Firaxis was brave with Civilization 7, altering the basic structure of the decades-old grand strategy series in ways that were bound to be controversial. I liked some things about Civ 7’s new “Ages” system, which requires players to swap to a new civilization twice over the course of a campaign, but it hasn’t been especially…

Late last year, Firaxis announced that Civ 7 would be getting the ability to play a single civilization across an entire game, addressing one of the major complaints from players who weren’t thrilled with the latest entry’s ambitious experimentation with the Civilization format. After promising in February that Civ’s traditional playstyle would return sometime this…

Just a few months after his surprise departure from Ubisoft, where he’d been serving as the creative director on the mysterious Assassin’s Creed Hexe, veteran developer Clint Hocking has founded a game studio called Build Machine Games. Hocking’s new outfit is “lean and fast,” he wrote on LinkedIn, but also “bold and ambitious.” “We aspire…

Back in 2010, we gave the WW2 RTS Ruse an enviable 84% review score, applauding developer Eugen Systems for “doing something novel with one of strategy gaming’s hoariest themes.” Just five years later, it was gone—removed from Steam by publisher Ubisoft due to expiring license rights. Now, in a surprise twist, it’s back: More than…

The Mortal Kombat 2 movie comes out Friday May 8, and early reviews have begun emerging from the portal. Does the sequel right the wrongs of the first film, which oddly didn’t even feature a Mortal Kombat tournament? Is Karl Urban an improvement over… uh, whoever that main guy was in the first movie? Does…