Articles by Nicholas Sutrich

Rise up to the challenge in the first of many seasons planned for Population: One.

What you need to know

Population: One is getting its first content season in the form of a 10-week event called Uprising, beginning this month.
Uprising will introduce new weapons, map updates, and a ton of additional to-be-announced content.
Seeker Credits can be gifted to other players to help unlock content.
Players will finally be able to create private servers later in the season.

Population: One is set to begin its first season, called Uprising, this month. The 10-week-long special event dwarfs other Population: One events, which often lasted just 10-days at a time. As is normal for other events, Population: One Season One “Uprising” delivers new items for players to battle it out, beginning with the close-quarters melee knife, undoubtedly brought on by the “special guest” that was unleashed in the previous event, Darkest Days for Population: One.

As the name of the season suggests, Uprisin…

For when you’re hungry for more.

As we said in our Walking Dead: Saints and Sinners review, if you’re planning to buy an Oculus Quest 2 or already have one, you absolutely need to own this game. It’s a triumph of VR game design and shows the true potential that a quality, experience-driven survival horror can deliver. The Trial, a free DLC, is the first DLC created for the game and adds a substantial new mode of the same name.

In this new mode, players can choose to enter one of three arenas that take place in some of the game’s more unique spaces. One sees players housed in a foggy mausoleum, while the other two take place in the streets of New Orleans. This horde mode separates itself from other similar-style games by encouraging players to scavenge and explore — a key component of the story mode — as well as to perform creative kills, earn coins, and craft items to get through as many waves of zombies as they can.

The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners: The Trial DLC pickin…

Are you or your child looking to get a few more robots in your life? While there are plenty of great household robots to replace some of your chores, these robots are all about having fun and learning something new at the same time. These fit in a wholly different category from the best coding robots for kids, though, so most of these robots don’t require a phone or tablet — so your kids can have fun without cutting into their daily limit of screen time! The following list of best robotics kits for kids is organized loosely by recommended age.

For the little littles

Educational Insights Drill Robot

Designed for kids ages 3 and up, this robot toy can help younger children develop fine motor skills. Included in the box is a child-safe plastic screwdriver and a set of screws that can be used to put the robot together or take it apart on a whim. Master the art of righty-tighty and lefty-loosey for those all-important building skills later in life.

$13 at Amazon

Skitterish fun

4…

This game is all about movement freedom and creativity.

What you need to know

Winds & Leaves is a gardening sim of sorts that tasks players with regrowing a barren world.
The game introduces a new kind of locomotion that uses the PS Move controllers like stilts to move about the world.
Winds & Leaves launches on PlayStation VR this Spring.

Spring has sprung for PlayStation VR — or, at least, it will when Winds & Leaves joins the ranks of upcoming PSVR games with an exclusive debut on the platform with the next season change. While everyone’s still stressed about buying a PS5, you can relax and feel truly zen while regrowing the entire world in Winds & Leaves. That sounds like an awfully daunting task and far from relaxing, but developer Trebuchet promises that the game is all about taking things one step at a time.

You’ll literally be stepping in Winds & Leaves, too, thanks to a brand new locomotion mechanic that utilizes the somewhat limited PS Move motio…

It’s a smart home without all the setup.

What you need to know

Lennar Communities Connected by Ring offers new homeowners the chance to have a smart home from day one.
The Ring app can now control products from vendors like Level, eero, Moen, Honeywell, MyQ, and plenty more.
You won’t need a new Lennar home to take advantage of the new interconnection in the Ring app; just a compatible product.

Ring and Lennar are teaming up to bring Lennar Communities Connected by Ring, a new program that lets you build a smart home from the very beginning of the process. During the building process, new homeowners can choose the Lennar Everything’s Included program which includes some of the best Ring products as well as products from Level, eero, Moen, Honeywell, and MyQ. Walking in the door with everything connected on day one certainly gets us a few steps closer to a smart home that actually feels like a smart home.

Part of that magic resides on that little black rectangle in your hands: t…

When you think of protecting your home from disaster, what crosses your mind? Fire? Burglary? Natural disasters? The best smart home security systems might cover these, but what about water damage? That often gets forgotten until the day you walk home and your basement is flooded. Smart water monitors were created to prevent these very situations. leakSMART is our pick for best smart water monitoring solution, as it can detect leaks throughout your home and automatically shut off your water in the event of a leak, all for a lot less than the competition.

Best Overall: leakSMART leak detection starter kit

The leakSMART leak detection starter kit includes a valve, sensor, and the hub that controls all of them. leakSMART utilizes an included Zigbee hub to communicate with all of its components, meaning it’s not reliant on Wi-Fi being available to work fully. It’ll also work with existing Zigbee sensors, so if you already have one, you can save money by just buying the leakSMART valv…

New locations, new enemies, and a new set of puzzles for your puzzler to puzzle over.

What you need to know

VR spy puzzler I Expect You To Die 2: The Spy and The Liar is coming to VR platforms in 2021.
Players can expect a host of new environments, puzzles, and enemies as they play the role of a super spy trying to prevent the evil Dr. Zor from achieving world domination.
Steam is the only announced platform for now, but more platforms are expected to be announced in the future.

Fans of the original I Expect You To Die are expected to leap for joy at the announcement that their feigned death in the first game was a success. That means in I Expect You To Die 2: The Spy and The Liar, you’ll be playing as a secret agent thought to be dead by your evil adversaries — although it seems at least one other individual knows your big secret. If you haven’t yet played the original, it’s one of the best cross-buy Oculus games you can find, totally playable on the Oculus Quest 2 natively o…

Mardi Gras season is a perfect time to revisit post-apocalyptic New Orleans.

What you need to know

The Trial will debut as a free update for the Oculus Quest version of The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners on Feb 4.
This never-ending horde mode using a new arcade-like scoring system to reward players with ways to upgrade their weapons between waves.
The Quest version of The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners sold 10x more than the Rift version.

In a move that probably couldn’t have been timed any better, Skydance Interactive announced that The Trial — a never-ending horde mode with an arcade-style scoring system — will be coming to the Oculus Quest and Oculus Quest 2 version of The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners on Thursday, February 4. That’s just in time for the annual Mardi Gras parades that fill the street of New Orleans in a normal year. This year, however, you’ll have the opportunity to clear those streets of the resident zombies, thanks to this new never-ending …

Quite possibly the best way to get that cinema feeling at home.

Bias lighting isn’t anything new, but few products go above and beyond expectations in the way the Govee Immersion TV backlight does. If you picked up one of the best TVs for PS5 or Xbox recently, you owe it to yourself to spend the $70 that Govee Immersion costs. Unlike the Philips Hue Play system, Govee’s design utilizes a camera that sees the screen instead of requiring your HDMI cables to be plugged into a dedicated box. The results couldn’t be more stunning.

Govee has two products in the Immersion RGBIC line, but the LED light strip is the more deluxe of the two options. Designed for 55-inch and 65-inch TVs, these strips run the perimeter of the back of your TV and shine light on the wall behind the TV. The key here is that the camera, which can be placed on top or below the TV — an upgrade from the previous version of this product — sees the TV screen and changes each individual LED on the light strip individ…

Forget the past and carve a new path.

It’s been a long time since I’ve played a Hitman game. I’ve only ever played the original, which was released nearly 21 years ago, but have fond memories of my time with the game. So when it was announced that Hitman 3 would have a VR mode where you could not only play through the entire Hitman 3 campaign, but also the remastered Hitman and Hitman 2, I was immediately interested. Then I found out it was exclusive to PSVR and, not only that, but it only works with the PS4 version of Hitman 3 — which is at least included for free with every PS5 copy — and I suddenly wasn’t sure about how well this would turn out.

As was said in our Hitman 3 review, the game tends to feel like more of a DLC pack than a brand new entry into a 20-year-old series. Because of that, the literal change of perspective from a third-person game on a flat TV to a first-person game in VR makes all the difference in the world. The base mechanics don’t change completely ra…