantic music and slow movement made for a fierce and exciting tension that invariably ended in both us of cackling with laughter and relief....

The family home you explore in Resi 7 is dark and mangled and labyrinthine. For me it’s scary partly because I’d actually consider putting down a deposit if given the chance. And if I had a few million to spare, which sadly I don’t. It would come furnished which is a bonus, and the rooms are a “good size” as they say on TV shows like A Place in the Sun and Escape to the Country (both shows pair well with lunch)....

But I was fixated on a far more glorious sport. The most extreme sport of all, according to certain chestnut seeds. That sport is Conkers. For those who don’t know, a “conker” is the name given to the seed of a horse chestnut tree. Crack open the spiky unpleasantness and you’re left with a wonderfully pleasing sight: a shiny brown round conker, perfect for dangling from a string and bashing against other conkers until one conker emerges the victor....

See, with ball collision switched off, Golf With Your Friends is pretty fun. The courses are oversized and fantastical, and because everyone’s balls are in play at the same time, you get all the light-hearted competition of a real putting contest without waiting for the person in front to take their turn. All fine and dandy. Turn ball collision on, however, and it becomes outright pandemonium. Instead of opposing balls ghosting harmlessly through one another, they begin clattering about from the first stroke....

Just to make sure, I went back and reinstalled Batman: Arkham City, which I fondly remembered to have some of the most jaw-droppingly brilliant combat I’d ever seen at the time. I feel a bit guilty saying it, but it paled in comparison to Shadow Of War. In Shadow Of War, I’d fight dozens of Uruk-hai, melting in and out of Wraith-form, delivering kicks, thrusts, and magnificent-looking counters. I can then dive to the side, see the incoming reinforcements of axe-wielding berserkers charging towards me....

There is no guarantee that you’ll succeed. Oxygen Not Included is a disaster simulator at heart. You begin a game trapped inexplicably in the centre of an asteroid, flush with building materials, precious metals, and exploitable resources, but very much lacking in food and oxygen. Armed with nothing more than the ability to command your three extremely loyal but foolish starting clones (called dupes) to do your bidding, you must quickly explore and expand outwards, ensuring that your lowly dupes (and all future dupes that you print out with your central printing pod) have everything they need in order to survive....

Phoenix Point is a turn-based tactics game designed by Julian Gollop, creator of the original X-COM - and it shows. Designed to be a sort of spiritual successor to the original X-COM and an alternative to Firaxis’ XCOM reboot, Phoenix Point brings many of the same narratological and mechanical beats: an alien-esque threat is hellbent on taking over the world, and you must build up your base(s) and squad(s) and embark on turn-based missions to thwart your enemy and hopefully keep up with their escalating power....

Developers Serious Sim are calling Heading Out a “narrative-driven racing experience,” inspired by the likes of Vanishing Point and Thelma & Louise. You’ll start each playthrough by answering questions about your vigilante driver and why they’re on the run. That’ll influence what kind of radio chatter you hear as you drive along, because apparently your antics are all over the airwaves. There’s a lot of both—dangerous driving and radio commentary—down here in its announcement trailer....

Enter Hellish Quart, out in early access today. It’s Bushid-ish - there are swords, there are duels, and there are one-slash kills - but it goes a step further by having all your movements be physics-based. The game’s Steam page says that its developers intend for the game to be in early access for one to two years. Aside from taking onboard player feedback, they’re going to be using that time to develop a full singleplayer campaign....

“Tesla once reached out to ask to put her story in a car. I asked how much they would pay for the license and to cover the engineering work,” Barlow tweeted. “They suggested zero, that I consider the exposure I would get.” The dev followed up with another tweet that described Tesla’s suggestion as “one of the sillier ideas I’ve heard”. Comments ranged from the expected and pretty valid criticism of rich people not spending their money to others who’d actually discovered games such as Stardew Valley through their Tesla....

Seriously, watch this speedrunner take multiple attempts at Hitman 3’s Dubai level which calls for two target assassinations. This attempt uses an alternate start for the mission where Agent 47 is already decked out in a pretty advantageous disguise. He can leave the staff area he starts out in, run down a hallway, and use a silenced pistol to snipe one target off a balcony while just out of view of any guards....

We here at RPS are looking at HZD from several angles, so while Nate is down in the wordmines right this second, and hardware editor Katharine puts together more excellent hardware and performance focused analysis, myself and Matthew are here to bring you a delicious video review. The adventures of future post-apocalypse warrior Aloy are a sight to behold on PC. In fact, I’d go so far as to say this is probably the best version of Horizon Zero Dawn you can get your paws on....

In this guide, we’ll explain how to do the griddy in FIFA 23, so that you can torment your opponents with the most popular celebration around. To do the griddy, you must score a goal and then hold down R2/RT and flick the right stick up twice. This will make your player automatically hit the griddy in FIFA 23, which is apparently what the kids say, and show your player dancing across the pitch in celebration....