The post “I have always worried about the livelihood of Tier 2″: 2026 World Star Challengers Invitational gives hope and opportunity to struggling Tier 2 ecosystem appeared first on Esports Insider.

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After some rumours, Metroid Ravenous has now been officially confirmed by Nintendo during the latest Direct broadcast.

It’s launching for the Switch 2 on 28th January 2027, with pre-orders now live on the eShop. Alongside this, the game’s estimated file size has also been revealed. According to Nintendo, it will require 20.2GB of space to install.

In comparison, MercurySteam’s 2021 Nintendo Switch title Metroid Dread requires 4.2GB of space. Samus’ more recent release Metroid Prime 4 Beyond requires 27.6GB of space on the Switch 2.

In Metroid Ravenous, you’ll once again take control of the renowned bounty hunter, as you hunt down powerful bosses, and use Samus’ newly awakened Metroid instincts to devour foes. Nintendo has also confirmed there’ll be amiibo support.

If you haven’t already seen it, Nintendo has revealed the box art and price of Metroid Ravenous for Switch 2. You can find out more in our previous story:

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Capcom has shared the first trailer for Monster Hunter Wilds: Ascendance, the big expansion for the latest entry in their hit monster battling series.

The expansion will launch in 2027 with the appearance of a giant dragon transforming the Forbidden Lands in both the land and the sky, with strange new inky creatures emerging and more.

The Forbidden Land is now being bedevilled by the Elder Dragon Lao-Shan Lung, who emerges with devastating effect on the Madoi Stronghold. As the Expedition Team tries to build their fortress, the skies above Wyveria reveal the Skybound Eyrie, which floats high up in the sky with ancient ruins and its own particular creatures.

These creatures include the pack hunting Araketa, which can create air currents from its wings and coordinate attacks. The trailer also revealed the brand new Elder Dragon Gundoraja, with a snake-like look as it swims through the skies.

Hunters will have some new tricks, including the Boost Bracer equipment, which can introduce new attacks, combos and movements, and the expansion will also bring more abilities for every weapon type

While it has a rough reputation on PC, Monster Hunter Wilds is a fantastic experience on console. In our review, we said, “Monster Hunter Wilds is the best Monster Hunter game we’ve ever had. The best storyline, the best visuals, and changes to the combat that revolutionise the way the game plays. That said, striving for the widest audience yet has dulled some of the series difficulty, and you may have to wait for the toughest parts of Wilds to fully reveal themselves.”

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I am a baby, floating through space. A decade or so passes while I’m frozen in a pod, dead to the world. Clearly, though, all is not as it seems. Upon finally being rescued and thawed out, I’m given grave news.

I’ve been diagnosed with consumerism.

You WHAT? I’ve only been alive in The Outer Worlds 2 for ten non-frozen minutes and in that time have bought exactly two items from a single vending machine. Sorry, it’s consumerism, the popup box of flawed doomsaying reiterates. Promotions and sales have riddled your brain. I laugh in disbelief for about an hour. Then, I hastily cobble together a headcanon about having spent all of my time adrift in the cosmos on the phone trying to order a talkie toaster advertised somewhere inside my coasting coffin.

Having accepted the flaw – one of several permanent negative effects you’re offered throughout the game – I was prepared for a playthrough in which the renegade gunslinger I’d set out to play was forced to reckon with her acquisition-related affliction, a battle to wrench out the corporate hooks which had dug into her otherwise cynical and money-savvy personality. The reality was that I could buy items slightly more cheaply, sell for slightly less, and was given the sort of generically dumb new dialogue options you usually get if you opt for a straight-up low intelligence Fallout: New Vegas playthrough. Rarely have any of these quips really been relevant to an addiction to buying stuff. Instead, being a confessed consumer has seemed to render me just plain stupid in The Outer Worlds 2’s eyes.

That perplexing quirk is among a few disappointments Obsidian’s latest RPG has served up in what’s otherwise been a fun time gallivanting around Arcadia. The Outer Worlds 2, much like its predecessor, pitches itself as a Saturday morning cartoon. It’s an enjoyable Saturday morning cartoon, with vibrant visuals helping its galaxy feel full of life, a regular stream of gags and ironic humour flowing at the same rate as any serious chatter, and fights which generally pack a punchy flow aided by an arsenal of armaments that are as satisfying to use as the game boasts they are at one point.

In the first of a series of broad similarities to Avowed, the fantasy RPG Obsidian put out earlier this year, The Outer Worlds 2 casts you as an Earth Directorate agent. As with the Aedyran Envoy, you’re a morally grey representative of a faraway faction, sent to sort out some shit on the other side of the galaxy, and given just about enough rope that you can make any number of roleplaying choices without having to consider why your bosses aren’t on the phone demanding an explanation. The world’s divided up into decently chunky hub areas on different planets that you progress between, each boasting a couple of factions clawing for control. The colourful artistic choices are where the thing really sings. It never falls into the black hole of visual blandness that a more NASA-pilled space adventure (cough, Starfield) might be sucked up by.

Avowed isn’t really the comparison Obsidian have embraced when hyping up The Outer Worlds 2, though. From what I’ve seen while trying to avoid ads featuring a man I’m sure is very funny appropriating my first name and proceeding to read some lines which aren’t that funny, the major talking point is Fallout: New Vegas. I’m close to as big a New Vegas advocate as you’ll get, and I liked the first Outer Worlds, but I’m not sold that its sequel fills those very big and beloved cowboy boots.

That said, I think a lot of this is down to New Vegas and the Outer Worlds 2 simply being games with contrasting outlooks and modus operandi. The latter’s three main factions offer more in the way of contrasting worldviews than the first Outer Worlds and are openly at war with each other, but their conflict ultimately serves as the biggest subplot to the game’s insistence that you save the world from a sciencey existential threat. The corpo-types of Auntie Cleo and Spacer’s Choice have merged together via hostile takeover into Auntie’s Choice, who wander around chattering about profits and committing cartoonishly Scrooge McDucky crimes.

The Protectorate are the opposite side of the coin, an authoritarian collectivist monarchy who control their citizens’ lives with an iron fist and buckets of Orwellian propagandising. Doing sums somewhere in the middle are The Order, determinist nerds who believe the universe runs to an equation, a doctrine which occasionally leads to some maths extremism from those who get a bit too excited about enforcing the numbers. Lurking on the fringes are a couple of minor groups who help flesh things out a bit, in the form of shady smuggler-types Sub Rosa and a science anomaly obsessed band of cultists dubbed the Glorious Dawn. Only Auntie’s Choice, The Order, and Sub Rosa get the full reputation meter treatment. The Protectorate’s exclusion from that puzzled me, until it became apparent that shooting up their facilities was going to be an unavoidable part of the main quest, with the game content to lean on them as generic baddies whenever it needs some to stand in the way of you pushing an important button.

As a result, they feel rather one-dimensional despite attempts to flesh them out and chip some cracks into the dogmatic face they project. That leaves the corporates and the nerds as your only options to side with in the main quest, with a third way of sorts being offered in brokering an alliance between them. You can kind of go the independent route by simply ignoring or refusing both, but there’s not a proper questline around doing so. Both have a bit of interesting backstory to them if you care to roam their fiefdoms in search of side quests, especially Auntie, but I’d like to have seen a bit deeper examination of their doctrines to go with the bit of chat about how they got here.

There’s some discussion along the lines of ‘we do this because of the X’ if you pry, but none of the leaders I’ve dealt with in-depth seem likely to whip out their own specific interpretation of a certain philosophy, and convincingly outline how they see themselves as applying it to the game’s world. I don’t think every video game talking head necessarily needs to be able to pull an essay on Hegelian dialectics out of their bum to be compelling, much as I love Caesar, but the majority of those running The Outer Worlds’ factions struggle to feel like talismanic figures putting a memorably specific stamp on Arcadia.

As with the first game, there’s commentary to be had in terms of those running the world being out of their depth or uncaringly laissez faire, but the New Vegas formula runs on strong, visible characters whose shadows loom large over the Mojave’s sands. That element becomes even more important when the war they’re fighting is stretched across multiple planets, leading to a tougher task getting across the gritty, knife-edge tension of a boiling pot world which could erupt at any time. I’ve also found the factions who do have reputation meters rather difficult to piss off through quest choices, outside of outright reneging on an agreement with them in the endgame.

Mass murdering their members and stealing can also do the trick, but even that seems to have a relatively high forgiveness threshold. At one point I added a kleptomania flaw to a list of quirks that ended up about 16 long by the time the credits rolled. As of writing, it’s auto-nicked about an entire city worth of junk out in the open while I’ve been running around in towns. Only once has that resulted in bounty-inducing mass aggro, which runs a bit counter to the flaw notification’s stern warning that I’d be kissing goodbye to stress-free safe space wandering.

Generally speaking, I’ve got a lot of time for the Outer Worlds’ flaw system, especially now each one comes with built-in pluses and minuses rather than just awarding a perk point. They’re nice optional twists mid-playthrough that can push you to switch up how you play when their execution matches the sales pitch, as is the case with the likes of the foot-in-mouth syndrome which adds a timer to dialogue choices as a punishment for skipping through chatter. The one which forces you to put most of the bits you earn straight into a savings account, which gradually pays out as you level up, is also great, since it helps limit your ability to just buy everything right away once you get towards the mid to endgame.

The cast of companions, while a bit openly formulaic in terms of being a six person gang neatly split into pairs of healers, ranged shooters, and melee brawlers, are likeable and have some fun quests that allow you a bit of influence over their personalities. Stern Protectorate Judge Dredd Tristan and recovering corporate soldier-drone Inez’s missions stand out in terms of that last part, with the rest lagging a bit behind, even if they’ve all got some nice jokes to pepper lulls in the action. While your ship does gradually fill up with keepsakes from your travels, I’ve found myself spending very little time just chilling on-board with my crew. Outside of missions, they don’t seem to have much to say aside from the usual ‘give your quick take on how the story’s playing out’ or ‘say whether you like one of the other companions’.

While you can tinker with gear or unlock lockboxes, there aren’t any activities that can set up camp chats or even instances of companions getting up to interesting stuff you can join in on. Far from a dealbreaker, but something that would have been cool. Then again, they’re probably just avoiding listening to me moan about the locking of extra weapon quick-switch holster and healing primer slots to gear mods. It’s a bit of a ballache, especially given the limited slots most gear has in comparison to the number of tweaks you can install. Sure, it forces you to pick and choose rather than equipping everything and achieving instant godhood, hand in hand with the levelling system, but is standing in the way of me adding a melee swatter to my regular rotation of normal gun/energy gun unless I ditch a more interesting ability really contributing much to the roleplaying?

Honestly, most of the gripes I’ve had with the Outer Worlds 2 are along those lines. Things that don’t necessarily impede your enjoyment of the thing, so long as you’re willing to embrace the elements it does well as an incremental embiggening of its predecessor, but do stop it waltzing over the threshold from plain and inoffensive good to great. When it’s sticking to its strengths and serving you wittily-composed Order radio tunes about Fibonacci number sequences, it’s a fun romp I’d have no issues recommending a mate pick up or give a go on Game Pass, were they inclined to use the service given its current baggage.

Meanwhile, if you float into Arcadia expecting something as deeply crafted and eminently memorable as New Vegas, or even Obsidian’s medieval murder mystery Pentiment, I’d say the experience falls short of those very lofty marks. Or, as The Outer Worlds 2 seems to think my advertising-addled brain would put it: me like Other Words too, but no new New Vargas.

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It’s another one of those layoff days, unfortunately. This time the studio in question is PowerWash Simulator developer FuturLab, who have laid off seven staff members with little fanfare after cancelling a project that has been in development for several years.

This comes from This Week In Videogames, whose sources told them that FutureLab CEO Kirsty Rigden announced this unrevealed project had been cancelled back in June, 2026, with work having started on it two to three years ago. A source even noted that those working on the project were “left hanging with no new work being assigned to them for weeks.” Another source alleged that “managers and team leads were not informed that their direct reports were going to be away or why,” and that the laid off staffers stopped coming to work without telling co-workers.

During a company meeting held last month, the developer’s COO Chris Mehers told the studio that it would be going through a redundancy process. Quite gallingly, during a following meeting, staff were told they shouldn’t use the word “redundancy” in regards to laid off workers, but to refer to them as “the leavers” instead. Staff were also told in the August meeting that the layoffs were related only to the cancelled project, and any redundancies would not affect work on PowerWash Simulator 2.

On top of this, staff were informed that managers and team leads were “not included in choosing the affected individuals to not give them any of the guilt,” and that these layoffs were handled in this fashion so that staff wouldn’t have to endure “the stress of not knowing their job security for the two weeks of the process.” In a statement, Rigden did confirm that FuturLab “recently cancelled a new non-PowerWash related project while in pre-production, as it would have cost us more than it was projected to make. Continuing with it wouldn’t have been a sensible decision.”

The statement continued to say the studio is “fully committed to making [PowerWash Simulator 2] the best game it can be, while prototyping new ideas for future games, [and] this has meant looking at our future plans and requirements for the studio, and as a result seven people have left the business. This is awful as these are people who are super talented and many of whom have been with us a long time, and I really really appreciate them. This was not an easy or quick decision to make, but by making difficult decisions early we protect FuturLab in the future.” FuturLab did not confirm whether staff were made redundant or if they left by other means.

As always, solidarity with all those affected.

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When thinking about games from the PS3 and Xbox 360 era in dire need of a remaster, The Lord of the Rings: War in the North wasn’t exactly at the top of our list. When Warner Bros. originally launched its licensed action RPG back in 2011, not only was it met with mostly middling reviews from critics, it also had to contend with one of the most influential video games of all-time – The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.

For the glow-up brigade over at Aspyr to shadow drop an enhanced “Legacy Edition” of War in the North for modern systems seems like such a strange choice. However, upon journeying back to this corner of Middle-earth after so many years, I was surprised to discover just how much I enjoyed playing this massively underrated dungeon crawler.

This is mainly thanks to a number of major overhauls, the most significant being the addition of a character-swap feature. For those who didn’t play the original game, The Lord of the Rings: War in the North is a co-op focused RPG that casts players as a human ranger, dwarf warrior, or eleven loremaster, working together to hack and slash through a gauntlet of Sauron’s minions. Each character fills a specific combat role within the party though you can create some overlap depending on which abilities you unlock and how you spend attribute points upon levelling up. In essence, Farin (the dwarf) is a tanky melee fighter who draws the attention of enemy mobs while Eradan (the ranger) excels in stealth and ranged ambushes with Andriel (the elf) on hand to cast support spells.

Being able to seamlessly switch between the three feels like a pretty fundamental feature missing from the original release. Warner Bros. and developer Snowblind Studios were clearly banking on players teaming up online or via local splitscreen without giving a second thought to those solo adventurers. Apsyr’s new Legacy Edition fixes this while also making co-op more accessible, through the introduction of online crossplay and enabling local co-op on PC for the first time.

It really is a shame that War in the North got completely eclipsed by Skyrim. While the latter is unquestionably more ambitious and influential, Snowblind Studios had made a genuine effort to modernise the simple yet addictive dungeon crawler formula it had been honing for years – they previously developed Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance as well as Champions of Norrath and its sequel, Return to Arms. Plenty of that DNA is still here with plenty of hacking, slashing, and sifting through hoards of loot, though they switched from a top-down perspective to a more cinematic third person camera. If memory serves, War in the North was also one of the first RPGs to fuse button-bashing melee with shooter-style gameplay, allowing you to switch between close and long range attacks similar to most modern games like God of War, Spider-Man, or Horizon.

That’s not to say the combat is super deep or diverse. Each level meanders in different ways though they all follow a similar blueprint: leading the party from one scenic vista to the next while occasionally pulling levers to spawn enemy mobs that come in various configurations. As you progress, characters learn a slew of active and passive skills that help mix things up though, for the most part, you’ll be chaining light attacks, blocks, and dodges, waiting for yellow icons to appear above enemies’ heads to signal they’re ripe for a finisher.

The Lord of the Rings: War in the North isn’t a cakewalk, occasionally presenting chokepoints that are teeming with tougher foes that can quickly wipe out your whole squad in a matter of seconds. The game rewards the careful timing of powers as well as knowing when to conserve ammunition and mana. It also rewards players who love to optimise their gear, whether combining particular armour sets or smartly slotting the correct gem in the perfect item slot. This is made easier thanks to the Legacy Edition’s improved menus.

It may be a remaster with 4K visuals and a boosted framerate, but there’s still something very 2011 about the way this game looks with a mostly brown and grey colour palette. While set in the same universe as Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings movie trilogy, it’s more frequent in its use of gore with plenty of blood splatters and chopped limbs during combat scenarios. It also features a whole host of familiar characters and while War in the North’s cast of voice actors aren’t able to perfectly emulate their on-screen counterparts, this isn’t something that bothers me as much all these years later. In case you needed another reminder that this game came out in 2011, Nolan North lends his unmistaken vocals to one of the main characters.

Overall, I’m surprised by just how much I’ve enjoyed my time with Legacy Edition – no doubt fuelled by an unearthed nostalgia for old-school hack n’ slash dungeon crawlers. There’s also a nostalgia there for the films and while War in the North isn’t canon, it folds in plenty of lore plucked from elsewhere in Tolkien’s Middle-earth. I had absolutely no plans to ever replay this game yet, thanks to Aspyr’s smart retooling and refining, I now can’t see myself putting it down before I see the credits roll.

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The big open world hit from earlier this year is about to get even bigger, as Crimson Desert: Charting the Unknown DLC will launch on 15th October.

Already with months of massive updates under their belts, Pearl Abyss is prepping even bigger game-changing additions for this Charting the Unknown DLC. New mechanical beasts and machines will seemingly be roaming the world, so Kliff will have to face off against oversized laser-beaming bots, but those who prefer an easier time of it can sink hours and hours into building your own personal mansion. How lovely!

Here’s the trailer blurb:

The story of Pywel continues in Crimson Desert: Charting the Unknown as Kliff, Oongka, and Damiane set out to discover their purpose and shape their futures. However, as turmoil unfolds around them, each must fight to forge a path through the trials ahead. Join them on a new adventure and discover what new possibilities await across Pywel.

We belatedly wrapped up our review of Crimson Desert in June, with Gamoc saying, “Crimson Desert is unique in the gaming landscape. A vast single player game that’s shaped by its original vision to be an MMO, it’s gigantic and packed full of interesting places, but its story is incredibly rough and delivered awkwardly at best. Combat is excellent, but the bosses are mostly awful. There is always a negative side to the game’s positives, but I feel those positives outshine them anyway. I wouldn’t recommend it to just anyone, but the right person will lose themselves in Crimson Desert.”

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Europa Universalis 5 is a forever game. Insofar as you might be able to play this grand historical strategy forever, but also because – my god – it takes forever to play. After a mere 45 hours of conniving, trading, battling, and scratching my head at menus, I have just about scraped my way through 150 years of Neapolitan history. I have yet to come across a single pizza with buffalo mozzarella on it, but there are approximately 250 years left to find one. This is the blessing and curse of a typically dense playthrough of Europa Universalis. Paradox’s trademark blend of intricate geopolitical clockwork, hands-tied confusion, and “one more year” compulsion is all here. You just need to set aside a few centuries to enjoy it.

For anyone who’s never indulged in these hypercolonial map scramblers, Europa Universalis 5 is a grand strategy where you pilot a nation through the ages, starting in the year 1337. I picked Naples – one of the recommended starter countries – but you could just as easily puppet the Shogunate of Japan, the Ottoman Empire, Zimbabwe, China, Dehli, or one of dozens of Mayan nations. Each country has its intricacies and quirks. If, say, Naples loses all its land to hungry neighbours, that’s game over. But other countries like the Golden Horde are “army-based”, and can only be destroyed if their military is wiped out. Islamic countries do not buy or sell alcohol. Irish tribes raise 10% more cows, presumably because there would be nothing to raid if they did not.

Your goal is simply to keep your country going. You may naturally want to expand your nation’s borders and gobble up smaller countries. That’s what war is for, and it has its own tempo, full of little toy men to move around on the map and battles to watch with an expression of mild concern as your 30,000 peasants are steadily butchered on a Sicilian mountain by Moroccan men-at-arms. Raising and moving troops is not hard to figure out, but the precise rules of battle can be tough to discern, buried as they are in heaps of stats and diagrams and tiny buttons that do important things. I have the benefit of years of Paradox strategy games, and even I do not fully comprehend exactly how victors are determined in these fights. I usually just make sure I have more troops than my foe, alongside a few of the shiniest new units from the tech tree.

In any case, I find rampant militarism one of the least interesting styles of playing the sim, even if it helps colour the map my specific shade of Italian blue. More inviting are home affairs. I proudly built roads across my entire country (it helps with trade and tax collecting) and made my capital city a book-printing, fabric-weaving powerhouse by building lots of dye factories, scriptoriums, and the like. The people who would come to love me most are the burghers: the growing population of city-dwelling merchants who love a bargain. Unfortunately, they’re not the only ones I need to please.

I’m talking about the “estates”. This is the game’s big balancing act, and anyone who’s played the Tinder-like kingdom management game Reigns will be instinctively familiar with the idea. There are five groups with power: the crown (that’s you), the nobility, the clergy, the burghers, and the commoners. Each estate has a little meter at the top of the screen at all times, showing their satisfaction level. If any meter gets too low, rebels will start to gather unseen in your country.

This is where the game’s many pop-up events come in, allowing you to side with one estate over another. The clergy don’t like this fancy new “university” idea, but the burgers love it – what do you do? The commoners want a holiday but the nobles think they ought to work harder – who do you favour? These meters will shift from red to green and back again as you try to balance out public opinion.

Sometimes you’ll grant a group special privileges, just to get them to shut up. For instance, I gave the nobles unreserved leadership of the navy (rich people love boats) and I granted the commoners their own representatives in parliament (poor people love universal suffrage). But each privilege granted gives more power to that group, and revoking these fancy rights is horrendously difficult by design. You can do it, but your country will be instantly destabilised. You could have a civil war by the end of the year.

It’s just one of the new plates to spin in this rich circus of history. I haven’t mentioned all the trade outposts I’ve seeded in other countries, or the sneaky way I’m annexing half of Greece, or how I’m pushing this new-fangled idea called “literacy” to the masses (it ramps up your research speed). The benefit of a historical sim of such terrifying scope is that you have access to an intense ahistorical anecdote generator, something you could probably play for the rest of your natural life. The trade-off is that you must face down an intimidating cavalcade of menus and buttons and keywords highlighted in bold.

It’s like waking up in front of a submarine’s control panel: an exciting and paralysing array of buttons to push, not always tidily arranged. You can study the manual closely (it has a sometimes-patchy encyclopedia of hints, and tooltips appear when you hover over a keyword). Or you can just dive in and start pulling levers until something expensive breaks. Either way, it can be an overwhelming start, even with the text-heavy tutorials doing their best to guide you.

This tutorial tries to quickly cover as many gritty systems as possible. Here’s the finance screen! Here’s how to build roads! Here are the different map modes! It seems to constantly say: “Oh, just one more thing” because, good heavens, there is always one more thing. This is a giant, intense sim, more granular than finely ground espresso and ten times as overstimulating. It might take days just to get familiar with its maddeningly labyrinthine user interface, although for seasoned EUIV veterans, much will be familiar.

The game’s language sometimes doesn’t help. A foreign country has an “opinion” of you, but also a “trust” level and a little currency called “favours”. All of these differ in minute ways but they all contribute to the same thing – your relationship with a foreign power. Many keywords are nearly synonymous. A “rival” is not quite the same as an “enemy”. One tab is called “diplomacy” and another “geopolitics” (the latter might have been more accurately titled “colonialism” – but we’ll get to that). The only way to learn the intended meaning of the designers is to painstakingly hover over the tooltips, as whole minutes of the game are spent frozen, a brow-furrowed expression of pure conceptualisation on your face. What is the difference between “food” and “food raw materials”?

I’m not going to explain all that. Partly because I already did and partly because it’s kinda dull to read about. Why spend time explaining the overelaborate markets menu, or telling you how the research tree is split into six distinct “ages” when I can instead tell you about the time 1.1 million people in my country died from the bubonic plague. It swept through the nation like a fart in a lift: immediately noticeable. The population numbers dropped massively. Events triggered every month or so, in which I had to make finicky decisions over who to infuriate and who to simply disappoint.

It was one of the first big dramatic changes to my nation. And yet, it remains a machine-like tale. I do not so much get the sense that a million people have perished. I get the sense that a big invisible hand has come along and shoved my numbers into a meat grinder to make the simulation a little more spicy. This is fine – EUV is a machine. But this was also the moment when I knew it would not supplant my beloved Crusader Kings 3, which is more focused on humanity and the characters of history, as opposed to the drier graphs and charts of history. Crusader Kings is for history graduates who watch Vikings and have a subscription to Ancestry.com. Europa Universalis is for statisticians who read books on military history and have watched every episode of Map Men. (I’m sure some of you freaks fit both descriptions.)

Here, a dry inaccessibility is aided by new “automation” gizmos. Basically, you can hand over whole systems to the computer. Don’t want to manage all the goods in your kingdom? Click a little cogwheel to automate those. Don’t fancy having to manage taxes? Fork it over to the blessed machine. You can cognitively offload the hiring of admirals, the construction of buildings, the next items on the research tree – almost everything – to the AI.

But such automation is a double-edged halberd. There are moments when something under the hood suddenly slurps 50 proto-euros from the treasury, and you’ll have no idea why. I wanted to build an Entrepôt in my capital (a big market dock for all my scumbag businessgoons). It cost 320 ducats. But every time my income neared 300, a chunk of change would disappear, the game’s gremlins deciding I don’t need all that surplus cash. I have no idea what caused this or where the money went. It stopped when I temporarily de-automated trade and production methods.

The automated navy and army commands are not always reliable either. More than once I ordered my forces to “hunt enemy navies” or “blockade ports” or focus on sieges, only to see them idle around doing nothing, even as defeatable enemies sauntered by or castles sat unconquered. The computer probably has some internal reasoning for this, but damned if I can figure it out. After that, I just clicked armies around by myself. Artificial intelligence once again bested by a single human finger.

All these overlapping systems and sneaky auto-tweaks and baroque menus create an intriguing monster. When the game is understandable, it is hugely gratifying. But it also feels a bit “you cannot press this button until you press that other button”. And that other button is obscured in a warren of menus you must spend nights coming to understand. It’s a hugely deep pool of wonderful tricks to get lost in, but a pool still sweaty from all the confused forum posters who dived in before you.

For example, France is forcing countless other nations to embargo me. For the longest time, I had no idea how they were doing that, what to do to alleviate it, nor exactly what effect it was having on my trade income and economy. There’s so much going on underneath this hood, and much is not cogently explained within the game itself. This process of coming to learn how to tackle your nation’s problems is itself part of the charm, but it nonetheless demands patience and time – two things you may not have in abundance.

You will also learn a lot of history. Yet just like my history class from an angry priest in an Irish Catholic boy’s school, certain political narratives come baked into the lesson. For instance, when you hover over a province in Africa during the “Age of Discovery”, looking for foreign shores to send your exploration ships, a tooltip will read: “This province is not owned by any country”. The 26,000 tribespeople who live in the Kru province are not a “nation” as the game (and perhaps some historians) would define it. They do not “own” that land, the game therefore decides. Which is a debatable technicality of language exploited to ensure the feature about planting colonies works like it’s supposed to. This is intentional. Europa Universalis 5 is all about managing a kingdom during centuries of often brutal and inhumane policies. You can build slave centers, you can commission conquistadors, you can establish missionaries, you set government policies that see people suffer.

You can opt to play as a non-expansionist power, of course. But I find that building an empire is very much the meat of this simulation, and since empires are built to extract riches from the periphery and pull them to the centre at the expense of those conquered, this is generally what the game is all about. I don’t say this in a fit of judgement – it is how history actually passed, and developers shouldn’t be afraid to build systems that simulate these things. I only mention it because players may want to know that EUV is determined to be blunt about the reality of these centuries. Colonialism happened, it seems to say, and this is how. You are not getting a sanitised version of history.

Neither are you getting a humanised version of it. Aside from intermittent pop-ups with flavour events about people you’ve often not met, Europa Universalis 5 still largely abstracts its horrors out to a numbers game, and in this sense its attitude to colonialism remains dressed in the dispassionate fabric of colourful maps and statistics. It is a top-down atlas of a world ready to carve up, and in this core respect it is mostly designed and expected to be played as a coloniser, even if other options are open. You have to be okay with roleplaying a jackass in a crown, is what I’m saying. Historical simulations can encourage thoughtfulness as much as they can reinforce sticky notions about our globe’s history. And Europa Universalis as a series at least has some experience in this regard. It’s a complex subject in a complex game. My 150 years on this earth have not granted me wisdom enough to address it.

But I can tell you that this is a moreish, deep, and long-lasting piece of work. My biggest complaint is that it could offer better instruction. Stellaris and Crusader Kings 3 have, for my ducats, been the most approachable Paradox strategy games for newcomers. Aside from not being so dry, their tutorials do decent jobs of introducing you bit-by-bit to the bitty machinery of ruling dynasties and star systems. Europa Universalis 5 has a more complicated task. The ambition of its simulation is so vast that it’s hard to simplify and teach. The common advice is to bathe in that sense of overwhelm and learn to accept disaster and confusion as part of the fun. Everyone in Sweden will die because of a button you forgot to press twenty years ago. And that’s fine. Italian kings do it all the time.

Part of me yearned to finish this playthrough before giving my final verdict, but considering it took Naples a full century just to discover there is a “south” of the globe (omg), I’ll just tell you now: it’s confusing as heck and I like it. Even though I’m playing at the second-fastest speed with judicious pausing, I would likely need to play for another 40-50 hours to make it through the full span of history. This statement is both horrifying and exciting – a game that disrespects my time? Disrespect me more, my huge messy map monster.

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“Low-poly dogs!” I hear you chant in the distance. “Low-poly dogs!” The war cry gets louder. “Low-poly dogs!” It’s inescapable now, the low-poly dogs requested by the masses are here… Or, well, in the digital world of Old School RuneScape at the very least, as Jagex have added in a new members-only quest that allows you to pick up your very own puppy.

This new quest is on the nosely called A Ruff Situation, whereby you must help characters Talia and Chase at the Ice Mountain’s new dog shelter. What you actually need to do in this quest, I can’t tell you, but I can tell you that you only need to be level 15 in crafting, so the devs are “expecting everyone to have this quest sorted on day one, capiche?” After sorting out the issues at the dog shelter, you’ll then be able to adopt a dog of your own!

“Your puppy will gradually grow into a fully-fledged dog as you care for it,” a blog post explains. “Unlike kittens, they won’t run away if you forget to feed them, so you can simply stop feeding them to keep them in puppy form. Note that they will run away if you’re killed by another player in the Wilderness with your dog by your side, so bring them to the Wilderness at your own risk. Please don’t replicate that in real life, though. Once fully grown, dogs will be able to help you while you’re out clue hunting by digging for Treasure Trail steps, saving you the trouble of carrying a spade.”

There are 12 different breeds you can adopt, which are as follows: chihuahua, collie, corgi, greyhound, husky, labrador, pug, samoyed, spaniel, bernese, shiba and yorkie. I find the inclusion of the pub and shiba quite amusing in particular, given that these breeds of dogs were nowhere near as popular as they are now compared to when the MMO came out. Seeing a RuneScape style shiba certainly makes me feel like I’ve shifted into another plane of existence.

Also, there’s a new crab quest where after reaching level 40 sailing and 30 fishing, you can drink a mysterious bottle on Dognose Island, which may let you talk to crabs. Cool! Never change, RuneScape.

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