Robin Bea

The Nintendo Switch is finally getting an official Joy-Con charging dock, just seven short years after release. Here's what the accessory might tell us about the Switch 2.

After teasing a new Overwatch 2 hero unofficially known as Space Ranger, Blizzard has revealed the true identity of the game’s latest character — an adorable little astronaut named Juno. The new support hero will be joining Overwatch 2 for good at the start of Season 12 on August 20, but players will have their first chance to try out her new kit this weekend, during a trial period running from July 19 to 21.

Cooking is an integral part of a lot of games, whether you’re wolfing down soup to keep awake in Stardew Valley or creating a dish so awful it’s censored out in Breath of the Wild. But in most games, cooking just means mixing a few options in a menu to give yourself a quick boost. Magical Delicacy — now on Xbox Game Pass — is the rare game that acknowledges that cooking can be a joyful activity on its own, and something that’s best shared with others.

Warframe is one of the most fascinating live service games, having spent a decade constantly reinventing itself. Heaps of updates and expansions have added an ongoing story and total reworks of the game over the years, but none has made me so eager to finally take the plunge into its robot-filled playground as Warframe: 1999, an upcoming Y2K-themed expansion that brings boy bands, shopping malls, and flirting over AIM to the sci-fi shooter.

With Dragon Age: Veilguard heading for release later in 2024, BioWare is ramping up the speed at which it shows off the upcoming game. After years of near silence on Veilguard, we got a gameplay trailer with a slew of additional details last month, including our first look at some of the game’s cast. Now we know who will be playing the leads of Veilguard, including a few familiar names that Dragon Age fans are already getting excited about.

Photography has the power to preserve the most important moments of your life, or make the past look better than it really was. Just think of a candid snapshot taken during a joyful party, compared to a smiling vacation photo taken in the midst of a miserable vacation. The Star Named Eos is a new puzzle game that explores those contradictory roles photography can hold in our lives, but fails to develop any deeper meaning.

Last year’s Armored Core VI gave mech fans a taste of lightning-fast action with the satisfying difficulty that only From Software can deliver. But that’s not all there is to mech games. There’s just something about giant fighting machines that lends them so well to turn-based tactics. Maybe it’s the lumbering gait of a mech, the strategic precision of kitting a frame out with weapons, or the sheer destructive force that takes a full battlefield to truly convey — whatever the reason, mechs just feel right at home in tactics games. A free new game on Steam is the perfect example of my point, melding an old-school presentation with dense tactical combat so well it’s a must-play for fans of early Front Mission games.

Nintendo makes a strong but halting step toward cleaning up the competitive scene.

The release of the long-awaited Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl is being pushed back yet again, but this time there’s something of a silver lining. Developer GSC Game World is soon to unveil a gameplay deep dive video giving players the closest look yet at the upcoming game. Stalker 2 ’s latest delay is also a fortunately brief one, pushing its release date from September 5 to November 20.

“What we’ve accomplished at World of Warcraft is just the beginning.”