XCOM 2‘s Last DLC Is Also Its Best

XCOM 2 is a phenomenal strategy game. The DLC Firaxis has released in its wake, on the other hand, has mostly been middling. Thankfully, Shen’s Last Gift is straight-up good. It lets you improve the shit out of your squad. With mechs. Like Alien Hunters before it, Shen’s Last Gift is comprised of two portions.…

Mass Effect Cosplay Is Almost Perfect

Blackwater Cosplay and photographer Paul Hillier have teamed up to basically bring Mass Effect’s EDI to life. The photos, shot in a studio, are incredible. As is the outfit itself, a collaboration between Blackwater and Kink Engineering (who have worked on Hollywood movies), which involved many layers of latex glued and layered atop one another…

Prey for the Gods, an ambitious survival game influenced by Shadow of the Colossus, continues to look incredible, as it seeks $300,000 on Kickstarter

Street Fighter Mods Are Getting A Little Too Nude

Today on Highlight Reel we have good bones and calcium, Mei bullfights, gravity deflects, smooth operators, and more! Watch the video then talk about your favorite highlight in the comments below. Be sure to check out, like, and share the original videos via the links below. Subscribe to Kotaku on YouTube for more! AC: Revelations…

Meet The Developers Who Are Still Making A Kinect Game

When Microsoft unbundled Kinect from the Xbox One in 2014, it was the beginning of the end. Unfortunately for the developers of Fru, the game they were building required Kinect. They were more than two years away from shipping. “We were shattered,” designer Mattia Traverso told me. When Microsoft announced Xbox One in 2013, Kinect…

Pokémon Go Players Love Catching Monsters On Their Toilets

Pokémon Go is a game that dares you to go outside and explore the world, and yet some of the most popular screenshots of the app in use is people literally pooping while capturing Pokémon. This should be no surprise: people love using their phones while in the bathroom. But in this particular case, playing…

Star Trek Online Throws Temporal Physics Out The Airlock

Sending players on a mission to save the future by killing the past, or saving the past in the future? Days of future past? It’s all very confusing, but that’s what happened when Star Trek Online released its Agents of Yesterday expansion seven years ago. Or today. Stupid time. Bringing elements of The Original Series…

The First Five PC Games I Use To Test A New Graphics Card

First, you spend too much on a new graphics card. Then, you fire up your chewiest, toughest PC games and make them beg for mercy. For one brief moment, your exorbitant purchase feels completely reasonable. Last week I bought a new top-of-the-line GTX 1080, a purchase I rationalized by telling myself I should get it…

Go Home, Krampus, It’s July

Nick De Spain is a concept artist at Turtle Rock, the developers of games like Evolve and the original Left 4 Dead You can see more of Nick’s work at his ArtStation page To see the larger pics in all their glory (or, if they’re big enough, so you can save them as wallpaper), click…

Finding A Magikarp In Pokémon Go Is Hilarious

Yes, the GOAT is in the newly released Pokémon Go, and boy, is he turning up in some pretty unexpected places. As you may already know, Pokémon Go is an augmented reality game that lets you catch Pokémon located in the real world. (We wrote our impressions here, if you’re curious.) Right now, Pokémon Go…

Doom‘s New Photo Mode Is A Beautiful Nightmare Factory

As part of Doom’s first major post-release update last week, id Software added a photo mode, and people are already doing amazing things with it. Here’s what it looks like when the photo mode kicks into gear: You spend much of Doom running ‘n gunning, not really paying attention to the details unfolding around you.…

Hearthstone‘s Most Ridiculous Card Reignites Debate Over Randomization

Is Yogg-Saron broken? Hearthstone’s most ridiculous new card is reigniting debates over one of the game’s core principles and a tenet that Blizzard has stood by for years now: RNG. RNG, a colloquial video game acronym that stands for “random number generation” and is used to refer to any outcome that’s determined by randomized decisions…

VR Has Its Roots In Ancient Rome

Probably my favorite virtual reality experience was unearthed around 1863 in the Roman suburb of Prima Porta. Well, it’s not a virtual reality experience as much as it’s an illusionistic fresco on four walls, but bear with me. In the villa of Livia Drusilla (58 BCE-29 CE), the wife of the first emperor of Rome,…

Watch This Excellent Speedrunner Power Through Zelda: Link’s Awakening

The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening is one of the best—maybe even the best Zelda game, so it’s a treat to watch speedrunner ZorlaxSeven blaze through it all in just under an hour and a half. Performed earlier this week at SGDQ, this Link’s Awakening run is really fun to watch thanks to some great…

Pokémon GO Players Are Saying the Game Kills Battery Life 

In what should surprise no one, Pokémon GO seems to drain phones. Pokémon GO has been rolled out in Australia and New Zealand (check out these microtransactions). The game sounds fun, but one common comment seems to be that the game uses a whole bunch of battery life. Website CyberShack notes that the game’s heavy…