Warlock, Hasbro and Invoke's open world action romp, looks like a good time—at least if your idea of fun is using magic to steal an ogre's sword before tossing it at another horrible creature, or using fancy blood rituals to ruin a sunny day, bringing rain and gloom. "Creative use of magic," Invoke calls it. I call it being a magical party pooper, but I'm here for it.

OK, so here's the deal. You're Kaatri, an experienced swinger of swords who's made a deal with D&D celebrity Tasha—you might know her from such spells as Tasha's Hideous Laughter—who has gifted you with a wide range of tricks. I'm sure it's not going to be a deal that comes back to bite her on the ass. Weird goths offering power? Always trust them!

Since Kaatri had this whole other life before making a deal with Tasha, she doesn't exclusively rely on magic. She's perfectly capable of removing heads from bodies the mundane way, in melee scraps that look snappy and cinematic. How the melee actually feels, well, I'm going to have to wait to find out, as Invoke and Hasbro aren't handing over the controller just yet.

Honestly, though, I'm more interested in the magic—even if using a sword is sometimes a bit more efficient. Take a simple obstacle, like some nasty, stabby brambles blocking a path. Now, you could just chop them away with your sword, but you know what's cooler? Using the spell Tasha's Leash to grab a lamp, which can then be used to set fire to the brambles. If too much fire is the problem, then you can use the same spell to grab a bucket of water to put it out.

It strikes me that Kaatri might be a victim of Maslow's hammer. No, that's not another spell. It's the idea that when we become overly familiar with a tool, we start to see it as the solution to everything. If the only tool you have is a hammer, everything becomes a nail. Which is bad. But screw Maslow—magic is awesome, why wouldn't you want to use it to solve everything?

And to be fair to Kaatri, magic is a wide-ranging bag of tricks. In the demo, I get to see her Shadow-stepping all over the place, teleporting to and away from enemies, as well as through obstacles. Any heavy objects in her way can be deftly moved aside without her breaking a sweat, or even moving. And when she's faced with a big gap and an imposing drop, some magical tentacles build her a bridge. I wish hammers were this useful.

So magic is incredibly convenient for traversal and puzzles—and traversal puzzles—but seeing it used in combat is where it becomes downright seductive. This is why you make dodgy deals with witch queens.

I kinda hate when videogame combat gets compared to ballet—a deadly ballet, a lethal ballet, blah blah blah—but seeing Kaatri firing on all cylinders (all credit to the Invoke dev driving the demo) really is physical poetry. It looks elaborate, technical and elegant. Yes, I'm annoyed I didn't get to play myself. The stringing together of melee, teleporting, time manipulation and telekinesis is just a delight to watch. And the interplay between all these spells and attacks goes beyond the immediate, instantly gratifying stuff.

At one point, we see Kaatri summon a little table, at which she performs a blood ritual to change the weather. It starts to rain. Bummer. But this drizzle does more than make enemies sad and damp—it makes them more conductive. And Kaatri can hurl lightning at them. Now we're cooking.

After the methodical, measured chaos of Baldur's Gate 3, I find myself really in the mood for this more action-dense, almost DMC or Bayonetta-style approach to D&D magic. It's flashy and over the top, but there's still this tactical grounding. Invoke's got something pretty cool brewing here, and I'm keen to see more as it gets closer to its 2027 launch.

It's unclear whether you can respec Hawks when you first start out in Star Wars Zero Company, but the good news is you can, and it's an entirely free process. You can change class, but also refund every Focus Point you've spent in its dedicated tree to start levelling another. Here's how it's done.

How to respec in Star Wars Zero Company

You can change your class once you reach Cycle 3, which is very early in the game. All you need to do is:

1. Interact with the Personnel console by the map table
2. Cycle right to the Focus Tree tab
3. Select Change Specialization in the bottom right
4. Pick whichever class you want

There's no cost to changing class and it will also refund all of your Focus Points, letting you respec entirely. The only thing this doesn't refund (if you're respec-ing a story character) is the Focus Points you've put into your talent at the top.

When you unlock recruitable operators a little later on, you'll also be able to change their talents in this same menu, letting you customise anyone you hire entirely. This means it's better to grab operators because you like the look of their character more than it is to recruit them based on their talent and specialization, which you can change at will.

While I do have some best class recommendations early on, it's well worth experimenting and playing around with different specializations. You can even change them on the initial story characters you work with like Trick and Kabb Uppercut, so team composition is always variable.

It may have taken seven years, but The Division 2 is finally getting crossplay. On top of that, we have more details on the latest expansion for Ubisoft's dystopian online action game, which adds a true New York City landmark.

First thing's first, though: crossplay. It's happening, at long last. The option is available across all platforms, and it'll be enabled by default. Clan size is going up to 100 to allow everyone to play together, and it'll launch in November. Clans will also be imported over, whereas leaderboards are going to be reset.

"Bringing Agents together across platforms has required significant work behind the scenes, including partially rebuilding the game’s online architecture," Ubisoft writes. "With crossplay, your platform will no longer stand between you and other Agents, opening up matchmaking and allowing more of the community to play together."

This is well overdue, but the fact some of the release's inner workings needed tinkering helps explain why it's taken so long. Making these facets a reality is often much more complicated than it may seem on the surface.

Besides getting crossplay, the new DLC is called Echoes of Central Park, focusing on the well-trodden area. In the darkened world of The Division 2, the park was used to bury bodies and left to grow out over the years. Nobody's sure what's going on in there now, but something's happening that pulls players towards the endless urban forestry.

"The expansion begins with a distress call coming from somewhere inside the park. Across the Upper West Side, rumors are spreading about what lies beyond its gates," reads the official description. "Agents will need to investigate those reports, prepare for what lies ahead, and eventually enter Central Park to uncover what has happened there since the outbreak."

It sounds very The Last of Us, and that's a compliment. A deeper dive into Echoes of Central Park is coming September 24, so mark the date. There's plenty of life in The Division 2 yet, it seems.

Speedrunner turns one of Metal Gear Solid 4's biggest bosses into a total pushover using the power of Master Collection Vol 2's enhanced framerate