No, commuters of Bus Bound’s Steam Next Fest demo, I will not stop publicly transporting you to the scene of accidents

The bumper sticker plastered to the rear of the pickup in front of me reads ‘please let me merge before I start crying’. Behind me, an angry mob are starting to sharpen their pitchforks and light their torches. The next stop beckons, and I’m not going to make it on time. There’s nothing I can do. For I am Bus Bound in this Steam Next Fest demo, and that bus is too large to slice through gridlock like a hooligan.

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Everwild screenshots leak after Microsoft cancellation, and you’d seemingly have been a walking garden centre

Rare’s Everwild was one of a number of games Microsoft tossed in the bin as part of wider layoffs earlier this year. It was disappointing, if not a huge surprise given how protracted Everwild’s development had been up until its demise, with lots of questions remaining as to what the mysterious ramble through nature would be like to play.

Now, some leaked screenshots might offer a bit more of an idea as to some of the stuff you’d have been able to get up to in between patting various creatures and swinging a staff around.

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Borderlands 4’s first bounty pack DLC releases next month, followed by a free mutant tree fight

Someone ring up Slayer, because it’s going to raining blood in Borderlands 4 soon. That being the natural way to precede the arrival of the shooter‘s first paid DLC bounty pack next month and a free December update that’ll bring a weird tree fight to the endgame.

All of this stuff will lay a pre-Christmas foundation for the arrival of a fresh vault hunter early next year. That hunter, whom Gearbox showed off a little while ago out of contept for chronological reveals, is Randy Pitchford’s magic cowboy spirit animal.

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The evil ghost lorry in Truckful’s demo nearly ate me and the lady who did a headstand in my bed

Drive faster, she screams as a cacophony of meepy noises, it’s coming! I know, headstand lady, I know, comes my response from behind the wheel. We’d be safe if I hadn’t botched one of the switchbacks and gently skidded into a low wall. I’d best put my foot down if I want to escape the demo of mysterious delivery driver Truckful without finding out what happens when a little truck is swallowed by a bigger truck.

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MindsEye devs accuse studio execs of “disastrously” mishandling redundancies and enforcing “unbearable” crunch

Following the inauspicious launch of MindsEye and subsequent layoffs at developers Build A Rocket Boy, 93 current and former staff at the studio have signed an open letter demanding an apology, while accusing Build A Rocket Boy’s senior leadership of having “consistently mishandled the redundancy process” and mandating “unbearable levels of overtime” around the game’s launch.

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Arc Raiders won’t force you to give up all of your progression via mandatory wipes, at least for now

Right, it’s that time again. Get ready to slide back down the ladder of powerfulness, because mandatory wipeage is required to stick everyone back on the same trajectory ahead of [insert new thing here]. No, say the developers of shooter Arc Raiders. They will not bow before the mandatory wipe gods at this time, instead trying out a voluntary wipe system dubbed Projects.

Yep, rather than leaning on the same unavoidable resets which plenty of extraction shooters and survival games employ to ensure newbies aren’t always guaranteed to run into folks with more levels someone playing a platformer in a regularly-stopping elevator to the sun, Embark Studios plan to do their own thing.

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Potential BIOS dive aside, Battlefield 6 goes surprisingly easy on PC hardware

Battlefield 6 marks the first time, in all my years of hardwaring, that I have been summoned to someone’s house in order to make a PC game work. I can’t offer this Jim’ll Fix It service to everyone, not least because IGN’s lawyers have issues with the name, so I’ll just say this: Enabling Secure Boot and TPM 2.0 is inconvenient, but not as fiddly as it sounds, and can be done with at most a couple of toggles in your BIOS/UEFI’s Security section.

As it turns out, that’s probably the worst of BF6’s hardware worries. I don’t know who forgot to tell DICE that all FPS blockbusters must now be callously demanding graphics card shin-kickers, but in both the campaign and multiplayer, this seems to run quite… well? Likely well enough that as long as you’re on any reasonably modern rig, you might not need to do much twiddling with the visual settings.

Still. Let’s have a go at it anyway.

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Bribe pigeons into criminal acts with infinite bread in The Bench later this month

Altruism is a funny concept. Most of us can agree that bestowing a generous gift of greening shelf-stable bread-like product on the local park pigeons is a nice thing to do, but what of the knowledge that moulders in the back of our minds all the while, telling us: keep this up long enough, and you’ll definitely end up with a loyal army of skyborne scavengers willing to enact your every destructive whim at a mere flick of your wrist? Feed them the really good bread, they might even let you throw them at things. From super seeded, to superceding god. Here’s the trailer for The Bench.

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Battlefield 6’s launch day patch notes are here and nearly 2800 words, so whip out your reading specs private

Battlefield 6‘s launch day patch was promised to be a big one, and EA weren’t lying. The full notes have just arrived ahead of the shooter’s launch tomorrow, October 10th. They’re over 2700 words long. That’s about double the length of my last feature, but solely dedicated to stuff like recoil and times to murderdeath.

If you played the beta, is there anything left you’ll actually recognise when you fire up the full version? I’ve no idea, to be honest, they could have hidden a line about swapping every character model for Mr Bean in here and I’d likely have struggled to clock it.

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Battlefield 6 review

All hail the Battlefools! They fan out efficiently from spawn and are instantly massacred in a hail of rifle fire and grenades. Arguments erupt in the chat. Who’s watching the flanks? Were you watching the flanks? I’m not supposed to watch flanks, I’m an engineer – my two defining passions are blowing tanks up and fixing them, a clash of loyalties that routinely gets me run over. You’re a recon – shouldn’t you be reconnoitring? Blame gives way to frantic improvisation as the attackers turn defender. People switch classes, get cut down, switch classes again. Support players plant lines of barricades that somehow avail them nothing against the snipers. Squad leaders ping the objective icon furiously, like babies banging the arms of their prams. One squad tries crawling behind a line of parked cars and is promptly squished by hammer-wielding exterminators.

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