The Banner Saga 1 & 2

Been Odin out for a decent Viking game on Xbox One? You’re about to be very Loki

The gods are dead… but the world still turns and continues to break. Humanity and their (sometimes) allies the Varl, great horned giants, have been left adrift to make their way through this time of hardship. Old enemies, the Dredge, have once again resurfaced to wage war on civilisation. You travel vast distances across beautiful landscapes reminiscent of the golden years of animation and the decisions you make along the way will have far-reaching implications.”

Lifeless Planet

It’s life, Jim, but not as we know it

Mankind has spent a notinconsiderable amount of time trying to locate Earthlike planets, but if sci-fi films, TV, books and games have taught us anything, it’s that there’s great value in the gazillions of empty, inhospitable ones, too. Not only are you far less likely to be kidnapped by General Zarblog or be eaten by ravenous space weevils, but you get to have a nice wander around an eerie, barren environment without worrying that you might be trespassing. There’s a lot of wandering in the aptly (or is it?) named Lifeless Planet, an adventure-y, platform-y, exploration-y game that touched down on PC last year. It’s also on its way to Xbox One, so we asked developer Stage 2 Studios what it’s all about.

25 things we learned from the Halo 5 beta

343 Industries’ month-long multiplayer taster is over, but we’ve still got its vivid flavours swirling around our mouths. Let us take you through 25 appetising facts we learned during our time on the Halo 5 beta…

After the online debacle that was Halo: The Master Chief Collection, the Halo 5: Guardians beta was precisely what the doctor ordered. The beta offered Master Chief Collection owners just under a month of access to kick the tyres of 343 Industries’ debut for Xbox One, and judge for themselves whether the studio’s plan to bring back that classic Halo feel might just work after all.

During that time, left no stone unturned in our effort to find the juiciest info-grubs around. Join us as we gorge on the finer details – good and bad – of Halo 5’s beta.

Epson EH-TW6600W

The LCD alternative to DLP dominance is still alive

Ignorance, they say, is bliss. We don’t know for sure about that, but just occasionally it can certainly come in handy for reviewing products. Like this new Epson projector for instance.

When we first fired it up, it looked pretty darn nice. Except the black levels weren’t quite what we’re used to with the latest DLP beamers. And that was when we remembered. Epsom only does LCD projectors. Ah. Of course. Had we known from the get-go, we’d have already been expecting mediocre black levels. And expectations can get in the way of objective assessments. But not here. We really did notice the black levels. Hold that thought.

BenQ W1070+

A budget beamer you can’t afford... to ignore

Not too long ago, a projector of any kind was a luxury most of us could ill afford. And even if we could afford it, we couldn’t really justify it. Not when the dingy beamers of yesteryear were so useless during the day and when anything even half cinematic in terms of image quality cost thousands. If that’s roughly where your thinking still is with projectors, may we suggest you take a quick look at the BenQ W1070+. It’ll throttle such misconceptions with the nearest HDMI cable to hand. It really is awfully impressive and utterly cinematic, especially for the money.

Corsair M65 RGB

I can shoot a rainbow, shoot a rainbow, shoot a rainbow toooo

What is the computer mouse missing? It already has buttons, wheels, lasers, optics, weights, pulleys, secret chambers for hiding priests and fluffy patches you can stroke to reduce blood pressure. The bespectacled, white-coated boffins at Corsair, however, think they’ve struck upon the answer. What the computer mouse needs now, more than anything, is colour!

That’s right, the thing hidden beneath your hand needs to be more colourful, to be a resplendent peacock advertising its virility in the hope other mice from across the district will come and mate with it. The M65 RGB claims to be able to display 16.8 million colours, which is presumably a rounded-up figure representing the 16,777,216 colours of the 24-bit RGB colour spectrum. The human eye, in comparison, can distinguish around 10 million colours.

Battlefield Hardline

The handcuffs are off as the cops-and-robbers shooter comes to Xbox – and we’ve gone hands-on with the beta

Balancing a game of cops and robbers can’t be easy – not with all those doughnuts those police officers keep stuffing down their throats, right guys? – which is one of the reasons why Battlefield Hardline’s release date slipped from last November to this March.

After gauging feedback from a multiplayer beta test on PC and PS4 last summer, the decision was made to delay the game so Visceral could make some further balancing tweaks. By the time you read this, the second (and hopefully final) multiplayer beta, which began 3 February, will be in full swing – and this time Xbox owners are invited to the party.

MSI 970 Gaming

Bargain-priced AMD 970 board anyone? Anyone?

You might think there’s as much point building a new motherboard based on the elderly AMD 970 chipset as there is making a new transmission for a Model T Ford. But there is some method to MSI’s madness. AMD has more or less given up on its FX range of CPUs, we can pretty much all agree, but it has gone and released some ‘new’ chips over the last six months.

We’re using the floating punctuation there because none of the latest procs are using AMD’s latest x86 CPU architecture, sticking instead with the old, inefficient Piledriver design. It did release the 9000 series processors however, with huge 220W TDPs and ambitious base and turbo clocks. Where this latest board makes sense though is with the lower powered E-series chips AMD also released late last year. The FX-8320E and FX-8370E are both 95W parts and that’s what MSI has designed its 970 Gaming to support.