I like to keep my eye on promising upcoming PC games, and Band of Crusaders is the latest game to capture my attention. It did so because it’s a new strategy game clearly inspired by the world of The Witcher.
Band of Crusaders is the first game from Virtual Alchemy, a Polish game developer. It takes place in a fantastical version of medieval Europe that has been overrun by demons, with players taking the role of a Grandmaster who’s recruiting crusaders to fight off these demonic threats. The setting and even the general art direction and color palette of Band of Crusaders look quite similar to CD Projekt Red’s games based on The Witcher, and that’s an inspiration its developers aren’t even denying. In a press release, art director Kamil Mickiewicz directly addressed any potential comparisons to The Witcher, directly stating that Virtual Alchemy “wanted to see what the world of The Witcher would look like if you removed all the Witchers.”
On the gameplay front, Virtual Alchemy stresses the game’s emergent nature. On a macro level, players move between points of interest on a world map, accept missions from different kingdoms, and recruit knights and other units to fight for them. Then, once players enter an encounter, they have to more adeptly use each character’s skills as they take on threats, human and demonic. Between battles, you can upgrade units at camp. It’s the kind of strategy RPG that works best on PC, and I think Virtual Alchemy can find an audience by offering up an answer to the following question: What would The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt be like if it were a strategy game?
Band of Crusaders does not have a release date, but it’s in active development for PC.
The Call of Duty franchise has held a special place in my heart ever since I played my first Black Ops game back in 2010. That game's campaign was something else, with twists and turns that culminated in a mind-blowing finale. We can all admit that compared to those older campaigns, the recent CODs have been lackluster at best, and a complete and utter disappointment at worst. The reboot of Modern Warfare did give me some hope, as the first two installments were actually quite good, but the third game left such a bad taste in my mouth that I wasn’t exactly expecting much from Modern Warfare 4.
After recently finishing the campaign, I can say that this installment is nothing like the recent releases and instead feels closer to the franchise’s roots. For the first time in a long while, the campaign comes across as well-crafted rather than rushed to hit a release date. It arrives three years after MW3, and you can see exactly where all that time went. It seems the studio finally made listening to player feedback a priority.
Epic Games has just announced the 2026 Epic AI MegaJam, which is looking to see how much game development can be squeezed into a very short window. This is running from November 12 through November 15.
Participants can work alone or in teams of up to five people, build in Unreal Engine or Unreal Editor for Fortnite, and bring along “as many AI agents as you want.” Epic explicitly encourages coding agents, AI-generated assets, audio tools, writing tools, and other AI systems. The official event page literally says "Vibe your way to $50k.”
It’s turning into a pretty good time to be a Monster Hunter fan who plays on a phone. Capcom has confirmed that Monster Hunter Outlanders will launch on Android and iOS on October 29, giving the series a new mobile-first game just as Monster Hunter Rise is also preparing to make the jump to smartphones through Netflix.
Outlanders is being developed by Tencent subsidiary TiMi Studio Group under license and supervision from Capcom. Unlike Rise, which appears to be the full console and PC game adapted for mobile, Outlanders is a free-to-play survival hunting game made specifically for phones.