The Xbox & Bethesda Games Showcase at E3 2021 was mostly about one thing: Xbox Game Pass. Microsoft said that 27 of the 30 titles mentioned during the event, including five upcoming games from Xbox Game Studios, will be released on the company's game subscription service. Four of those first-party titles were given release dates: Sea of Thieves: A Pirate's Life is set to debut on June 22, Psychonauts 2 is slated to launch on August 25, Age of Empires IV is expected to arrive on October 28, and Forza Horizon 5 is supposed to be released on November 9. Halo Infinite, meanwhile, was only given a release window of "Holiday 2021." Microsoft did say that Halo Infinite will offer free online multiplayer—a series first—at launch. The description for the game's multiplayer reveal trailer claims that "Halo Infinite's free-to-play multiplayer experience is dynamic, ever-evolving, and arrives later this year on Xbox and PC." The trailer itself showcased a ...

There are – currently – eight Yakuza games now on Xbox, with a ninth one on the way in the form of detective spin-off, Judgment. Having been released at some rate over the past 14 months, players have hardly had chance to breathe! Yakuza 6 though represents the ending to Kazuma Kiryu’s saga – a journey that started in Yakuza 0 and 1980s Japan. Whilst being one of the best games in the series, it is also one of Kiryu’s most personal. Yakuza 6's plot is immediately compelling, even if you're new to Kazuma Kiryu's punch-laden saga. After a three year stint in prison, he discovers that his adoptive daughter, Haruka, has gone missing. He returns to Kamurocho, only to find that she's been left in a coma after a hit-and-run. But there's one more bombshell: she's got a baby son called Haruto. In a state of confusion, he hoists Haruto into his arms and travels to the seaside city of Onomichi in search of answers. And it's this switch-up from the hustle and bustle of ...

 A healthy marriage is like the ultimate co-op game: You have to know when to give and take, when to push and pull, and when to talk and when to listen. But most importantly, you must always remember when it’s your turn to take the garbage out - something Hazelight Studios has certainly done during the development of the almost entirely garbage-free It Takes Two. This utterly superb co-op platformer manages to cram in enough unique and exhilarating gameplay ideas to give Shigeru Miyamoto a migraine, with not a single dud among them. Centering around a pair of pint-sized parents, May and Cody, It Takes Two is a bit like Honey, I Shrunk the Kids if the director had been tripping on LSD. The world around you isn’t merely supersized, but augmented with all manner of fabulous contraptions and anthropomorphic everything. May and Cody’s journey from their garden shed back to their house takes them on dazzling detours through everywhere from outer space to a tiny nightclub housed inside an...

  Outriders review – riders on the storm It’s really, really hard to figure out what Outriders is in its first few hours. A slow, lost world-style opening introduces you to the planet Enoch, humanity’s second chance after environmental collapse claims Earth, but after a devastating natural disaster you find yourself flung forward in time, imbued with superpowers, and plunged into a brutal civil war. Yep, humanity flew itself halfway across the universe to start from scratch and managed to devolve into a Mad Max-like dystopia in less than a century. While the last remaining enclaves of humanity duke it out for resources, it’s up to you and an expanding camp of allies to trek across Enoch and uncover the cause of the natural disaster that sent the colonisation effort spiralling out of control in the first place. I wasn’t expecting the main story to keep my attention for very long, but Outriders had me hooked for the duration of its 15-hour campaign. Your group’s search for answers ac...

 2018's Subnautica is not only the best survival game in existence, but one of the best games ever made regardless of genre. Its wondrous mix of exploration, storytelling, crafting, base building, and occasional trouser-shredding terror, all taking place in one of the most imaginative virtual worlds ever conceived, is up there with games like the Witcher 3 and Dishonored in terms of mastery of the craft. Subnautica: Below Zero is almost as good. I say that rather than "not as good", as I don't want to sound like I'm writing from a position of disappointment. In almost every way, Below Zero shares the wild imagination, adventurous spirit, and richly tactile systems of Subnautica, while there are several areas where it undoubtedly improves upon that first game. Nonetheless, Below Zero is a less consistently brilliant adventure. There are some areas where the game frustrates, and others where Unknown World's admirable efforts are less effective than they were fiv...

  Returnal is a hard game to pin down. On the one hand, it is very much a pastiche of existing game genres: Play one run and you will see how it very clearly draws elements from roguelikes, Souls-likes, metroidvanias, action-platformers, bullet hell shooters, and horror games. But while it borrows from all those genres, its unique flow ensures that its chaotic shooting galleries and creepy storytelling feel decidedly new. A shifting, but not jarring pace, an unpredictable narrative, tough-as-nails gameplay, and a constant sense of ambient terror--Returnal's many moving parts coalesce into a rare shooter that grabs you with its mechanics and its story and never lets go, seducing you with its challenges and a foreboding sense of dread every step of the way. When you start Returnal, interstellar scout Selene Vassos crash-lands on an alien planet, Atropos, which is broadcasting a mysterious signal. Stranded, Selene makes some startling discoveries on the planet, including the game...

There's nothing quite like Mudrunner for c ooling the blood, to paraphrase the classic Flanders and Swann number. There's something meditative about plunging a truck into brown soup, then spending ten minutes wiggling the left stick and attaching winches to trees in a gradual and patient attempt to free your wheels from the quagmire. It's a premise that would be considered ponderous or perverse by conventional game design standards, which hold that players should be swept along and kept busy at all times. But Mudrunner didn't come from conventional game design—it came from the mind of Pavel Zagrebelnyy.  Zagrebelnyy was born in St Petersburg, Russia, the world's northernmost metropolis. It was a grounding that would give him access to people, infrastructure, and ultimately work at an internationally known game studio. But it also gave the young Zagrebelnyy reams of strange, swampy countryside to explore. When he was at home, he played with toy trucks in his sandbox...