It all started with me using dynamite to catch some fish. While trawling off a faraway coast, I received an urgent letter to come home. The old man is dead. His brother has taken over, and my sister and I decide to bail. We are presented with our very own island. A place where we can grow, mine, and produce …

There’s a reason that this RedLynx/Ubisoft series has been with us for so many years (20 if you include the original Java version). Basically it’s fun. We could’ve said flat-out fun, but there’s much more finesse to the experience than that, as players soon discover. Just like learning to ride a real bike, the basics of Trials never truly leave you. But as the series has evolved, the gameplay has become ever more nuanced, and now it’s time for more people to explore the many ways that flipping two-wheeled rides around like a fool can be so very fulfilling.

In a new developer diary, Ubisoft Massive detailed just how Dark Zones are going to change in The Division 2as players return to that PvPvE sandbox in pursuit of some contaminated but powerful gear.

Assassin’s Creed Odyssey is one of my favourite games from last year, and I spent dozens of hours role playing as my own idealised, ass-kicking version of Kassandra. The game was always sold as being about player choice, with even the character’s gender being an option; a first for an Assassin’s Creed game. For the most part, the game let players play whoever they liked, letting them forge hetero and homosexual relationships with abandon. The game’s latest DLC however, forced players into a cisnormative relationship for the sake of procreation – and many players weren’t happy about it

A private beta for The Division 2 kicks off on February 7 and runs until February 10, if you happen to have pre-ordered the game. If you haven’t, because you’re a 2010s video gamer who has been through all of this before maaaaaaaan, you can still stand a chance to hop in to the beta by registering for it. If there’s enough space, that is.

Back in 2016, in Ubisoft’s lovely Watch Dogs 2, a mission had players hack into a fictionalised version of Ubisoft’s San Francisco offices. The gaol of that mission was to steal a trailer for an unannounced game and sell it off to gaming website. It turned out that the trailer – which showed a colourful space exploration reminiscent of No Man’s Sky – was a real game in development. It was a clever, meta way to announce a new game. Unfortunately, that game has now been canned

Ubisoft has now announced that it’ll skip Steam for its impending online shooter, The Division 2. The game had a now removed Steam Page, with a Ubisoft representative saying “We have no plans currently on releasing Tom Clancy’s The Division 2 on Steam.”

Life is good in Far Cry new Dawn! And surprisingly authentic, as Ubisoft’s replica of a post-apocalypse landscape has some actual science behind it.