Over the last couple of days, multiple copies of upcoming space exploration game No Man’s Sky have been leaked despite the recent delay of its official release until August 12. The game officially went gold on July 7, meaning that physical copies are already being distributed to retailers.

Alongside Star Citizen and Elite Dangerous, No Man's Sky is among a new wave of ambitious space exploration titles landing on the PC platform. The game promotes planetary exploration as one of its core features, with procedurally generated planets, inhabitants, and atmospheres, but also leaves room for space flight and ship management.

No Man's Sky has already undergone a few delays, with its most recent pushing the PC release back to August 12 from the original August 9 release date. PlayStation 4 owners will see the game on shelves first, with developer Hello Games sticking to its August 9 launch for the console.

Mirror’s Edge Catalyst is EA’s reboot of their 2009 first-person parkour game. The first Mirror’s Edge was well-received for its advanced visuals and intuitive, mechanical gameplay. For some of those who played the first ME, time has only sweetened memories of the innovative parkour-style gameplay. When EA and DICE announced the sequel, we were immediately interested -- we liked the first game most for its time trials and 3D platforming, somewhat unique in execution with Mirror’s Edge.

Like its predecessor, gameplay in ME Catalyst is deceptively simple. You run, you jump, you slide, and sometimes, you kick. We pick-up playing as Faith, a young woman who makes her living as an aptly titled ‘runner.’ If you couldn’t guess, that means she runs items and information from point-to-point, like a courier -- but in a dystopian future where private security companies routinely invade the privacy of citizens. Runners allow data to be moved about more discreetly. As a runner, you traverse the rooftops of Glass -- the city ME Catalyst takes place in -- almost entirely made of a white concrete that stays freakishly clean. Those rooftops also host a lot of ventilation, piping, and fences, all of which are used to the advantage of our parkour-trained runner. Navigation of the rooftops is left largely up to player, but certain obstacles light-up red to guide the player towards the objective.

Mirror's Edge – the first game – had some of the most intensive graphics of its time. Just enabling PhysX alone was enough to bring most systems to their knees, particularly when choppers unloaded their miniguns into glass to create infinitesimal shards. The new game just came out, and aims to bring optimized, high-fidelity visuals to the series.

Our Mirror's Edge Catalyst graphics card benchmark tests FPS performance on the GTX 1080, 1070, 970, 960, AMD R9 Fury X, 390X, 380X, and more. We're trying to add more cards as we continue to circumvent the DRM activation restrictions – which we're mostly doing by purchasing the game on multiple accounts (update: we were able to get around the limitations with two codes, and it seems that the activation limitation expires after just 24 hours). The video card benchmark looks at performance scaling between High, Ultra, and “Hyper” settings, and runs the tests for 1080p (Ultra), 1440p (Ultra), and 4K (High), with a splash of 1080p/Hyper tests.

We've also looked briefly into VRAM consumption (further below) and have defined some of the core game graphics settings.

The freshman effort from studio Fool’s Theory looks promising. A small group of seasoned game developers that comprise the studio has been together now for about a year – including former CD Projekt Red (The Witcher) team members – and PAX East 2016 offered our first look at their game, Seven: The Days Long Gone. The Polish group set out to do something they said “no one has done,” which was to create an isometric, parkour-style, jump-and-climb action RPG. We got the chance to play Seven: The Days Long Gone, an Unreal Engine game, and speak with project lead Jakub Rokosz at PAX East.

The game takes place in a “beyond post-apocalyptic” future where mankind is slowly rebuilding. The plateau of Peh begins our story, and players get to explore the Empire of Vetrall throughout the campaign. We were placed in the game as protagonist Teriel the thief, but were informed that Fool's Theory also intends to allow players to choose their own character when the game is complete. Teriel is possessed by a demon, Artanak, who has an agenda of his own. The demon and its host work together to learn about the Empire of Vetrall, aiming to discover much about the ancient world and its secrets. Gamers can expect about 10 hours of campaign play with many more added, assuming all the side quests and adventures are also completed.

Industry luminary Warren Spector helmed the keynote at the East Coast Game Conference yesterday in Raleigh. Readers of our Star Citizen (Chris Roberts) and Shroud of the Avatar (Richard Garriott) content are already familiar with Origin, the studio responsible for effectively inventing MMOs, early game graphics technologies, and pioneering PC mechanics. Spector was employee number twenty-six at Origin Systems – a self-described “old-timer” when compared against the studio's maximum 350 employee count – and has a history developing seminal games.

Spector worked at Origin with Richard Garriott, Chris Roberts, Dallas Snell, Starr Long, and other recognized industry veterans. In our interview with Warren Spector, we talk about what it was like working at Origin, behind-the-scenes stories, and throw-in a brief question about System Shock 3.

Bethesda’s Automatron DLC was the first DLC for Fallout 4 and was a solid addition to the game, but fell slightly flat in some areas. Quickly following Automatron, Bethesda is rolling-out their Wasteland Workshop DLC, which adds to the capabilities of settlement building through new lighting, technology, and even the ability to catch creatures.

Capturing creatures is likely to be the most significant – and fun – addition from Wasteland Workshop. The types of creatures that can be captured range from raiders to deathclaws to cats. These creatures can be tamed, or more interestingly, made to fight to the death. Settlers can even be chosen to fight creatures, so next time “another settlement needs your help,” Preston can be forced to fight a deathclaw. Maybe that’ll teach him.

The games industry sometimes churns titles in a way that feels excessively incremental – an attachment to counting and ever-lengthier sub-titles. It wouldn’t be time for a major release if it weren’t a sequel, and today’s sequel has built a brand upon challenging player skill. Dark Souls returns with its third game, which has now appended a third Roman numeral to its suffix. In DS3, the planet is dying and the we're one of the many who have been resurrected to save it – and die trying. Several times.

Our Dark Souls III review & gameplay video looks into the dark, medieval-fantasy world and definitively analyzes mechanics, PC controls, graphics, and replayability.

We've just posted an overall positive review of FromSoftware's Dark Souls III, a game which we found highly rewarding and challenging, but were critical of its PC port. Some of the issues disclosed in that review spoke of hardware and framerate issues.

Dark Souls III had crashing (CTD) issues, micro-stutter and choppiness in cut-scenes, an immutable 60FPS cap, and difficulties saving keybindings. We look at some fixes for these issues today while pointing-out graphics settings and save file locations.

Fallout 4’s first DLC – Automatron – was released last week for $10. In it, the player has to stop “The Mechanist,” an evil villain creating robots that are terrorizing the Commonwealth. More significantly, Automatron adds the ability to create and customize robots.

Today, we're reviewing that DLC. Fallout 4: Automatron marks Bethesda's ambitious expansion efforts with its best-selling title, and we've got story and gameplay analysis below.