Season five of Overwatch 2 will arrive on Tuesday, bringing with it updates such as a mythic skin for Tracer, a fantasy theme and a fresh limited-time game mode. However, it feels like a bit of a placeholder as Blizzard is already looking forward to the sixth season, which starts on August 10th. The studio is calling this the biggest update to Overwatch 2 yet. It'll be called Overwatch 2: Invasion and it will include co-op story missions . Long-promised hero missions, which were going to feature long-term progression features for all heroes, are no longer happening.

It's been a wild ride this year, but you can always rely on Assassin's Creed to lighten the mood. Let's see what those zany historians at Ubisoft have cooked up for us in the excitingly named Assassin's Creed Valhalla … Peterborough, is it? I have nothing against our beautiful cathedral cities, rolling plains and park-and-ride services, but after 12 months of Brexit, Covid-19 and forest fires, plus the cancellation of the Eurovision song contest, I was hoping for something a little less Tough Mudder from this giddy, quasi-historical, action-adventure series, which previously had us gallivanting around Atlantis. For the first few hours, you're thrown into the icy political drama of ninth-century Norway, where Viking warrior Eivor runs around snow-blasted islands having stern conversations about the future of her clan. I went with female Eivor.)

In 2016 Tom Clancy's The Division brought players together in the war-torn streets of Manhattan fighting against a variety of enemy factions, as well as one another. Ubisoft's RPG-shooter carries a diverse range of enemies to keep the player on their toes. But unlike other games I've covered to-date, The Division needs to deal with the practical issues of being an online co-operative game and how to manage all sorts of AI systems for thousands of players across the world. In this first of a two-part series, I'm going to be looking at how developers Massive Entertainment sought to create a variety of interesting and challenging encounters throughout the world of The Division; how they designed their enemy opponents and manage their behaviours as thousands of players rush to battle online every day in the mean streets of New York City. After an outbreak of weaponised smallpox, New York city breaks down into chaos and is quarantined from the outside world until the contamination is contained and order is restored.

Team-based multiplayer shooter Overwatch is getting a sequel: and interestingly for fans, it'll bring story missions into the game for the first time. According to Blizzard, it will also "redefine what a sequel means". Which is quite a claim for an online shooter. Unveiled with a crowd-pleasing cinematic trailer at annual fan convention BlizzCon last week, Overwatch 2 will introduce PvE missions in an all-new story mode, as well as a new core competitive mode, Push, a six-versus-six PvP team battle, which sees teams compete to have a robot push the map's objective to their opponent. Before now, the original 2016 first person shooter focused on PvP gameplay, with spin-off comic books and animated shorts filling in backstories for the popular crew of ragtag leads.