As it turns out, I personally spunked the equivalent of one-and-a-half working weeks on Techland’s overambitious zombie sequel. Being confronted with a hard figure like that, in the cold twilight of the new year, tends to prompt a little regret and reexamination. What was the motivation? Why did I settle on a 6/10 with my review editor at Edge magazine, and then go back for more?

I can’t speak for other Dying Light 2 players, who perhaps sought escape or simply value for money. But I know that I was chasing something very specific. A high brought on a decade prior by the time trials of Mirror’s Edge—those taut yet freeform gauntlets made up of rooftop extractor fans, fire escapes and sudden chasms which made the best of first-person parkour. 

In Dying Light 2, as in Mirror’s Edge, navigation is almost always a high wire act that pushes you to think before you jump. But in timed challenge mode, that careful tread is balanced against a ticking clock. The toughest and most satisfying parkour trials in Dying Light 2 forced me to abandon the thoughtful approach in pursuit of pure speed if I was to stand a chance of reaching the top scores—firing myself forward with the assistance of my trusty grappling hook, while hoping that memories of recent runs would make sense of the blurred terrain as it flew by.

Those standout runs had to be teased out of the open-world morass of quasi-medieval Villedor, however. Dying Light 2’s parkour challenges are fairly numerous, but are uncovered organically, one by one, across the breadth of its city map—the largest part of which is gated behind campaign progress. And even then, many won’t be manageable until you’ve put in the hours with Techland’s skill tree. 

Wall running, sliding under objects, the emergency forward roll that saves you from pancaking after a long fall—these are all central components of the first-person parkour moveset which can be traced back to Mirror’s Edge. You’ll struggle to conserve crucial momentum without them. And yet they’re all buried beneath character progression in Dying Light 2, locked away until you’ve collected the necessary XP. As for that grappling hook, forget about adding it to your toolbelt until you’re deep into the hit-and-miss story.

White hot

If the dim, flickering hope of proper parkour sustained me through Dying Light 2, then the release of Neon White in the summer was a blinding lightbulb. This is a game built almost entirely from first-person movement challenges, all timed and intended to be repeated in leaderboard battles with your friends. I say friends: I was driven on by the impressive performance of a former colleague I haven’t seen in years, and who probably has no idea I was using his scores as a high watermark. Nonetheless: cheers, Nick. Hope you’re well.

At first glance, you wouldn’t think Neon White has enough Mirror’s Edge about it to hit the spot. Its abstracted and lurid levels, built from severe and textureless towers and viaducts, evokes 90s shooters rather than the GoPro footage of real-life freerunners. And the parkour itself veers closer to Minecraft community efforts than DICE’s model. Press ‘w’ and you’ll move forward at a set velocity, gathering no momentum unless temporarily boosted by bombs or flowing water. Hit the spacebar and you’ll paint a floaty arc through the air, but won’t see any flailing limbs in your peripheral vision—only white streaks to suggest you’re travelling at speed. There’s no stamina bar, nor any way to interact with the ledges and walls in your path, other than to land on or circumvent them. 

All of this might strike you as a backward step for the parkour genre. Yet Neon White isn’t featureless. It’s focused. And its levels aren’t blank—they’re clean and easy to read, all the better for plotting a laser-guided route through. Their tidiness leaves room for a tactical layer, provided by a hand of cards which can each be used in one of two ways, either to fire a projectile at an enemy, or punctuate your parkour in some specific way. A pistol is also a double-jump. A rifle can be a horizontal dash. The uzi? A ground-pound that drops you like a plummeting elevator. By the time you’ve perfected a map, you’ll have decided exactly how to play each card and when—expending them with split-second precision.

Map perfection is achievable not only by streamers and YouTubers who specialise in that sort of thing, but the average player—thanks to the Neon White’s tight scope and instant resets. It’s a kind of accelerated learning made familiar by micro-challenge platformers like Celeste and Super Meat Boy. Since you’re never more than a handful of seconds from your last wrong turn, you can correct your flaws, experiment with routes, and iterate on runs at breakneck pace. The curve from first contact to mastery can be drawn in just a few minutes, but it’s no trick—this is real, skill-based problem-solving you can be proud of.

Which makes it all the more frustrating to remember every time Dying Light 2 booted me back to the open world rather than letting me retry an obstacle course while it was fresh in my head. It’s understandable, of course: Techland’s sequel doesn’t just do parkour, but also exploration, scavenging, stealth, survival horror, first-person melee and branching narrative. Every part of that equation must be balanced with the rest, and none can take precedence—since variety in activities is a central tenet of the open-world formula. But looking back on the year, I’m grateful to Neon White for letting me skip to the good bit. Even if it did highlight just how many hours I’ve flushed down the u-bend.

As it turns out, I personally spunked the equivalent of one-and-a-half working weeks on Techland’s overambitious zombie sequel. Being confronted with a hard figure like that, in the cold twilight of the new year, tends to prompt a little regret and reexamination. What was the motivation? Why did I settle on a 6/10 with my review editor at Edge magazine, and then go back for more?

I can’t speak for other Dying Light 2 players, who perhaps sought escape or simply value for money. But I know that I was chasing something very specific. A high brought on a decade prior by the time trials of Mirror’s Edge—those taut yet freeform gauntlets made up of rooftop extractor fans, fire escapes and sudden chasms which made the best of first-person parkour. 

In Dying Light 2, as in Mirror’s Edge, navigation is almost always a high wire act that pushes you to think before you jump. But in timed challenge mode, that careful tread is balanced against a ticking clock. The toughest and most satisfying parkour trials in Dying Light 2 forced me to abandon the thoughtful approach in pursuit of pure speed if I was to stand a chance of reaching the top scores—firing myself forward with the assistance of my trusty grappling hook, while hoping that memories of recent runs would make sense of the blurred terrain as it flew by.

Those standout runs had to be teased out of the open-world morass of quasi-medieval Villedor, however. Dying Light 2’s parkour challenges are fairly numerous, but are uncovered organically, one by one, across the breadth of its city map—the largest part of which is gated behind campaign progress. And even then, many won’t be manageable until you’ve put in the hours with Techland’s skill tree. 

Wall running, sliding under objects, the emergency forward roll that saves you from pancaking after a long fall—these are all central components of the first-person parkour moveset which can be traced back to Mirror’s Edge. You’ll struggle to conserve crucial momentum without them. And yet they’re all buried beneath character progression in Dying Light 2, locked away until you’ve collected the necessary XP. As for that grappling hook, forget about adding it to your toolbelt until you’re deep into the hit-and-miss story.

White hot

If the dim, flickering hope of proper parkour sustained me through Dying Light 2, then the release of Neon White in the summer was a blinding lightbulb. This is a game built almost entirely from first-person movement challenges, all timed and intended to be repeated in leaderboard battles with your friends. I say friends: I was driven on by the impressive performance of a former colleague I haven’t seen in years, and who probably has no idea I was using his scores as a high watermark. Nonetheless: cheers, Nick. Hope you’re well.

At first glance, you wouldn’t think Neon White has enough Mirror’s Edge about it to hit the spot. Its abstracted and lurid levels, built from severe and textureless towers and viaducts, evokes 90s shooters rather than the GoPro footage of real-life freerunners. And the parkour itself veers closer to Minecraft community efforts than DICE’s model. Press ‘w’ and you’ll move forward at a set velocity, gathering no momentum unless temporarily boosted by bombs or flowing water. Hit the spacebar and you’ll paint a floaty arc through the air, but won’t see any flailing limbs in your peripheral vision—only white streaks to suggest you’re travelling at speed. There’s no stamina bar, nor any way to interact with the ledges and walls in your path, other than to land on or circumvent them. 

All of this might strike you as a backward step for the parkour genre. Yet Neon White isn’t featureless. It’s focused. And its levels aren’t blank—they’re clean and easy to read, all the better for plotting a laser-guided route through. Their tidiness leaves room for a tactical layer, provided by a hand of cards which can each be used in one of two ways, either to fire a projectile at an enemy, or punctuate your parkour in some specific way. A pistol is also a double-jump. A rifle can be a horizontal dash. The uzi? A ground-pound that drops you like a plummeting elevator. By the time you’ve perfected a map, you’ll have decided exactly how to play each card and when—expending them with split-second precision.

Map perfection is achievable not only by streamers and YouTubers who specialise in that sort of thing, but the average player—thanks to the Neon White’s tight scope and instant resets. It’s a kind of accelerated learning made familiar by micro-challenge platformers like Celeste and Super Meat Boy. Since you’re never more than a handful of seconds from your last wrong turn, you can correct your flaws, experiment with routes, and iterate on runs at breakneck pace. The curve from first contact to mastery can be drawn in just a few minutes, but it’s no trick—this is real, skill-based problem-solving you can be proud of.

Which makes it all the more frustrating to remember every time Dying Light 2 booted me back to the open world rather than letting me retry an obstacle course while it was fresh in my head. It’s understandable, of course: Techland’s sequel doesn’t just do parkour, but also exploration, scavenging, stealth, survival horror, first-person melee and branching narrative. Every part of that equation must be balanced with the rest, and none can take precedence—since variety in activities is a central tenet of the open-world formula. But looking back on the year, I’m grateful to Neon White for letting me skip to the good bit. Even if it did highlight just how many hours I’ve flushed down the u-bend.

If you don’t already know, beamforming is when a signal is directed at something to better improve the signal strength and quality. It’s not just an audio thing, there are loads of uses for beamforming in regards to wireless signals, but that’s what Razer is using it for with the new Leviathan V2 Pro. Basically, the system will determine where you are and, through some neural network computing, beam the audio signal directly at your ears.

To do this, the Leviathan V2 Pro comes with a small infrared sensor array, located in the middle of the unit. The data from which is then fired through a neural network processor to sense where a user is, or more specifically where their ears are, to better create spatial audio. That data is then “immediately discarded” and never gets transferred to your PC or the cloud, so sayeth Razer (opens in new tab).

There are five 2-inch speakers included within the soundbar, operated with different interference patterns to keep the user in the sweet spot for audio, and a subwoofer that plugs in at the back to go on the floor.

So is this all worth it? I’m going to write a full review on this product soon enough, but I am pretty impressed with how seamless the audio shifting is as I move my head at my desk. You sit in the middle of your desk and the audio is firing right at you. You move to the left and the audio is firing right at you. You move to the right and the audio is firing right at you.

You get the idea.

There are a couple of modes onboard that work best in different scenarios: THX Spatial Virtual Headset and THX Spatial Audio Virtual Speakers. 

I quite like the THX Spatial Virtual Headset mode for listening to music. It delivers the aforementioned described beamforming effect but is mostly just a straightforward stereo, 2:1 listening experience.

The Virtual Speakers, however, are a bit more involved, as they attempt to replicate a surround sound speaker setup without the hardware. I’m usually pretty sceptical about these sorts of features, as I don’t find the dip in audio quality to often be worth the positional audio gain, but I have to admit the Leviathan’s virtual speakers are pretty impressive. I ran a 5.1 speaker test locally on my machine and the positional audio is so much greater than the standard stereo output. Not a bad loss in quality either, though a little bit tinier on the rear left and right directions. I mean you definitely don’t want to listen to music with this mode enabled, but for gaming I could see this coming in handy.

First impressions have been pretty good, then. Though I was expecting to be blown away: it’s $400 (opens in new tab). That’s $150 more than the Razer Leviathan V2 (opens in new tab) we reviewed earlier in the year, let alone a normal pair of computer speakers (opens in new tab). That leads to my biggest concern so far: it’s a neat feature but definitely not a must-have one, and for that sort of money it’s likely a tough sell to most.

I have more testing I want to do with this soundbar before drawing conclusions. The Leviathan V2 Pro will ship from January 31, so there’s plenty of time to make my mind up before then. Stay tuned for that.

If you don’t already know, beamforming is when a signal is directed at something to better improve the signal strength and quality. It’s not just an audio thing, there are loads of uses for beamforming in regards to wireless signals, but that’s what Razer is using it for with the new Leviathan V2 Pro. Basically, the system will determine where you are and, through some neural network computing, beam the audio signal directly at your ears.

To do this, the Leviathan V2 Pro comes with a small infrared sensor array, located in the middle of the unit. The data from which is then fired through a neural network processor to sense where a user is, or more specifically where their ears are, to better create spatial audio. That data is then “immediately discarded” and never gets transferred to your PC or the cloud, so sayeth Razer (opens in new tab).

There are five 2-inch speakers included within the soundbar, operated with different interference patterns to keep the user in the sweet spot for audio, and a subwoofer that plugs in at the back to go on the floor.

So is this all worth it? I’m going to write a full review on this product soon enough, but I am pretty impressed with how seamless the audio shifting is as I move my head at my desk. You sit in the middle of your desk and the audio is firing right at you. You move to the left and the audio is firing right at you. You move to the right and the audio is firing right at you.

You get the idea.

There are a couple of modes onboard that work best in different scenarios: THX Spatial Virtual Headset and THX Spatial Audio Virtual Speakers. 

I quite like the THX Spatial Virtual Headset mode for listening to music. It delivers the aforementioned described beamforming effect but is mostly just a straightforward stereo, 2:1 listening experience.

The Virtual Speakers, however, are a bit more involved, as they attempt to replicate a surround sound speaker setup without the hardware. I’m usually pretty sceptical about these sorts of features, as I don’t find the dip in audio quality to often be worth the positional audio gain, but I have to admit the Leviathan’s virtual speakers are pretty impressive. I ran a 5.1 speaker test locally on my machine and the positional audio is so much greater than the standard stereo output. Not a bad loss in quality either, though a little bit tinier on the rear left and right directions. I mean you definitely don’t want to listen to music with this mode enabled, but for gaming I could see this coming in handy.

First impressions have been pretty good, then. Though I was expecting to be blown away: it’s $400 (opens in new tab). That’s $150 more than the Razer Leviathan V2 (opens in new tab) we reviewed earlier in the year, let alone a normal pair of computer speakers (opens in new tab). That leads to my biggest concern so far: it’s a neat feature but definitely not a must-have one, and for that sort of money it’s likely a tough sell to most.

I have more testing I want to do with this soundbar before drawing conclusions. The Leviathan V2 Pro will ship from January 31, so there’s plenty of time to make my mind up before then. Stay tuned for that.

Not a moment too soon, we’re finally getting details of retail SSDs supporting the latest PCIe Gen 5 interface at CES 2023. We’ve already seen Phison showing off its latest E26 PCIe 5.0 controller chip (opens in new tab) in an engineering demo drive. But now we’re getting the actual retail drives themselves.

To briefly recap, PCIe Gen 5 doubles peak bandwidth over Gen 4. On paper, that means maximum throughput of 16GB/s versus 8GB/s. In practice, the maximum attainable actual bandwidth will be less due to various protocol overheads.

This could be a bit of a reach, but were you attempting to transmogrify gaming and personal transport you might end up with something like the Dee, BMW’s future-gazing car concept (opens in new tab) for CES 2023.

The basic idea is a car that changes color in real time. Inevitably, the fine detail is techier than that and uses E Ink. In not-so-short, the concept car is covered in teeny tiny capsules filled with electro-active pigments that change color when a current is applied.