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Emergency legislation to delay the release of terrorist prisoners could create a dangerous “cliff edge” where they are freed without any restrictions, the government has been warned. Under plans announced in the wake of the Streatham attack, which was launched by a terror convict days after he was released from jail, automatic release will be cancelled for inmates who have already been sentenced. The Parole Board does not currently have any say in the release of terror offenders on determinate sentences like Sudesh Amman, who are freed halfway through their term regardless of risk. But under the new law the board would assess all inmates convicted of terrorism and keep them inside for longer if they are still thought to be a threat. The Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation warned that offenders would still have to be released at the end of determinate sentences, which are currently served half in prison and half under licence. “The difficulty which any new legislation will have to address for this cohort of terrorist offenders is, what happens if the Parole Board refuses to release the offender before their sentence expires?” Jonathan Hall QC told The Independent. “If their sentence has expired, they cannot be released subject to conditions, and cannot be recalled for bad behaviour. There is a real risk of unintended consequences.” Mr Hall urged the government to avoid creating a “cliff edge” where terror offenders are freed from prison without licence conditions, which can include deradicalisation programmes and restrictions on internet usage, movement and association. The warnings come as one of the victims if the attack was named in reports on Tuesday as teacher Monika Luftner. In a statement, St Bede’s Catholic Infant & Nursery School in Lambeth said a member of staff was making a “good recovery after experiencing a shocking attack”. On Monday, Robert Buckland told MPs emergency legislation would see the Parole Board risk assess terror convicts for potential release after serving two-thirds of their sentence, rather than the current half. “The underlying principle has to be that offenders will no longer be released early automatically and that any release before the end of their sentence will be dependent on risk assessment by the Parole Board,” the justice secretary added. “We will ensure that the functions of the Parole Board are strengthened to deal even more effectively with the specific risk that terrorists pose to public safety.” Mr Buckland said emergency legislation would apply retrospectively to terrorist prisoners given standard determinate sentences like Amman’s. Downing Street said there would also be a full review of the maximum prison sentences for terror offences, including looking at whether offenders of all levels of seriousness should be held in jail indefinitely until the Parole Board assesses they are no longer a threat to the public. The plans have raised concerns over radicalisation inside British prisons, where recent cases have shown that terrorists are able to network and spread extremism. Amman’s mother claimed he had been further radicalised inside HMP Belmarsh, where a former inmate told The Times he openly stated his wish to carry out a terror attack and conducted a mock Isis execution. There are already up to 800 flagged extremists in British jails – almost four times the number of terrorist prisoners – and there have been repeated official warnings about Islamist radicalisation including from the Parole Board and a government review. The Prison Reform Trust urged the government to “proceed with caution”. Director Peter Dawson said: “Terrorism has always posed a very particular set of challenges for criminal justice systems. “There are examples from history both in this country and overseas where poorly thought through or disproportionate reactions are likely to have made things worse rather than better in the long run. Unfair treatment or disproportionate punishment are both effective recruiting sergeants.” Downing Street acknowledged that there was nothing to prevent prisoners being automatically released until the emergency new law is passed. The prime minister’s official spokesman would not comment on whether they had identified any terrorists due for release before the new law comes in. The government has not ruled out derogating – effectively partially suspending – the European Convention on Human Rights in order to apply the new measures, which are likely to be subject to legal challenges. The Streatham stabbing was the third terror attack in just over two months to be carried out by a convicted terrorist in Britain, following the assaults at Fishmongers’ Hall in London and inside HMP Whitemoor. Amman, who had previous convictions for cannabis and offensive weapons possession, was initially arrested for planning terror attacks in May 2018, after writing online that he was “armed and ready” and pledging allegiance to Isis. But he was charged with the lesser offences of collecting and disseminating terrorist material after consultation with prosecutors, and handed a determinate sentence of three years and four months that saw him automatically released on 23 January. He was being followed by undercover officers when he grabbed a knife from a shop, removed it from its packaging, and started stabbing passers-by in Streatham on Sunday. Meanwhile, his father, Faraz Khan, has said he never thought his son “would go this far” and he did not know he had become radicalised. Speaking to Sky News on Tuesday, Mr Khan said Amman was reciting the Koran when they last spoke, a day before the attack, and he had been shocked to learn of his son’s actions. “He never talked to me about things like that,” he said. “He said when his mother came to see him she brought him food – that’s the kind of things he talked about. “I told him not to be naughty, be good, and he listened.” Scotland Yard said Amman was shot dead by police within a minute of beginning his attack, which was claimed by Isis in a generic statement on Monday morning. Both stabbing victims survived. Around 50 terrorists are released from prison each year, according to officials, and the figure is expected to be similar in 2020 unless rules change. Home Office data shows 41 convicted terrorists were released from jail in the year to June, as well as 12 suspects who had been held in custody but not sentenced. Among those due for release, according to the Henry Jackson Society, is Mohammed Ghani, who threatened to kill police officers, and Britain’s youngest terrorist, who plotted to murder police in Australia. Also on the list are at least five men who aspired to or travelled to Syria to support Isis, as well as Moinul Abedi, who was jailed in 2002 for stockpiling homemade explosives for a terror attack. Fahim Adam, from Blackburn, who collected extremist magazines, and Mohammed Khilji, from London, who posted beheading videos on WhatsApp, could also be freed.

Regularly eating fermented soy products such as miso and soy sauce could help you live longer, new research has found. A study published in the British Medical Journal looked at the diets and overall health of 92,915 Japanese men and women aged 45 to 74 for an average of 15 years. The researchers found that those who frequently ate miso, tempeh, soy sauce and natto, a gooey dish made from fermented soybeans that is po[CENSORED]r in Asian countries, benefited from a lower risk of mortality. The study examined how much fermented soy needed to be consumed in order to see benefits. It found that men who ate at least 50.2g per day of fermented soy were 10 per cent less likely to die in the 14.8 years after compared to those who ate the smallest amounts of fermented soy products. Women saw the same benefits from eating at least 46.6g per day. Consuming natto alone led to health benefits, too. The study found that eating at least 26.2g of the dish every day led to a 24 per cent lower risk of death from cardiovascular disease for men and 21 per cent lower for women. The authors suggested that the benefits of fermented soy products could be down to their high fibre content. They are also rich in potassium. But the researchers said that various unmeasured factors could have influenced the study’s results, so more studies are needed in order to establish cause and effect. Nonetheless, co-author Dr Norie Sawada of the National Cancer Centre in Japan said that he would recommend consuming fermented soy for its impact on cardiovascular disease, which is the leading cause of death in the USA. In the UK the leading cause of death is still cancer.

We suspect this is just the beginning. Few station wagons have ever been as capable and downright mean-looking as the current-generation Audi RS6 Avant. It’s already a performance superstar with 591 horsepower (441 kilowatts) driving all four wheels. It accelerates like a supercar, sounds like an angry Roman god, and yet its long-roof greenhouse is luxurious for five passengers and an extra set of tires for when you inevitably wear out the rubber on the road. Now, ABT has made it better and by that, we mean faster. Here’s the first step towards the new ABT RS6-R we previewed last December. This isn’t the complete package – that’s still expected to arrive later in April. The noted Audi / VW tuner is starting with a power performance upgrade that elevated the 4.0-liter twin-turbo V8 to a lofty 690 hp (515 kW). ABT doesn’t offer full details on what all is changed, but the crux of the upgrade is a new engine control unit with a tune that’s obviously more aggressive than what you get from the factory. Gallery: 2020 Audi RS6 Avant By ABT: Beyond that, ABT mentions “a whole host of engine protection measures to provide you with remorse-free driving pleasure.” As for that pleasure, ABT says the tweaked RS6 Avant hits 60 mph in 3.3 seconds so yeah, it's seriously quick. There’s no mention if the speed limiter is removed – a stock RS6 is limited to 155 mph but we suspect this wagon would accelerate well beyond that mark. There’s no mention of suspension changes at this point either, but the high-output Avant does ride on a set of new wheels. Whether more power is coming with the full release in April is unknown, but we wouldn’t be surprised if that happens. Previous ABT RS6 projects have gone well beyond 700 hp, and with other tuners getting the new Avant close to 800 hp (597 kW), it certainly appears there are more ponies for ABT to wring out.

It wasn’t too long ago that we discussed the likelihood of cheaper PCIe 4.0 boards hitting the market in Q1. Well, it appears we were right. Gigabyte has submitted various models of AMD Ryzen-compatible B550 motherboard to the Eurasian Economic Commission (EEC) (via VideoCardz). This list includes six models in its flagship Aorus line, and a couple in the more budget-friendly – but feature-sparse – Gaming X line. The past couple of years have been great for AMD. With its mid- and high-end CPU range already beating Intel on price, core-count, and manufacturing process, since the release of the X570 chipset back in July they have also supported PCIe 4.0. PCIe 4.0 boards haven’t been cheap, however, running a cost that’s closer to £200 than £100. This is where Gigabyte might save the day: these B550 boards will most likely be cheerful – you know, because they’re cheap? PCIe 4.0, as is the case with each iteration, doubles the transfer bandwidth from PCIe 3.0’s 8GT/s to 16GT/s. Theoretically, this means that with PCIe 4.0 there can be up to 32GB/s of data transfer. This allows manufacturers to crank up read and write speeds for SSDs, and increase available GPU bandwidth. The list of 8 B550 chipset motherboards submitted to the EEC by Gigabyte are as follows: B550 AORUS ELITE B550 AORUS PRO B550 GAMING X B550M AORUS PRO B550M DS3H B550M GAMING B550M H B550M S2H There’s no definite guarantee that these boards will be PCIe 4.0, but considering a B550A chipset has already been seen in previous (OEM-only) motherboards, it would be a bit silly for them not to be. As we discovered when comparing the (PCIe 4.0) Corsair Force MP600 M.2 SSD to the (PCIe 3.0) Samsung 970 Evo M.2 SSD, the boosted bandwidth only improves initial game load times. Once you’re actually in-game the difference is negligible. It’s all good having double the bandwidth in theory, but when games aren’t utilising it you might as well have stuck to 3.0. On top of this, with AMD Zen 3 just around the corner, it makes you wonder why it felt the need for a new budget chipset on the eve of 600-series boards. AMD is set to retain the AM4 platform for at least one more Zen CPU generation, however, so these budget B550 boards will likely prove useful, perhaps cheaper, alternatives. All this aside, it’s nice to see that more affordable options for PCIe 4.0 motherboards are on the way. And not everything is about gamers, after all. PCIe 4.0’s increased bandwidth does allow for faster data transfer from those SSDs that support it. It might also be that the sooner PCIe 4.0 boards hit the market, the sooner games start to properly utilise the increased bandwidth.

For a growing number of people, myself included, EA Sports' goal of forcing FIFA into every gap in our lives has already been achieved. When I wake up I set player auctions on my phone. When I get to work I use the web app to check their progress. At lunchtime I play 2v2 with the guys from sales. When I get home I play a few online tournament games. On slow weekends I throw down some micro-transactions and build a new team. When I'm not doing that, I'm watching YouTubers. (I'm a particular fan of Itani's Five Pack Challenge.) Ultimate Team is the key - a mode so good that it has become FIFA's most prominent, and so successful that it has propelled EA Sports' Andrew Wilson to CEO of the whole company. For anyone who has never tried it, Ultimate Team involves buying blind packs of cards, which represent players and consumables, and assembling a fantasy team with them. You then take part in tournaments and trade items with other players either in-game or using companion apps. Packs can be bought using in-game currency earned from trades and games played or by spending real money on micro-transactions. All the right licences and slick, gratifying gameplay keep it interesting for months. Years, in fact. It's often said that people play football games all year round, but I played Ultimate Team in FIFA 13 pretty much until FIFA 14 arrived for review. EA introduces regular new tournaments that coax you into trying new players and team concepts, while special packs are released for sale during happy hour events and the contents of packs are refreshed with upgraded Team of the Week players, nicknamed 'in-forms', throughout the year that follows the game's release. They're rare to come by in packs and expensive on the transfer market, but even if I can't have the card myself, I can still enjoy the likes of IF Aubameyang vicariously through YouTube videos. My advice for cheap success in FIFA 14 Ultimate Team? Go for a wide 4-2-3-1 and get your bids in early for Eljero Elia and Sidney Sam. Ultimate Team is a brilliant set of ideas superbly executed, and FIFA 14 does nothing that is likely to break its stranglehold over its fans' time, having been tweaked in appealing but conservative ways. You can now play single matches against random online opponents, for example, and you can search for players by name (in-game at least - you can't in the support apps) and run quick price comparisons on items you want to trade. All are welcome additions, none is particularly exotic. A bigger change is that formation cards are gone, meaning you can freely experiment with your team's formation without having to buy consumables that change each player's preferred set-up to match your new system. In their place we now have Chemistry Style cards, which boost a few of a player's key stats permanently, allowing you to turn your striker into a battering ram, for example, if that suits your approach. Really, though, it's much the same mode, except everyone starts from scratch, unable to bring progress forward from FIFA 13. (EA Sports Season Ticket subscribers get a slight boost, at least, with a weekly gold pack and early digital access to the game.) Zeroing everyone's progress again might sound a little cheap in a mode that is clearly designed to extract cash over and above the game's cover price, but hi my name is Tom and I'm an addict. Being able to play Seasons in co-op ought to satisfy a growing subset of FIFA fans, while Career mode now has a scouting network. Besides, Ultimate Team's continued appeal is as much about the global fascination with real football as anything. Did you see Ozil's three assists on Saturday? I wonder how much he is trading for? 90k on PS3, by the looks of it. If I can afford him, could I build a decent team around him? To ensure maximum chemistry - the stat that determines how well your AI team-mates anticipate your actions - I'll need fellow Germans, Arsenal or at least Premier League players around him. Might as well buy a couple of gold packs and see what I get. Barring an unlikely global collapse in the football industry, then, Ultimate Team's continued success and our enjoyment of it should be assured, and the same should be true of matters on the pitch, where FIFA 14 remains a frenzied game full of goals and exciting spectacle and does its best not to break anything as it evolves. There are a few new features, but they are stones tossed into a river rather than a dam set against the flow of existing gameplay. Ball physics have been adjusted so that aerial passes now have a flatter parabola, for example, often bouncing out of play rather than landing with generous backspin, and you can't get through a match without a dramatic bicycle-kicked clearance from a defender. Presumably both are attempts to reduce the potency of pace and over-the-top passes. Skill Games have been overhauled for FIFA 14 with plenty of new scenarios, and seem more consistently interesting this year. Likewise, the way the defenders react more quickly, closing down the player in possession and putting in a pair of standing tackles rather than a single lunge for the ball, should stop attackers racing past them before they can react. Right-stick trick moves, meanwhile, no longer require you to hold the left trigger, making them more accessible, and the abandoned trigger button is now clamped down to protect the ball under duress. Players also take a little longer to get the ball out of their feet now, and the way they push off with it and accelerate has changed as well. In theory, all of this should slow the game down. In practice, though, the game pushes back elsewhere. Attackers can now change direction dramatically while sprinting, rather than tracing a predictable arc, while the volume of successful headed goals, chips and finesse shots - those curled efforts that head for the top corner - is higher than last year, so pacey wingers still feel overpowered. This despite stronger, faster defenders and systems supposedly geared towards halting momentum. For me, the superficial changes are more compelling than these new systems, which are largely forgotten about after a few hours of adaptation. Shooting is probably where the game has seen the biggest infusion of new fun. Technique remains largely unchanged, but the range of contextual shot types is much greater, from dipping volleys to outside-of-the-boot shots with a succulent reverse-swerve. I lost hours in the practice area using Ibrahimovic to bend the ball out-to-in from miles outside the box. It always looks amazing. FIFA 14 may not be that much better as a game of football, then, but it is a much better spectacle than last year, from overhead kicks in defence and more aesthetically pleasing shots to smaller details, like the way the ball hits the post more frequently, bouncing along the line in desperate search of a tap-in or scrambled save, or new contextual animations, like a defender falling backwards as he heads a goal-bound effort upwards into the net. It's also a much more fluid and dynamic-feeling game, with fewer breaks in play thanks to far more quick free-kicks and throw-ins, and summarisers on the commentary team as well as play-by-play announcers and touchline reporters. The new menus are very nice too. A lot of this is style over substance, of course, but the truth is that FIFA 14 has plenty of substance as well - perhaps not as much as PES 2014, which takes football more seriously, but enough that you can play it for 12 months without growing too bored of it, sprinting, weaving, crashing into tackles and then showboating in front of your opponent when you score a winning goal, or losing and drowning your sorrows in the Ultimate Team store. You could argue that FIFA 14 shows EA Sports is running out of ideas, then, but for me this is a developer that knows exactly what it's doing. Neither the football match engine nor Ultimate Team were broken in any major way, and the placebo effect of a suite of control and balance tweaks, along with its increasingly snug ties to the drama of real-life football, will be enough to carry its ever-growing audience of players through the next season. As much as I know I will play it all year, though, I would like to feel a greater sense of progression next time. Hopefully EA Sports will find the next-generation consoles inspiring.

Rainbow Six Siege’s Tachanka rework finally drops in Year 5, Season 1, says leak: Rainbow Six Siege‘s long-awaited Tachanka rework may be just around the corner. The Lord’s revamp will be included in the upcoming Year 5, Season 1 update, according to a reliable leaker, and it will bring some big changes. Resetera member Kormora, who has a history of leaking Siege information ahead of official announcements, says the new season will make Tachanka’s main weapon his LMG – rather than his special ability as it is currently. The update will also give him an incendiary device of some kind and introduce map bans (“players decide what map to pick and ban”) for the first time, according to the leaker. Kormora concludes by revealing replays will come to Siege in the first season of Year 5. Tachanka, despite his peerage and meme status in the Siege community, has been the most maligned operator since the game’s initial launch. His stationary turret is powerful but almost entirely restricts his movement, making him vulnerable from multiple angles. Developer Ubisoft has been open about its intention to rework Tachanka, but such a revamp, while much-needed given the operator’s lowly status in the Siege meta, has not yet appeared. We’re set to find out more on Rainbow Six Siege: Year 5 at the Siege Invitational later this month. For now, we’ve reached out to Ubisoft for comment on the latest leaks.

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Xbox Series X frame rates above 60Hz? You’ve got AMD’s Zen 2 architecture to thank for that. According to Xbox boss Phil Spencer, the step up from AMD Jaguar cores with the Xbox One to Zen 2 cores with the Xbox Series X allows its next-generation console to deliver high and consistent frame rates, variable refresh rates (VRR), and more to improve the “feel” of the game. “We’ve never really tried to limit what developers are trying to do on our platform,” Spencer says in an interview with Stevivor, “whether it’s 60 frames per second on Xbox 360 or people doing 4K60 now on Xbox One X. We want to give developers the tools to go try things that they want to go try on any of the hardware platforms and capability can be there for them to go try things. “I think we’ve reached a point with Xbox One X in the generation where games look amazing, and there’s always work we can do to look more amazing. But I want games to feel as amazing as they look. We don’t have that in today’s generation, mainly because the CPU is under-powered relative to the GPU that’s in the box in order to reach a feel and frame rate and kind of consistency or variable refresh rate and other things that we want.” It’s that last bit that’s key. The Xbox Series X is powered by AMD’s Zen 2 CPU architecture, the same one found within most of the best CPUs for gaming today. Zen represents a colossal improvement on the Jaguar APU fitted within current generation Xbox consoles before it. Pivotal to AMD’s return to form in recent years, Zen, and subsequently Zen 2, offers vast performance advances to bring it in line with the best from Intel. Both Microsoft and Sony will be utilising AMD’s Zen 2 architecture in their next-gen designs, and the PlayStation 5 will likely adopt many of the same features touted by Spencer as a result. Further similarities between the Xbox Series X and PS5 include an SSD, AMD 7nm GPU (RDNA), and hardware-accelerated ray tracing. We’re sure to see that same AMD-powered ray tracing in discrete gaming GPUs sometime this year, too.

Rainbow Six Siege’s Mira and Jackal have a ban rate of over 70% Rainbow Six Siege developer Ubisoft has revealed the game’s most hated – sorry, banned – operators, and it’s Jackal and Mira that come out on top. The former is the most banned attacker, while the latter is the most banned defender. Good job to those two! Jackal is banned in an extraordinary 70% of ranked matches on PC (of platinum rank and above), followed by BlackBeard (24%), Thatcher (21%), and Montagne (18%). Mira, meanwhile, is banned in 84% of matches. Eighty-four! Echo follows closely behind with a 73% ban rate, with Valkyrie, Maestro, and Lesion all sitting much lower down (11% and then jointly 6% respectively). Despite the ban rates suggesting players don’t like facing these operators, Ubisoft has not stated any plans to change them. Instead, the company plans to adjust Lesion, as he “can often be quite frustrating to play against”. As highlighted above, the operator is banned in 6% of matches, making him the fifth-most banned defender. Take a look at the full graphs below. Ubisoft revealed the details ahead of Rainbow Six Siege’s 4.3 update, which is live on PC now. The patch brings big changes to every gun in the game, as well as nuffs to Ela, Finka, Ying, Nokk, and Smoke, and nerfs to Echo, Maestro, and Jager. Rainbow Six Siege’s Road to SI 2020 event is live, meanwhile. It adds a new map, Stadium, for the next five weekends leading up to the Six Invitational on February 14. Siege’s Year 5 pass also leaked just recently, and it now contains fewer operators than before.

Dungeon Keeper is a hard game to review. That's because any critique of this remake of Bullfrog's 1997 PC hit can't help but slide down the slippery slope towards being a critique of free-to-play gaming in general, and that's when people start banging the table and raising their voices and it all goes a bit Jeremy Kyle. It is, at least, easy to see why EA revived this beloved cult classic in this fashion. Revisit the original Dungeon Keeper today and be amazed at just how many of its ideas have been reborn in mobile games. It was one of the first "tower defence" games, for example, flipping gaming convention upside down by casting the player as an evil tyrant, crafting the most perfectly evil lair in which to trap and kill do-gooder enemies who enter your hallways looking to save the world. You did this by using an expanding army of imps to dig out new rooms, which you could then use to house traps, treasure and monster-spawning hatcheries. The more you expanded your labyrinth, the more stuff you discovered. The more stuff you discovered, the more new things you could build. It was a near-perfect feedback loop of routine and invention. And, credit where it's due, EA's Mythic studio has revived that gameplay style very accurately. The viewpoint is loftier, the art style more cartoony, but almost every feature from the 1997 game remains in place. Our old horny host cheekily makes fun of micro-payments even as he's ramming them down your throat. The big difference is that wherever there's a crack in the gameplay, EA has hammered in a wedge in the shape of a paywall. There are four currencies at play here, three of which are in-game - gold, rock and mana - and the inevitable gems which can be purchased with real money. Everything you do has an immediate cost counted in one of the first three currencies, and a countdown timer that can be swept away with the fourth. Of course, of course, the economy is stacked in such a way that you're forever being steered towards the gems. Progress is impossible without upgrading your various rooms, and to do that you need gold or rock, your stockpiles of which have a finite ceiling that must be raised by upgrades. Upgrades which require gold or rock. By constantly ratcheting up the amounts required, the game creates an ingenious but ruthless domino effect. You need to level up your workshop, but to do that you need more rock than you can store, but upgrading your rock storage means saving up more gold than you can store, but upgrading that... and so it goes on. The head bone, in this case, is connected to the wallet. To give an example of how crudely this system has been implemented, upgrading your Dungeon Heart - the core of your lair - to Level 3 requires only a few thousand rocks. Getting it to Level 4, the cost rockets to 50,000. The ripple effect of upgrades needed so that your dungeon can even hold that much rock is ludicrous. Scroll through the rooms and traps yet to be unlocked, and you'll see the price of items heading north of seven figures. Those mottled tiles to the side are gem veins which can take up to 24 hours to dig out. Unless you pay, of course. The game does ease you in, at least, adhering to the classic dealer's mantra that the first taste is free. You're started with an area of soft ground to dig your first rooms out of, and the imps carve through it with familiar ease. Fill that space, however, and you must start mining the outer edge of the map, made up of gem veins that take between four hours and a full day to excavate a single square. Making space for a basic 3x3 space suddenly becomes a task that can literally take all week. Meanwhile the amount of gems mined from each square can be counted on your fingers, while every gem transaction costs in the hundreds. But there I go, reviewing the free-to-play business model rather than Dungeon Keeper. It's hard not to, though, when that business model is the only thing holding the game up. The tragedy isn't that EA has crammed micro-transactions into a beloved game - though that certainly stings - but that it has done so in such a rote and predictable way. Let's be clear, again, because it bears constant repetition: free-to-play is not automatically a bad thing. There are plenty of examples of great games - hardcore PC games - that use micro-transactions, and do so while building an engaged and devoted fanbase. League of Legends. World of Tanks. Team Fortress 2. There are clearly better templates to follow. Yet what we have here is the shell of Bullfrog's pioneering strategy game, hollowed out and filled up with what is essentially a beat-for-beat clone of Clash of Clans. Every function, every mechanism, every online feature has been tried and tested already by Supercell's money machine and EA is following behind, drooling like a Pavlovian dog. That's what stings the most: not that Dungeon Keeper has gone free-to-play, but that it's done so in such soulless fashion. Creatures no longer spawn automatically as your dungeon expands, but must be summoned in exchange for gold. The closest the game comes to its strategy roots is in the multiplayer aspects, which unlock once you've built a Training Room for your minion monsters. There are campaign levels that you can undertake by choice - both attacking AI dungeons and defending your own - but you'll also be open to invasion from other players. This would be great, if it weren't for the complete lack of consequence. In the original game, defending your lair against enemies was literally life or death. If you failed, it was game over. There's no such thing as game over in free-to-play though, because when the game ends so too will the payments - so instead you'll find yourself opening the app to be told that someone attacked you. You may have lost some resources, which will be replaced in time, but whatever damage they did repairs itself instantly and you carry on with no real penalty. With such pitifully low stakes, and gameplay that values impatience over skill, there's only the most slender of gameplay threads to cling to. t's always tempting to write this sort of free-to-play title off by saying it's not really a game, and in a lot of ways it isn't. But it's Dungeon Keeper, and every now and then you see enough of that game to feel nostalgic, before it vanishes again behind a 24-hour cool down timer. Let's be generous. Those glimpses of the game Dungeon Keeper used to be are enough to earn one point. You can have the rest for 800 gems.