Vermintide 2 screenshot of Sienna in Winds of Magic

If you're in the mood for filling out your backlog with even more games you don't have time to play, you'll be delighted to hear that Steam's Spring Sale 2024 has now arrived! Much like its predecessors, it brings with it a boatload of discounts across a wide variety of games and genres.

For those of you that have no clue where to even start, allow me to share with you a couple of games that have managed to catch my eye - all of which are currently on a sizable discount. Without further ado, here's the brief list in no particular order:

Darktide official artwork for the Vanguard armor bundle

Quite a few months have gone by since Darktide's last content update, but I'm happy to say that the mysterious Fatshark has now finally emerged from its burrow and signaled the end of winter. In other words, we have finally received a small blog post explaining what exactly the studio is currently working on!

First and foremost, the Darktide team is planning to do a comprehensive revamp of the penance (achievement) system. While the actual details are still few and far between, the goal is to not only add a whole bunch of new cosmetics to play Fashiontide with, but to make them a lot more interesting to collect as well.

Helldivers 2 official artwork and logo

A little over a month has gone by since launch, and already the Helldivers 2 team has released a bunch of new weapons to toy around with. They have all arrived as a part of the new Cutting Edge 'Battle Pass', though don't worry about this being paid DLC as the Super Credits required to purchase all of them can be found in-game easily enough.

As for the actual weapons, the new arsenal includes a fast-firing laser rifle, a plasma shotgun, a laser pistol and my personal favorite, a lightning shotgun! Naturally, there's also a couple of new armor sets to collect, a fancy stun grenade, new cosmetics, as well as new emotes to goof around with.

Dragon's Dogma 2 official logo artwork

It took an incredibly long amount of time for us to finally get here, but I'm happy to say that Dragon's Dogma 2 is nearly upon us! You can expect to see it launch onto PC and consoles on March 22nd, 2024 - nearly twelve years after the original!

Much like its predecessor, Dragon's Dogma 2 will have you make a party with up to three AI companions and set you loose to explore a gigantic world. Along the way you'll likely encounter all sorts of danger you'll need to fight in classic action-RPG combat, though with a bit of an important twist. Instead of simply hitting giant enemies in the toes and hoping that's good enough, Dragon's Dogma 2 will once again have you crawl all over them in order to annoy them, briefly incapacitate them or even bring them down so you dish out some serious damage.

Helldivers 2 promotional artwork without logo

[Update]: Helldivers 2's Cutting Edge update has added a variety of new energy weapons, including a lightning shotgun!

As I've detailed throughout my review, Helldivers 2 has a very serious balance problem. A good chunk of the weapons and stratagems are simply too weak to deal with enemies on the higher difficulties, which then directly leads to many players running basically the same generic loadouts as those are the ones that can reliably get the job done. Needless to say, it's not an ideal situation.

So in order to sort this out, as well as fix a couple of bugs, the Helldivers 2 team has now launched their very first balance update. Unfortunately, it's very a messy one!

Helldivers 2 artwork for the EXO-45 Patriot Exosuits (mech)

[Update]: Helldivers 2's first balance update has now landed, and it's unfortunately a very messy one. Thankfully, at least the mechs are great!

If you were eagerly waiting for the mechs to arrive ever since they were teased in that one pre-launch trailer, I'm happy to say I bring good news! According to a brief Tweet, the EXO-45 Patriot Exosuits will soon be heading to a battlefield near you!

I'd love to tell you more, but I'm afraid the details are currently nonexistent. That said, Arrowhead have previously revealed that they will be releasing a major update on the second Thursday of each month, so there's a pretty good chance the EXO-45 will be launching on March 14th. This is obviously just speculation, however, so don't get too attached to that day just yet.

MTG Arena artwork for Murders at Karlov Manor

Once it arrives this March 5th, MTG Arena's Alchemy: Karlov Manor mini-expansion will bring with it 30 new cards to toy around with. Much like the previous sets, these will help beef up some of the currently underplayed deck concepts, add a couple of goofy cards to brew with, as well as introduce a brand new mechanic to explore - Incorporate.

"A card that incorporates adds an additional mandatory mana cost to another card, and that second card gains additional attributes/text. Incorporate perpetually adds an additional casting cost to that card, adding any new colors from that cost, and adds abilities/text to that card for the rest of the game."

PowerWash Simulator Warhammer 40k crossover DLC screenshot an Imperial Dreadnaught

After toying around with Lara Croft and Final Fantasy VII crossovers, among others, PowerWash Simulator has now decided to give the grim darkness of the Warhammer 40k universe a good scrubbing. And so, dressed up as a lowly member of the Adeptus Mechanicus, the new DLC will task you with cleaning a variety of heavy machinery like the Land Raider, Dreadnaught or Imperial Knight.

What all of this nonsense looks like in action, as well as just how nasty the vehicles start off as, that you can check out through the trailer below. Have a gander:

Sons of the Forest screenshot of the skull mace and an overgrown helicopter in the woods

After exactly a year of updates that have fleshed out everything from the gameplay mechanics to the world and story, Sons Of The Forest has now been released from Early Access. Personally I think that may have been a bit premature as there's still parts of the game that feel underbaked, but that's a fairly minor nitpick as the basic gameplay loop of exploring, fighting and base-building is very satisfying.

As for what exactly all of this looks like in action, as well as what sort of style and atmosphere Sons of the Forest has gone for, that you can check out through the launch trailer below. Have a gander:

Overwatch 2 screenshot of the first three new heroes

After struggling with balancing the heroes and roles for quite a while now, Blizzard has decided to undertake some drastic measures in Season 9. As such, not only has Competitive Play been made more transparent and... well, competitive, but the actual core design principles behind the various heroes have also been tweaked.

First and foremost, hero health has been increased by around 15-25% in an effort to prevent fights from devolving into who can one-shot who first. Then, in order to prevent healers from becoming too dominant with the increased health pools, Damage heroes have swapped their reload speed passive for one that reduces enemy healing by 20% for 2 seconds upon hitting an enemy.