With intense performances, a heady atmosphere, and sharp writing, The Wolf Among Us’ gripping neo-noir saga rivalled the prestige TV dramas of the time when it first came out in 2013, earning acclaim as one of Telltale’s greatest yet. Now, with a long-awaited sequel in the works, it’s been given a fresh coat of paint that’s gussied up locations and added a slew of behind-the-scenes content to sweeten the pot. Some holdover annoyances haven’t been addressed, like the original’s stiff and occasionally uncanny animations, which get in the way of The Wolf Among Us Remastered feeling truly definitive. Still, this story remains a fantastic one, and the enhanced set dressing even manages to deepen its sinister mood.

For those who didn’t play the original, The Wolf Among Us thoughtfully adapts Bill Willingham’s beloved graphic novel series Fables, in which folklore characters covertly coexist with humans in a New York suburb aptly called Fabletown. Set roughly 20 years earlier as a non-canon prequel, Telltale’s adaptation artfully draws on classic noir storytelling, dropping you into the shoes of Sheriff Bigby (aka the Big Bad Wolf) to solve a bizarre but gripping murder. With a decapitated head on his stoop and little more to go on than a ribbon and an etched ring, the marshal must use his keen nose and perception to find the culprit… and he has to do it fast. With humans investigating the case and the social fabric of the mythical community at stake, failure could cause their secret society to collapse entirely.

On top of that already immense pressure, there’s one more important piece of subtext to consider: after centuries of violence as a storybook baddie, Bigby’s constituents don’t necessarily trust him to get the job done and, naturally, watch his every move. As such, he’s forced to lean on familiar faces like Snow White, The Little Mermaid, and Bufkin from The Wizard of Oz to chase leads as he unravels a web of complex issues spanning class consciousness, poverty, and abuses of power. It’s a journey that proves to be thoroughly engrossing.

To peel back the seedy underbelly of Fabletown, your time as Bigby is loosely split into segments. For the most part, you’ll have intriguing conversations from a third-person perspective, choosing from a handful of responses as a clock quickly ticks down. Through this system, you can lean on witnesses who seem to be hiding something, threatening them if they continue to hold back. Or, if all else fails, you can resort to physical violence (assuming that aligns with your own moral compass). Cleverly, the language used in these interactions draws on its fairy tale source material without ever feeling corny. So, despite including terms like Witching Well and Magic Mirror, the conversations remain emotionally charged – a tribute to the writing underneath and the resonant, enduring performances of its cast.

What’s most important is that your reactions here are not one-sided. As you make certain decisions, a threatening notification pops up stating that the character you’re interacting with will remember what you did (a staple of the genre). For example, say you make a promise to deliver something and don’t come through – well, they might have a few choice words for you the next time you meet. In this way, The Wolf Among Us is not just about solving the whodunit; it is also about choosing whether Bigby will shake off his villainous origins and prove his status as Sheriff and protector.

What’s neat is that the choice is mostly up to you. If you want to, you can cruelly push the citizens to get your answers, or try as often as you might to take their side, even if that means going against the legal institution to which you are professionally bound. By exploring this curious grey area, I began to understand why the residents of Fabletown act as they do, eventually allowing me to empathise with their actions, no matter how desperate or depraved they may be.

Amidst these social calls, you’ll occasionally control Bigby directly as he picks through dingy locations – such as dive bars and ornate offices – interacting with clues to advance the investigation. Just like in conversations, there are even more ethical quandaries to consider, like whether you should interrupt a wake like an unemotional jerk or kick in a door instead of knocking like a gentleman. As the confusing haze of right and wrong settled in, I frequently struggled to maintain my good-guy persona, especially when provoked. It would be so easy to smack an obvious bad guy in the head to get the answers I needed more quickly, but then wouldn’t I be just as bad as him?

Last but not least are the interactive sequences, which require you to complete a series of quick time events to survive some of the higher octane moments throughout the tale. You’ll rip out throats, jump across city blocks, and even set broken bones, with failure occasionally leading to a game over. Thankfully, frequent checkpoints drop you right back into the action if you miss a beat. The variety and frequency of these moments do well to keep you busy as you piece together the killer's identity, particularly as many of them arrive with mesmerising (and sometimes gruesome) animations.

Mirroring the flow of the original, The Wolf Among Us Remastered takes place over five episodes that are about two hours long (all included in this single package instead of being sold individually). For the most part, the choices you make feel impactful, which keeps the momentum chugging along nicely. That is, until the penultimate episode, when the pace suddenly dips and characters start needlessly reiterating their points of view. In earlier episodes, I’d look under every stone to figure out who the villain was, and I was fairly confident I understood what was going on by episode four, so everything slowing down right when I was ready for the payoff felt slightly disjointed.

I do get why they didn’t alter this chapter more substantially; this is a remaster, not a remake, and major story alterations could ultimately do more harm than good if handled poorly. Besides, there are still enjoyable chats throughout the episode, so the dragging is only a minor blip in an otherwise brilliant story, with a finale that certainly clawed me back. But when the rest of the tale is so tight and considered, it’s still a bit annoying to spend a couple of hours rehashing information you’ve already worked hard to uncover.

That dissatisfaction is also softened by the fact that the locations you visit are so intentionally designed and brilliantly reflect the personalities of their inhabitants. While Bigby's tiny, sparsely furnished flat fits with his lone wolf status, the local watering hole’s scrappy yet warm atmosphere matches its down-on-their-luck clientele. The remaster's design glow-up further bolsters that environmental storytelling, as everything from couch upholstery to pawn shop artefacts has been redesigned with far more detail. For instance, those familiar with Aunt Greenleaf's apartment will see that it’s now even witchier than before, with hanging tassels and strewn curios. Elsewhere, the infamous Puddin ‘n’ Pie remains seedy but stylish, featuring Art Nouveau-esque pendant lights and extravagant neon piping.

With so much effort spent on the look, it’s a shame that not every detail received the same touch, and that there are still a handful of friction points on the technical side. Characters sometimes move as if on a swivel, and Bigby’s animations when finding clues tend to feel strangely rigid and occasionally robotic. In the 2013 original, these blips were passable, but in a 2026 remaster, the awkward animations and jerky movements stand out. That’s not to say they are so distracting that they undo all the impressive polishing elsewhere, just that I wish those edges had been similarly smoothed over in order to soundly mark this as the definitive version of the tale.

Harkening back to a simpler era of DVD extras, The Wolf Among Us Remastered also includes a gaggle of bonus features for fans who might want a peek behind the curtain of development. There’s a toggleable Noir game mode that lets you play out the tale in black and white, a digital gallery that compares old art stills with new ones, plus developer and cast interviews about the making-of. As someone who likes to sift through every scrap of lore, I found these additions certainly fun to pilfer through… even if the interface is a tad old-fashioned, leaning more toward sentiment than usefulness. The most compelling add by far is a handful of playable deleted scenes that, while rough around the edges, highlight interesting plot threads and deviations that are exciting to experience after the final credits roll.

Phantom Blade Zero has spent years looking almost too good to be true, especially coming from a studio that's best known for its mobile games. That’s why it's just about the biggest compliment I can pay it that after 50 hours performing picture-perfect kung fu, it's exactly as fun to play as it looks. This effortlessly smooth action game has some of the most satisfying and well-tuned combat I’ve played in a long time, a surprising number of secrets to discover and quests to complete in each of its beautiful levels, and a neverending supply of clever encounters full of unbelievably awesome moments. Its convoluted story and occasional performance issues may not live up to that incredible action, but it nails just about everything else, and there were only a handful of moments where I wasn’t absolutely thrilled to be slicing my way through the ranks of the Wulin.

Phantom Blade Zero plays like something straight out of a wuxia epic. As a metal-as-hell martial artist of mysterious origins with only 66 days left alive to exact your revenge, you set out on an odyssey across the ruined lands of the Phantom World, facing off against all manner of beast and badass along the way. The story here isn’t Phantom Blade Zero’s strong suit as it tries to do a bit too much, shoving in a whole bunch of mystical jargon, dozens of characters, and a needlessly complex timeline, very little of which ultimately pays off anyway. In the first couple hours alone, so much time is spent toggling back and forth between present day, several years ago, several months ago, and several days ago that I was exhausted by all the exposition before I’d even faced my first real boss fight. That said, there are enough likeable characters along the way, especially your unflappable hero named Soul, that I was usually able to forgive it for occasionally wasting my time with unnecessary flashbacks and lengthy explanations.

Besides, you’ll be spending most of your time exploring the world and squaring off against enemies big and small, and it’s pretty clear that Phantom Blade Zero wants you to spend most of your attention on this part of the adventure. And that’s a good thing, too, because by God is it good. It only took a couple minutes for the precise parry and dodge mechanics to feel natural, and the nuanced but not-overly-complex system of weapons, combos, special abilities, and upgrades are rolled out at an extremely smart pace, all of which are easy enough to slip into like a tailored set of flowing wuxia robes. I’m a complete snob when it comes to the feel and pacing of combat in these types of games, so the fact that this immediately felt like reuniting with an old friend made it instantly compelling, and it’s one of those intangible things that’s very hard to get right.

Even more impressive is that not only does the combat feel good right away, it does so across dozens of weapons, each with their own unique moveset. This game that doesn’t just encourage you to change up your weapon loadout at regular intervals, it actually requires you to mix things up since swapping your active melee weapon is one of the ways you can restore your posture meter with a single button press. And since many enemies, particularly bosses, can instantly drain your posture with certain attacks, you’ll be swapping between different options with regularity, forcing you to commit multiple movesets and special abilities to memory. Conveniently, Phantom Blade Zero makes it extremely easy for you to reclaim and reallocate points invested in leveling up weapons, so there’s rarely any reason to stick with a set loadout anyway – especially since you always seem to find the exact tool you need right before entering an area or encountering a boss where it would come in handy. For example, I noticed that I found a water cannon weapon only a few feet away from an area that led to a fire-based boss. Nice.

Beyond that, you’ll unlock a bunch of additional tools like grappling hooks and bows, which have utility both in combat encounters and outside of them since you can use them to reach certain parts of the map or break through barriers that are otherwise impassable. There are also trinkets that offer interesting buffs, like a significant damage increase when you’re at full health, and a skill tree with perks that let you do things like execute a dodge while in mid-air or increase the number of healing items you can carry. There’s a surprising amount of depth to the things you can upgrade and the ways to customize exactly how your Wulin warrior does his thing, and I spent much more time than I typically do in these kinds of games just testing out different weapons and swapping my equipment around as a result. At the very least, it’s worth doing so just to see the unique execution animations when you finish off trash enemies.

You’ll have plenty of time to try them all out as you get your steps in across Phantom Blade Zero’s eight maps, too. Each one is filled with foes to take down, side quests to complete, chests to loot, and secrets to discover. A surprising amount of the places to go and people to meet are completely missable, including the entirety of a very cool questline that sees you getting trained by none other than Donnie Yen as the mysterious gold-masked man (which is actually one of PBZ’s strongest subplots). While most of the side quests are pretty straightforward missions to go somewhere and collect some stuff for a small reward, they gave me more reasons to spend time exploring every nook and cranny, which I was happy to do. And unlike lots of modern games filled with icons on the screen telling you exactly where to go and what to do, Phantom Blade Zero instead makes use of hand-drawn maps that only give you a vague idea of your location in relation to key landmarks, allowing you to explore and fill in the gaps on your own.

If there’s one thing that consistently mucks up this journey, it’s that Phantom Blade Zero suffers from some pretty bad geometry. Soul gets caught on surfaces all the time, and even the tiniest bumps in the road can stop him dead in his tracks, which is pretty hilarious for a guy who can jump 40 feet in the air while doing 19 backflips. Not only that, there are invisible borders all over the place that make exploration janky at times, especially when platforming sections ask you to get to a specific ledge, only for you to discover there’s an invisible wall and you fall to your death. I died nearly 200 times over the course of my playthrough, and roughly half of those deaths were me falling into a pit or getting caught in the environment until I was able to get myself killed or reload my save file. In one case, I even lost about 20 minutes of progress when my supposed martial master couldn’t escape from some bushes. Oh, and enemies occasionally get stuck in the environment too, which just makes fights where it happens feel so lame.

Despite that, Phantom Blade Zero’s superpower – the magic trick it performs time and time again – is its way of making you feel like you’re the only person in the world badass enough to withstand its utterly insane flurry of swords against godlike monsters like it’s nothing. The truth is that the melee dance of combat encounters is just so finely tuned, with every attack telegraphed just enough to give you exactly the time you need to react, aided by an almost imperceptible musical rhythm that grants you a certain level of precognition for what’s going to happen next. Once I synced up with its tempo, I started anticipating attacks before I consciously registered them, leading me to perfectly block some lightning-quick attack I hadn’t seen before. There’s nothing specifically special about my reaction time or skill with action games – rather it's a testament to how incredibly well-balanced and smartly designed these unbelievably sick fights are. It’s without question the thing Phantom Blade Zero does best, and it’s an illusion I fell for repeatedly, from the opening sequence all the way to the final battle.

Something I admire about Phantom Blade Zero’s difficulty is how consistently it feels exactly right – not too unforgiving, but it rarely lets you feel like you aren’t in danger of getting your butt kicked. I’m typically someone who relishes a challenge from games like this and so played Phantom Blade Zero on its hardest difficulty exclusively, but found myself beating just about every major boss fight in two or three tries, plus a good chunk that I cleared in one go – and I didn’t mind that one bit! It meant that I rarely saw enough of a boss to know every tool in their murder belt, and refreshingly made me feel like the one to be feared rather than the other way around. It’s pretty damn cool to enter a room and watch a 10-foot-tall badass with an eight-pack swing around a blade and think, “oh, man. This guy’s totally screwed.”

Part of the way this Goldilocks level of difficulty is achieved is due to the interesting decision to not make you repeat phases of a boss fight that you’ve already cleared. If you get through a first phase that just makes the bad guy mad and then get killed after he turns into an even more hulked-out psycho, you’ll pick back up at the top of that second phase. I’ve been known to get annoyed at having to replay the first phase of a boss fight a dozen times just to get another run at the more challenging part, to the point where multi-phase boss fights in general can get on my nerves these days. By removing this annoyance entirely, it got rid of a lot of potential friction with some of these encounters

It also allows for more freedom in how these encounters are designed, like moments where a boss uses a cheap move that one-shots you instantly if you get hit by it. Normally, including insta-kill moves like that is a good way to send me into a rage, but because my progress was almost never set back far enough to bother getting mad about, I felt a lot more lenient toward that kind of thing. I mean, let’s face it, that crazy attack where you get impaled on a giant spear, then set on fire and smashed face-first into the floor probably should kill you right away, so it’s pretty neat that Phantom Blade Zero found a way to make a devastating moment like that exciting rather than irritating.

It’s also incredibly impressive that throughout the 50 hours it took me to reach credits, as I fought dozens and dozens of bosses, I was continually surprised by the creative enemies it threw at me. Sure, there’s the occasional big-guy-with-a-big-axe or dude-with-sword-you-swear-you-fought-already, but these are by far the exception, not the rule. At one point I found myself wearing a lion dancer mask, jumping around on poles to collect heads of lettuce to power up my fire blast, and in another section I fought a posse of warriors who worked together as one unit to throw preposterously intricate attacks my way – the main threat to my life there was getting caught with my guard down because I was too busy cackling. The boss fights are so consistently interesting, memorable, and numerous that I felt utterly compelled to seek out each and every one of them, which led me to turn this first playthrough into a full-on completionist run to avoid FOMO.

When I previewed Phantom Blade Zero a little over a month ago, one of my primary concerns was how it would perform, and thankfully the version I played for this review had a far more consistent performance. The framerate was much steadier, with only a few times I can recall ever noticing issues during combat. That said, there’s one map in particular where the framerate was consistently pretty terrible, specifically on a part of the map where something seems to not be working right. This feels like the type of thing that could pretty easily be identified and fixed, so I’d be surprised if a patch doesn’t arrive at or shortly after launch, but it’s worth shouting out since I suspect there are other lingering issues hiding about.

I’m taking a look back at each of the core Grand Theft Auto games and replaying them in the lead-up to the arrival of Grand Theft Auto 6. What we’ll be putting together won’t be traditional re-reviews, and they won’t come with any new IGN score, but they will re-examine what made each GTA remarkable upon the time of its release. By the end of the project, using GTA’s previously six-star wanted level, you should be able to get an idea of where each of these games roughly rank in my long-term love for this series.

Our last stop in this series is Grand Theft Auto V: a game so nice, they released it thrice.

13 years. Three console generations. 230 million copies. Over $10 billion in revenue. The numbers that tell the story of Grand Theft Auto V’s longevity and success are wildly impressive and virtually unprecedented. The only other games even in the conversation are Minecraft or, depending on your criteria, about 200 different versions of Tetris. The numbers, however, don’t tell us why GTA V still sells more copies every few months than most games will ever total. They don’t tell us why people can’t get enough of it, and they don’t tell us why it’s special. So how did we get here? I guess it was the weather.

While GTA IV’s Liberty City sandbox was a dense, modestly-sized, and entirely urban environment, GTA V’s vision of the city of Los Santos was considerably more sprawling and varied. Yes, it retained a grid-like downtown district packed with tall buildings and a few particularly sizable skyscrapers, but Los Santos otherwise has a wholly different identity to that of Liberty City – and the map encompasses an area way beyond Los Santos itself.

The aesthetic shift is stark. Weather depending, the beating San Andreas sunshine gives vehicles a dazzling gleam, casts crisp shadows, and saturates the whole place with a sharp, sun-bleached vibe. It’s not the stylised orange tint that illustrated the oppressive heat of 1992 Los Santos in GTA: San Andreas, but it’s bright, effective, and a striking visual departure from the cold, drab, and gritty appearance of Liberty City.

It’s also such a different place to explore. The town is splintered into dozens of distinct districts that seamlessly blend from one to the next – from the affluent mansions of Vinewood Hills and Richman to the spectacle of Vinewood itself, glowing under a thin layer of grime and entertainment industry sleaze, and from the sun-kissed sand and beach bum backalleys of ageing Vespucci to the graffiti-tagged and struggling suburbs of South Los Santos.

Outside Los Santos, the countryside opens up to include desert, forest, mountains, and a handful of other small towns dotted around the map. It’s essentially a greatly expanded vision of the southern segment of GTA: San Andreas’ map – the section that features Los Santos, Mount Chiliad, and its immediate surroundings. It’s actually more than twice the size of GTA: San Andreas in its entirety, even if it doesn’t always feel that way, considering you can’t travel beyond the fringe of the county to find a fully-fledged San Fierro or Las Venturas. However, that’s more of a statement about how utterly special GTA: San Andreas’ map really is, rather than an indictment of GTA V in any real way.

That is, GTA V’s map remains a stunning achievement. It’s a world that – even after 13 years – I’m still spotting signs, storefronts, and subtleties that I don’t think I’ve overtly noticed before. Like all the best developers, Rockstar understands that true immersion emerges through accumulation: a single graffiti-tagged wall, bill-covered pole, or interesting piece of architecture might not be hugely remarkable on its own, but combined they become something else altogether. Funnily enough, a world full of thousands of such details can make an entire city so realistic you essentially stop noticing it. It’s almost counterintuitive; things don’t stand out, because they look so authentic, lived-in, and normal.

Streiht Up Menace

The smartest way Rockstar exploits this densely detailed map is through GTA V’s defining innovation: its trio of protagonists. You swap between Michael De Santa, a retired criminal becoming increasingly agitated at his otherwise comfortable suburban life; Franklin Clinton, an aspiring, small-time hustler looking for a real payday to get him out of his rundown neighbourhood; and Trevor Philips, a wildly volatile Canadian psychopath who was formerly partners with Michael.

The system is much more than a novelty. Switching between them allows Rockstar to prod us into different parts of the world to explore, without relying on a single character to experience everything. For a map this large, it makes a lot of sense.

For clarity, following the release of its single-player expansions The Lost and Damned and The Ballad of Gay Tony, GTA IV also ultimately featured three protagonists – and three different lenses through which we could view and interact with Liberty City. Similarly, it was a really smart way of squeezing more value out of the map, and drilling down on parts of it Niko Bellic’s story never really took him to. But while you could certainly regard this as a first draft of a multi-protagonist approach, you can’t switch between them in real time in GTA IV; you have to pause and load into the expansions separately.

In GTA V, the transition between characters is far, far more rapid, and occurs after just a brief zoom out and back in again, dropping you into Michael, Franklin, or Trevor’s life in the middle of whatever they happen to be doing at the time – which may well be dropping a man off a bridge. The transitions give the illusion that these guys continue to exist beyond the missions in which they appear.

Do It (’Til You’re Satisfied)

GTA V’s missions are typically far more varied and layered than those in GTA IV. After experimenting with it in The Ballad of Gay Tony, GTA V introduced mission checkpoints and finally shed what had arguably become the most frustrating characteristic of the series – the need to completely start from scratch after failing a mission.

This is what allows GTA V’s missions to be longer and regularly more wild than ever. With checkpoints as a safety net, Rockstar could really push the boat out with what it asked us to attempt – free from the sometimes debilitating concern that messing up at the last minute will result in a long drive and a lot of backtracking over things we’ve already done.

Of course, the highlight here is the focus on multilayed heists, taking the fan-favourite Three Leaf Clover bank robbery mission from GTA IV and blowing that concept out to make it the central pillar of GTA V’s campaign. There are multiple big scores that can be tackled in overtly different ways, something made easy to experiment with thanks to the ability to easily replay missions from a list of those you’ve previously completed. With the exception of The Ballad of Gay Tony, in past GTA games, the only way to play the missions again was to start over from the beginning.

The heists are where the three-character structure becomes most effective. We’re not just passengers on these huge marquee missions; rather, GTA V builds elaborate on ramps to these heists focused on planning and preparation which typically draw on the different skills and traits of Michael, Franklin, and Trevor. It gives the heists, and the campaign as a whole, a sense of scale and variety that would’ve been difficult to achieve through a single character.

Higher Love

Beyond the multiple protagonists and the escalation in mission variety, GTA V also made major changes to the car handling and significant refinements to the shooting. Vehicles are certainly more approachable to drive in GTA V than they are in GTA IV; they brake hard and respond sharply to steering input. The result isn’t superficial or overly light, but it does feel very grippy. It’s a handling model that I think is particularly suited to sure-footed sports cars, although I have to concede a part of me prefers the way older vehicles feel with the “slidey cars” cheat on. It’s just more drift-friendly.

In terms of vehicle variety, however, GTA V is very much a welcome shift back to the broad spectrum available in GTA: San Andreas after things were scaled back significantly in GTA IV. As a result, one minute you could be fanging an 18-wheeler down the freeway, and the next kicking tyres and lighting fires in a fighter jet. GTA V dialled things up rather than back, so go ahead: land that jumbo on the beach and escape via a jet ski. Why the hell not?

Combat was polished too, with more nimble movement and more dependable cover shooting. The highlight for me is the sound of firefights, as guns bark and bullets thunk into car panels. It’s brilliant stuff. The integration of the weapon wheel, which functions similarly to Red Dead Redemption and Max Payne 3, also means you can carry way more hardware – as well as multiple weapons within a single class. The weapon wheel stores all of the weapons you collect and you’ll never lose them, even if they run out of ammo or you get busted.

Party All The Time

When GTA V launched on Xbox 360 and PS3 in September 2013, both of those consoles were approaching the end of their lifespans. With the Xbox One and PS4 arriving in November that same year, you could probably make a strong case that GTA V felt like the last great statement of that generation. Many people did. However, I think there’s more to it than that.

A couple of weeks before its September 17 release, I was fortunate enough to conduct the world’s first hands-on with GTA V for IGN. Revisiting and playing it again so extensively this week has very effectively taken me back to how blown away I was in that moment. I was stunned by what I was playing, and utterly convinced GTA V was outright good enough to upstage both Microsoft and Sony’s new consoles. In fact, I wrote never mind November; the next generation will start when Rockstar says it does. In 2013, that was a comment reflective of just how ahead of its time I believed GTA V was; that it was simply streets ahead of its peers, squeezing next-generation scope and ambition out of a console that first launched in 2005. Simply put, it felt like a new benchmark for an era that hadn’t even officially arrived yet. On September 3, 2013 – two weeks before GTA V came out – maybe that’s a bold claim. But with new and improved versions of GTA V going on to loom large over the generation to follow, and then doing it all over again for the generation after that – all to the tune of 230 million copies – I don’t think it was ever an exaggeration.

Verdict

Grand Theft Auto V was a game so preposterously future-proof upon its 2013 launch on Xbox 360 and PS3 that its subsequent ports to modern machines remain the benchmark for open-world action-driving games. At the conclusion of this GTA Legacy Review project I find myself too emotionally attached to the PS2 pair of Vice City and San Andreas to push past my adoration for the style and soundtracks of those period piece classics and place anything above them but, make no mistake, there are very few games I’ve played more than GTA V. Combining an enormous and extraordinarily detailed world, three compelling protagonists, a thrilling set of varied missions and heists, and the foundation for a world of multiplayer that is simply a whole separate discussion, GTA V is the peak of the series. At least for the next few weeks, that is.

For more reflections on the incredible Grand Theft Auto series, you can read our new Legacy Reviews of Grand Theft Auto, Grand Theft Auto 2, Grand Theft Auto III, Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, and Grand Theft Auto IV.

This is a standalone review that covers only Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4's DMZ mode. You can find our campaign review here, with multiplayer impressions to follow after launch.

Extraction shooters feel a little like a modern trend, with some heavy hitters like Marathon and Arc Raiders shaking the table within the last year or so, but they’ve been a growing experiment in the shooter space for the past decade or so. Call of Duty dabbled in it with the original DMZ back in 2022 (you could argue they were late to the party then), and its return in 2026 is timely. But with so much high quality competition on the market, is it welcome? I’ve only dipped my toe in since its “pay to play on time” launch on Tuesday – about five or so hours of vehicle hijacking, SAM site hacking, and target elimination on my docket so far – but this bigger, better DMZ makes a great first impression.

The PvPvE dynamic of extraction shooters often lives and dies by how well the mission and level design encourages you to explore, rewards you for overcoming challenges, and guides you to interact with others in order to keep those spoils. The fictional Korean Hajin region your exploits take place in is well suited for this. Its dense pockets of urban development – a village in the north, the dangerous main city in the east, an isolated prison out west – are separated by rocky forests concealing all sorts of militarized checkpoints and other points of interest hiding loot to shove into your pockets. Parts of it look a little samey, the consequence of modern urban development where (at least from the outside) most buildings look the same, especially compared to some of DMZ’s big sci-fi competition that go above and beyond to look striking at first glance.

The map is so big that you could spend the entirety of your approximately half-hour runs in only a fraction of it. Battle Royales (like CoD’s own Warzone) move players around by having an encroaching death cloud forcing everyone into a smaller and smaller area. DMZ instead entices squads to adventure with its Dynamic Operations.

Dynamic Ops are spontaneous missions that appear as you travel across the battlefield which come in lots of forms, from securing a package to blowing up a target to escorting a VIP. Many of them are multi-stage affairs that have your fireteam moving from point to point as NPC enemies ramp up a more coordinated defense against you. These all get rewarded by supply drops that grant you loot, the value of which escalates based on how many of them you're successfully completing. I prefer this sort of objective chasing to the more standard task lists in other games like this (which also exist here, in fairness) because it makes for more engaging individual runs. I’ll prepare the best I can beforehand, but can’t be ready for every possible string of operations once I deploy.

There are many actions and events, like aforementioned supply drops, that are broadcast to everyone within earshot, hypothetically to tempt other players to be nosy (and potentially belligerent), but my skirmishes with others have been pretty limited so far. It’s still technically the early access period, so a wave of operators is set to crash against me in the coming days, but I found that most people have opted to mind their own business. It would be a mistake to confuse this passivity with pacifism though – this isn’t the Arc Raiders playerbase, which spent many of the opening months of that game more interested in helping than hurting. Whenever another player was in eye or earshot, it was assumed that a fire fight was to follow. It’s just unclear at this point how much of that was motivated by them wanting what I had versus just coincidentally being in the same place at the same time.

Hajin is also a pretty lively place. Enemy patrols speed down roadways, sometimes as lone jeeps and other times in large caravans. Helicopters and drones streak across the skies looking for interlopers like me, or occasionally other NPCs from rival factions tearing the map apart. A train runs on a schedule, and you can absolutely hitch a ride on it to get from place to place. Squads of enemies could be posted up anywhere. Weird exploding robot dogs can sniff you out as you slink from building to building. There was always at least a base level of tension with every step I took or round I let off, because there was just enough going on around me that any push I made could be the one that knocks over the house of cards I was hiding behind.

Clashes with the NPC denizens of the DMZ start pretty tame, but ramp up as you and your squad make yourself more notorious by killing enemies and completing objectives. As enemy units start to don armor, pull up in more durable vehicles, and use higher grade weaponry to take you down, fire fights can get desperate quickly. There's an instinct for people in pick-up groups to run out on their own, potentially to get first dibs on loot perhaps, and they almost always regret it – it doesn’t take much for enemies to get the drop on you, as you are only where you are and they are potentially anywhere and everywhere else.

Call of Duty’s top tier military shooter gunplay, toeing the line between the lethality of simulations and the snappy speed of arcadey romps, feels at home in DMZ as well. All of the new tweaks, like the way your weapons interact with your surroundings or movement adjustments, feel like it had roaming gunfights in an open world in mind. Being able to cancel out of mantles so you aren’t stuck in an animation when you least want to be feels like the kind of quality of life inclusion that Warzone demonstrated was needed for a long time. That said, the smattering of guns lack much in the way of real identities outside of the normal archetypal framings that have existed in gaming forever (shotgun, assault rifle, sniper, etc.).

You can also drop into story missions, which are quest chains that include more structure, resembling the campaign missions without the more cinematic story elements. These were pretty rowdy and unique, like an escort mission where our squad had to wheel an injured general out of hospital, bed and all, while enduring swarms of enemy combatants. There's a finite number of these and the possible rewards are more limited, with less incentive to explore the places around you and no enemy players to pirate or evade. But they serve as a great tasting platter of the pace Dynamic Ops keep and a good tour of the various locations you'll need to get familiar with on the map.

In between missions, you tend to all of your gear and progression from the safety of your FOB. Weapons, crafting ingredients, and consumables that you procure out in the field can be sorted through here, all of it put at risk when you equip it and redeploy. When you unlock the 3D printer and gunsmith areas, crafting new toys and upgrading weapons becomes the main way you spend your plunder to enhance your chances in Hajin. The value proposition of spending in-game money on upgrades is still hard to parse for me this early on. You can easily blow tens of thousands of won to trick out a weapon, but there hasn't been an obvious benefit to doing so that outweighs the risk of throwing all of that hard earned money down the drain if you die while using it. That’s the kind of knowledge that only comes with reps, I imagine.

Similarly, Operators have individual sets of trait trees that you upgrade with points they earn in the field. These don’t appear to be novel to any individual fighter; there's no Ghost-specific ability where he gets unique buffs while saying something very British. Instead there are pools of passive traits across three categories, all operators have a choice between the same handful of major traits, while the 15 or so minor traits that fill out the trees are randomized. What makes an operator special seems to be limited mostly to how they look and sound, which was a bit of a bummer.

These traits can be pretty meaningful in the field, though. One of the randomized traits I acquired for Valeria, Ammo Scavenger, doubled the ammo I got from ammo packs and made conserving my shots basically a thing of the past. The faster revive speed all operators have access to in their Survivalist tree has been the difference between clutch plays and total wipes on more than one occasion. There's definitely some kind of character building to be had here, but you really can’t know where it’s all leading until the next group of traits to choose from are revealed. And all that is before accounting for the fact that I'm not sure there's a way to reset or reallocate these trait points outside of abandoning the operator all together if you fail to extract with them (as opposed to spending some cash to get them back into the fight).

My first steps into the new Korean War have been intense so far, and I know I’ve only scratched the surface. Hajin is a region brimming with promise, even if most of it has the kind of design you have to live in for awhile to be able to find its unique charms. There are zones I’ve yet to see and some secrets I'm sure to encounter while I stalk, slide, and shoot my way through it. I’m sure it will get rowdier as the general public starts to pile into the servers on launch day, but for now I really dig the emphasis on the E in the PvPvE structure of these runs. Dynamic Operations have kept me moving and earning, while the factions at war in the region buzz around the map, at first dutifully watching their posts and eventually doggedly hunting me down.

I’m just as eager to spend more time out in the field as I am with my nose in the menus of gunsmithing and operator leveling to tease out what nuance there can be found between the battle. I’ll be back with my final, scored review of DMZ once I’ve done a whole lot more of both.

When it comes to translating One Piece into a video game, developers have typically taken the action route, leaning on flashy battles and wild Devil Fruit powers as pirates sail the high seas. That makes One Piece: Grand Gourmet’s Sanji-centric restaurant builder with the full roster of characters from across the series is an inspired choice. But while I adore the premise and appreciate revisiting the major locations and feeding nearly every character, working to win over residents of the Grand Line often feels as shallow as the lovestruck chef it's based around.

After a storm separates them from the rest of the crew, Sanji and Luffy find a restaurant ship being terrorized by a group of fake Straw Hat pirates who are posing as (and giving a bad name to) the restaurant of Sanji’s mentor, the Baratie. The duo sets sail to beat the fakers in culinary battles and clear the Baratie's name throughout the Grand Line and beyond. Taking a chronological path from the early Romance Dawn days in the East Blue all the way to a taste of the latest arc in the manga and anime, Grand Gourmet is packed with fan service in lieu of a meaningful original story. While I wish there was more meat on the bone, I enjoy Grand Gourmet embracing Sanji’s ethos that everyone who needs food will be fed, and it turns out, everyone the Straw Hats ever met is hungry.

Seafood, They Eat It

Your floating restaurant starts small and empty, with only a kitchen, a table, and Sanji’s chef skills to cook for hungry customers. Feeding people brings in valuable cash you can use to build out the restaurant with more tables, attractions, and decorations to improve the space's comfort. The more comfortable the accommodations, the happier the customers, and the more they will spend on food. Ironically, comfort is an unfortunate word for this metric. The crimes I must have committed to the concept of interior design have to be the most stressful and sloppy places to attempt to enjoy a meal. I love the idea of building a restaurant that pulls elements from various islands and lets you run wild with the decor, with Sanji cooking delicacies from across the globe, but that tantalizing proposition falls flat in execution.

Each new region brings a set of restaurant fixtures themed to the current story arc you’re sailing through, be that new flooring, lamps, benches, or landscaping. For example, the Thriller Bark set features horror-themed decor, plus a spot to plant the stray zombie friends who accompany the living visitors on the ship. Instead of rewarding you for making an aesthetically pleasing, well-organized dining room, Grand Gourmet doesn’t care about actual comfort. Instead, it incentivizes you to cram every square inch with lamps, benches, and shrubbery to boost stats. Neither Crocodile nor Eustice Kidd ultimately cares what their assigned seat looks like. And because of the limited space and clunky reorganization tools, these areas remained cluttered catastrophes that still somehow made a boatload of money.

Some elements also move beyond the typical restaurant vibe to make the ship a more appealing destination, but they aren’t without their own faults, either. My favorite fantastical attractions are meeting spots for giant sea kings or land crabs, which add cool elements to the ship's deck and showcase the eccentric animal designs of the One Piece world. It’s fun to collect fish to store in an aquarium or keep the pets of visitors in animal-friendly environments. However, once you have the features and creatures in place, there’s not much else to do with them. They’re yet another money-collecting attraction that doesn’t affect their surroundings besides providing a small bump of comfort.

Meal Prep

Like the interior design, the restaurant’s food has promising building blocks but lacks the finesse to make planning a proper meal worth the trouble. Sanji draws inspiration from his fellow crewmates and restaurant visitors, letting him make everything from simple dishes like rice or spring rolls to fantastical concoctions based on legendary characters or events from the One Piece world. Piecing together a balanced meal of up to four items lets you sell products at a higher price, and you can increase it further by pairing them with other food endorsed by the same Straw Hat crew member. Except, like the design elements, it’s disappointing that diners are never picky about what you specifically serve them; it only matters that you put the food out.

The best course of action is to serve what’s going to rake in the most cash every time, which the automatic meal tool already does effectively. I wish there were incentives for putting together a regional meal or a group-inspired platter to break up the monotony of only pairing the priciest products. This extends to the fake Baratie boss battles, which put Sanji in a Food Network-esque cooking competition, in which the automatic meals were still plenty successful. You can always put together bespoke plates of food and decorate a meal with different figures, plates, and utensils to spice up the meal-planning experience – there’s just not any reason to do so outside of having a little fun.

Learning to cook new foods is critical to building the restaurant's reputation and fighting fake Baratie, but whether or not you’ll unlock a crucial recipe is a crapshoot. Some foods are key to turning a customer into a fan of the restaurant, which lets them follow you to new regions, but it's nigh impossible to know who might know which recipe. Nothing points you toward who to impress and what food they are capable of inspiring. You have to be lucky enough to have the right items on hand, and the right people on board, to crack a novel recipe. Unlocking a specific food is often dumb luck, and while it can be frustrating to figure out, much of what you need falls into your lap at the right time. The moments when things don’t come together feel bad, though, especially when your favorite characters have to be left behind when the time arrives to move forward on the journey.

Pressureless Cooker

While Sanji handles the cooking responsibilities, Luffy sets out to explore with the rest of the pirate crew. The action itself is simple, but I looked forward to searching each new region because it’s one of the few tasks that enables the restaurant to consistently flourish in meaningful ways. These idle activities cost Berry, affinity points, or coins to send the crew to important One Piece islands, villages, and bases – the price is worth it, though, as exploration rewards you with new faces to visit the restaurant, giftable items to create new fans or increase profitability, and precious ingredients for new kitchen concoctions. Some rewards are level-gated while others require a specific crew member to bring them home, giving me a great reason to level up every member of the Straw Hat crew whenever possible (once you’ve found them somewhere in the vast ocean, that is).

Each crew member helps out the restaurant in a way only they can, and these are some of the best realized parts of Grand Gourmet. Sanji, of course, cooks all of the meals; Franky, the shipwright, creates new furnishings and can expand the square footage of the ship; crafty Ussop makes decorations and utensils to modify meals; and the swordsman Zoro trains the Straw Hats, allowing them to level up further for expeditions and other activities. My favorite crew member is the money-hungry Nami, who not only bailed me out financially multiple times but also negotiates a half-price discount on new amenities once a day, giving me a neat loophole to buy expensive ship upgrades on the cheap. Every member of the pirate crew brings a fun element to the ship, even if everything doesn’t necessarily help the cause of beating the fake Baratie.

Running a business isn’t cheap, especially when serving hundreds of hungry mouths in the middle of the briney deep, but I’m disappointed by the lack of pressure or punishment for spending far outside my means. Every shop, buffet, and employee hired to help the cause has daily overhead, which put me deep in financial trouble almost every day. (Don’t get me started on how much it was to add Blackbeard to the payroll.) Each sunrise, my Berry count went negative, and I had to crawl through the day. Because no friction challenged my poor financial management, I never needed to find a better way to run the company. The only time anyone cares how shallow my pockets are is when I'm spending money during the day, and even then, someone usually bailed me out immediately, filling my coffers far more than necessary.

With no reason to think too hard about the business management side of things, what has instead kept me playing Grand Gourmet (even after the close to 20 hours it took me to roll credits) is seeing damn near every single named One Piece character running around the ship and interacting with each other. It’s fun to see old comrades share a table or bitter rivals chat about characters they relate to. Some meetups are surprising and funny, like two villains discussing “work,” which may or may not involve poisoning people with synthetic Devil Fruits. There are also references to its own lack continuity, which make for interesting meetups between characters who may not exist in the same place or lifetime.

Each character has an affection rating that, when raised to a specified level, can give your staff new items to craft or more customers to invite, making them important to interact with beyond just the fun of having them aboard. Grand Gourmet looks great too, full of small details on the hundreds of character sprites that are truly impressive. Almost every character’s design is recognizable and unique, with many featuring special animations that bring each person to life, like Akainu firing up a giant magma fist while helping to create a new dish. These flourishes don’t happen often, but do inject some much-needed panache to the normally mundane way everyone strolls around.

While almost every character the anime has produced is here, it’s a shame the same can’t be said for the memorable music, voice cast, or sound effects from its long history. Instead, the soundtrack is limited to a handful of nondescript background themes on a short loop paired with a painfully small sample of sound effects, which makes it feel like an early iOS game (which isn’t a huge shock given this game is so deeply tied to developer Kairosoft’s mobile game lineage). A big part of One Piece’s appeal lies in its audio design and music, so it’s a bummer that Grand Gourmet has none of that.

To evoke the classics is also to hold yourself to the high standard set by them. With Final Fantasy Resonance bringing the venerated series back to its origins with turn-based combat, and wielding Square’s HD-2D art style to modernize nostalgia for the pixel art era, it plucks at something I've longed for as someone who grew up in the SNES generation. While I've expressed my love for the Octopath Traveler series time and again, Final Fantasy has of course crystalized into something meaningful over the past several decades. But as much as Resonance looks like a torchbearer for classic RPGs, it also goes for a style of storytelling that often rings hollow. So, I think of it as a game of moments – when a genre-fusing boss theme graces your ears, when you execute a turn perfectly and watch all your spells fire off with big damage numbers, and when a cutscene brings HD-2D to life in a way you've just never seen before.

Resonance adapts the story and characters from the now-shuttered mobile game Final Fantasy: Brave Exvius by packaging them into the structure of a traditional RPG; no gacha mechanics, no microtransactions. It's quite similar to what Square Enix did with Octopath Traveler 0 and it's a brilliant way to bring existing stories into a format I'm a lot more inclined to play. With that comes an overworld with towns to represent each region, random encounters, an airship for roaming free and discovering pieces of land that feel like secrets, and full voice acting throughout the main story.

It largely sticks to the events of the first season of Brave Exvius, which follows the knights from the Kingdom of Grandshelt, Rain and Laswell, the mysterious magical girl born from a crystal, Fina, along with additional friends on a quest to stop the armor-clad Sworn Six from destroying the world's crystals and plunging it into calamity. Of course, there's more beneath the surface. That said, a lot of dialogue and interstitial events have been added to fill out the journey, which took me about 45 hours to complete (including all of the side quests marked on my map and poking around the overworld for optional minibosses who offer intense challenges). While chunks of Resonance's story aren't very riveting, the production value here had me forgetting that this was built on the bones of a mobile game – not that Brave Exvius was any lesser of an achievement for what it was.

That retooling extends to gameplay, which retains concepts and mechanics that work extremely well as an engaging turn-based combat system – and hearing "turn-based" and Final Fantasy in the same breath after all these years released those good chemicals in my brain, too. This is not an ATB system with an active element, but a straightforward turn order along a timeline. And the way you either plan accordingly depending on which units are up or manipulate the order to your advantage had me employing similar strategies as I do in the Trails series or the Octopath Traveler games.

It's all about elemental affinities and staggering enemies in Resonance, however. Each party member has their own set of elements covered through magic spells or element-imbued physical attacks, but they also equip what are called Visions that function somewhat like a Job system directly inspired by Final Fantasy V. This is what provides flexibility in party composition, giving you the tools to make sure you either cover all the elements or go all-in on a specific type so you can streamroll bosses. While every attack chips at an enemy's stagger meter, hitting their weaknesses is, of course, the strategy demanded of you.

I'm of two minds with this system: while it’s nice to have flexibility as you swap Visions between party members to constantly change their overall movesets, it can sometimes trivialize your combat approach. For example, going into a water-themed boss fight, I knew purely electric builds were going to be the optimal strategy. So, while it was rad as hell to watch chunks of stagger and HP get chopped off as I spammed electric attacks, I often didn't feel the need to think much harder than that. Having the foresight to anticipate the right element before a fight isn't quite as rewarding as being pushed to scheme with what you have.

Compare this to the boost and break system of an Octopath Traveler, where the tools you're given are more dynamic and free-flowing even with elemental affinities involved, which then lets you get more creative rather than just having you hammer away with one specific element. I cruised through the first half of Resonance since most enemies and bosses were pushovers. But thankfully, things got tougher in the late game where they hit harder and inflicted more status ailments to work around. Key moments where I was challenged to think steps ahead culminated in some real hard-fought battles toward the end.

Overall, it still provides enough of the puzzle-esque tactical thinking that's required of a good turn-based RPG. Party members level up alongside their mastery of equipped Visions, but you have to manually rank up Visions then apply passive perks and support spells, which gets into some interesting buildcrafting that gives a little extra depth that mattered for those big fights. And I enjoyed Resonance's combat system because it still captures the satisfaction of teeing off on a staggered enemy with your nastiest spells, especially because their animations look so good and hit with emphatic impact.

Visions themselves are super fun to toy with because most of them are avatars of star characters from Final Fantasy's past. Their movesets call back to specific spells and signature attacks from their respective games, and it's nice to see parts of the series' history celebrated in a way that's integral to how Resonance plays. Staggering an enemy grants extra turns in a bonus phase, and staggering all of them (or a lone foe) leads to the sweeping stagger phase where everyone gets to pile on, which then concludes in a Resonance attack tied to a Vision of your choosing. I still find it jarring to go from beautiful HD-2D to a CGI cutscene (pulled from Brave Exvius) when summoning a Resonance attack, some of these are pretty cool, like big Shanttoto throwing a massive boulder of dark energy or Clive getting ready to hit L3+R3 to accept the truth. There's some wonderful pixel art around those cuts that look incredible, too, like Lightning, who gets a full animation set here – and it's lovely to see these characters recreated in that style.

Each is obtained by visiting shrines sprinkled throughout the overworld and going through a quiz-like dialogue sequence that walks through the events of their own stories (and beware, there are some major spoilers for Final Fantasies you have not played yet). I found this pretty cheesy at first, but it really grew on me as a reminder of how each entry captured something powerful that has stood the test of time. You never really know which shrine belongs to who, so when their music kicks in, it had me grinning ear-to-ear – and as someone who was deeply touched by FFXIV Shadowbringers, hearing "Tomorrow and Tomorrow" and recounting Y'shtola's ongoing story is a prime example of how sometimes Resonance got me.

More than the hard-fought battles against god-like beings, Final Fantasy has stuck around and won our hearts because of the stories it tells. And this is where I wrestled most with Resonance. The foundations of its story are quite solid and consistent as a classic Final Fantasy about the power of crystals that fuel these magical worlds and defeating evil to save the world against villains who reveal themselves to be more complicated by story's end. But it's always about how those stories get told and the impactful themes they explore along the way. Resonance has glimpses of hitting those same highs, yet I found long stretches of its storytelling to be quite underwhelming.

Taking the story of Brave Exvius and expanding on it was definitely worth exploring, but Resonance fills out a lot of that time with dialogue that feels like it was written for a middling young adult novel then crammed into a fantasy world. Not that fantasy stories need to be Shakespearean or high-concept, but much of Resonance reads like a script that didn't get punched up; overly talkative where it takes five lines for something that could've been said in one, and banking on a contemporary twee tone and some mustache-twirly villains. I love melodrama, long cutscenes, and tropes like the power of friendship, and Resonance has that for sure, but doesn't start dialing it in until late in the game.

But there's still something enticing about going on a journey with characters who overcome unbelievable odds. I came around on lead protagonist Rain and his brother-in-arms Lasswell because, while simple characters, they have a bond that riled me up for the conclusion. Fina turns out to be a little bit more than someone with a mysterious, dark past and was a compelling way to weave in more of the magical storytelling devices sensibly. The stern tactician Nichol and pink-haired mage Sakura turn out to be the better written characters who fit the RPG mold so well; and the emotional arc Nichol goes through is genuine and one of the few ways the story shows some depth. However, I struggled to care about the Sworn Six since a lot of their dialogue undersells their importance to the broader lore. And that Dr. Lazarov is an incredibly annoying throwaway who is nothing more than a mad scientist to roll your eyes at.

Resonance also struggles with narrative momentum because it's shrouded in a vagueness that blurs its throughline rather than luring you in. So, it relies more on the societal issues of each region – environmental tragedies, revolt against a tyrannical government, or underclasses being exploited. These stories are delivered decently on their own, but the thematic coherence didn't come until much later, and how it all tied together through the mysterious ways of magic was predictable, if not fine.

Now, it usually takes more than spectacle to win me over, but Final Fantasy Resonance is an exception. When it matters most, the strongest moments are uplifted with some of the best cutscene work in HD-2D, wielding camera movement in a 3D plane effectively as character sprites and pixelized special effects coalescence through fluid animation that conveys emotion dialogue wouldn't be able to capture alone. The art style may have been born out of nostalgia, but Resonance proves that we're past that point and it can lead to new, evocative ways of creating worlds and elevating stories beyond the sum of their parts.

Music also plays a large role in why I look back at my time with Resonance fondly. It may be the expectation for a Final Fantasy game to have an amazing soundtrack, but the way certain town themes employ instruments that instill the feeling of a brutal, industrialized empire or a mystical city floating in the sky is magical. From the normal battle theme to the different tiers of bosses, I realized that Brave Exvius' great soundtrack was here all along and played off of many of the musical themes attached to the series. Remixing a dungeon theme into a bouncy electronic tune was like having fire come out of my headphones. And my jaw dropped when I heard a boss theme remix that had piano jazz fused with orchestral metal, a double bass drum pedal, and a latin choir that in a way that came together in unexpected harmony; it's such an impressive song I still can't get out of my head. Sometimes music resonates more powerfully than words, and it's one of the things I'll remember most.

This review covers Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4's campaign and traditional multiplayer PvP modes. You can find our standalone DMZ review here.

Another year, another Call of Duty. This time it’s developer Infinity Ward’s turn to deliver the next chapter in its Modern Warfare saga, and it does so impressively in an all-action campaign full of twists and turns. Moments of consequence are aplenty in a particularly dark tale of personal vendettas and explosive invasions, played out across a set of missions that largely hit the mark. The single-player shines, then, but the multiplayer portion of Modern Warfare 4 is quite a bit duller. Solid foundations and a novel new arena ensure there’s plenty of fun to be had, but the majority of its new modes and maps do little to excite due to some unimaginative design choices and awkward spawn positions. The combination of these two halves is a much-needed reminder of what Call of Duty can be at its best, even if it can’t fully recapture the heights of its glory days.

Modern Warfare 4 Campaign

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4's campaign has been set an unenviable task: tie the bow on a seven-year-long series of stories I’d politely describe as “uneven.” To its credit, it handles this challenge well, delivering a genuinely exciting string of missions that are great when they focus on what is new, rather than getting bogged down in the past. It’s the best Modern Warfare has been since its 2019 reboot by quite some distance, and a reminder of how good Call of Duty can be when the people making it are given time to cook.

This collection of blockbuster sequences that has clearly been built from the ground up as a single-player experience is in stark contrast when compared to 2023’s woeful Modern Warfare 3 campaign, arguably the low point of the entire series. A mishmash of multiplayer maps mixed with slivers of near-incomprehensible story, I don’t envy Infinity Ward having to pick up from where it left off. The studio has done about as good a job as it could, though, thanks to a smart structure which splits the two halves of this story until they inevitably collide, providing both variety in mission design and tone.

Captain Price has been at the centre of the Modern Warfare plot, and that doesn’t change too much here. Following the disastrous finale of Modern Warfare 3, he’s now on the run, acting as a lone wolf, wanted by the very people he used to work for. His half of the story is initially tied up in knots so twisted even Alfred Borden would have trouble with them. Infinity Ward’s answer? Take a machete to much of it and kill off any characters introduced in the past two games that it deems superfluous. It’s almost an admission of guilt over how poorly these people were handled in the past, but it does give a sense of finality to this seemingly saga-ending chapter.

A tale of string-pullers and warmongers, Price’s story takes place over the course of five days in the run-up to the North Korean invasion of South Korea (plenty more on that in a moment). The former SAS captain has the blinkers on for his nemesis Makarov and whoever his boss may be. It’s fair to say that the Russian terrorist is not close to being the well-developed threat from the original Modern Warfare 2, which feels like a wasted opportunity to revive a famous villain. In his place steps Mads Mikkelsen’s The Archer.

For the most part, Price’s chapters of the story play like a Bond movie, packed full of parkour escapes, car chases, and stealthy infiltrations. Mikkelsen’s casting only reinforces this feeling, and while he’s classically unsettling in his performance, his character was never given quite enough screen time for me to grow a connection with him. As such, while the missions that make up Price’s side of the story are fun, it comes across as the weaker half. Infinity Ward clearly wants Price to be the strongest emotional bond to the player and for his personal vendettas to feel like our own, but, in truth, many more of the missions are dedicated to the Korean conflict. Incidentally, this is also where I found a lot more of the engaging storytelling to be found.

Modern Warfare 4’s 16 missions took me around the world as well as back and forth in time. The Korean invasion takes place in the “present day” as I followed a squad of soldiers from the moment war is sparked to its conclusion, while we switch back to Price every now and then as he hunts for whoever is behind the plot in the preceding week. These time shifts also allow for a clever mixture between traditional military missions and behind-enemy-lines ingenuity. For example, an early level has you fistfighting and gun-fu-ing your way through a New York nightclub as Price puts on his best John Wick impression. The next, you’ll be holding off paratroopers on the streets of Seoul armed with a mortar. While the Korean sections are generally louder and more traditional boots-on-the-ground “Call of Duty” in their approach, it came somewhat as a surprise to me that it managed to build such a strong connection to its playable character.

There’s an endearing nature to Young Mazino's Park Hyun Jun. Just as Farah did in 2019’s reboot, he gives an emotional anchor to the story that offsets the gruff military types nicely. The same can be said for his whole squad, a mixture of Korean and US soldiers who maintain a well-balanced mixture of levity and seriousness. Their bonds rooted me in its events well, and I actually cared what happened to them by the end. In general, I found the Korean side of things much more compelling and ended up caring about the likes of Park, his friend Jae, and their northern counterpart, Ko, a lot more. While Mikkelsen’s The Archer can come across as a moustache-twirling, nuclear weapon-wielding caricature at times, Modern Warfare 4 actually does a good job of bringing depth to the North Korean threat instead of painting each and every one of its leaders and people following their orders in one shade of evil.

The general direction of the story may not surprise you, but there are some engaging character moments that the past couple of Modern Warfare installments have desperately lacked. One such moment happens during one of the campaign’s standout missions: Stranded. As is the way these days, Call of Duty is now an interconnected beast, so this particular mission actually gives you a taste of Modern Warfare 4’s DMZ extraction mode as it takes you deep behind enemy lines. Due to your stranded nature, you have to go out into the wild and forage for ways to rebuild your arsenal by raiding outposts or heading to mystery markers on the map, then head back to the safety of your basement hideout to craft new equipment. What could so easily come across as a glorified, crowbarred tutorial does actually fit in and play around with the larger story in interesting ways.

Tasked with three main objectives to complete in any order you choose across a large snowy map, Stranded embraces freedom of approach as few other missions do. You could fast travel between the three key locations and move on with the story quickly if you’d like, or spend a couple of hours unlocking each of its snow-covered secrets, ranging from exotic weaponry to keypad-based puzzles to solve. It’s an evolution of Black Ops 6’s Phantom Pain-inspired open zone mission, trading in the sand for a much cooler climate that I enjoyed skulking around with my thermal-scoped sniper rifle. It’s elegantly folded into the campaign, too, making each of its chosen mechanics make narrative sense while also being very fun to play through.

This expansive chapter was the standout mission across the roughly seven hours it took me to complete the campaign, alongside Korea’s answer to D-Day – opening with a beach landing from hell where Infinity Ward’s phenomenal sound design gets to shine – and an airfield escape in which you can dynamically switch characters at will to hold off your attackers. The latter contains a great sense of spectacle that felt like pure Call of Duty at its core. These huge-scale operations are often the highlight, with the amount of moving parts at times simply astonishing. It’s a full-blown campaign crafted to be played like one, not a hodgepodge of other modes where the story feels held together with sticky tape. A sweet relief when compared to what preceded it three years prior. That being said, while the quality of the missions is consistently very good, there isn’t a genuine all-timer here to rival the likes of All Ghillied Up or Clean House, either.

That consistency only stumbles once or twice, usually when forcing you into some unforgiving stealth segments or asking you to engage in its imprecise counter-based melee system. First-person thumping can be disorienting at the best of times, and it's not done particularly well here. This is made even more frustrating by the fact that it often rears its head during some of the story’s key moments, meaning having to retry these brawls lessens the impact of what should feel like emotional hammer blows. Rest assured, these are rare occasions, though. For the most part, I enjoyed the mixture of new ideas being blended with age-old Call of Duty staples. Chopper gunner raids, night vision ambushes, and explosive tank sections. They all still hit the mark. Especially when soundtracked by some fantastically emphatic music at times — the Korean battles in particular are scored with some adrenaline-fuelled electronic orchestrations.

The gunplay is refined, packing the sort of punch we’ve come to expect from Infinity Ward, but still shouldn’t be taken for granted. Movement is slick, being able to transition from a sprint into a slide, before mounting onto a pillar and peeking around the corner to pop a head peeking out of cover. No, enemy AI may not be the smartest, but that doesn’t mean you should play them for fools. Even on regular difficulty, get a little cocky and opt for the run-and-gun approach and your health bar won’t last too long. Managing your ammo, armour plates, and cover is needed, especially towards the campaign’s latter missions. Enemy variety may be limited, but a few heavily armoured brutes caused me quite a bit of trouble when trying to stay out of the blast of their shotguns in some tight underground tunnels. Nothing a few stolen explosive shells of my own couldn’t eventually sort out, though.

Modern Warfare 4 Multiplayer

There’s always a slight adjustment period when switching from Black Ops to Modern Warfare multiplayer. After two years with BLOPS, I trained my brain to expect a longer time to kill when playing Call of Duty, while Modern Warfare is traditionally the faster shooter by comparison. It's somewhat surprising, then, that Modern Warfare 4 actually feels slower than either Black Ops 6 or 7, but I'm by no means against this. That longer time to kill and a few extra bullets needed to defeat an enemy (or deplete your own health bar) lead to more thoughtful encounters. I've enjoyed being able to dip in and out of duels rather than it feeling like whoever spotted the other person first automatically wins.

A similar thing can be said for movement, which is pleasingly simple. There's no tac sprint, omnimovement, or wall-running to worry about this time, which I find a real blessing. Yes, some of these abilities could result in impressive John Woo moments, but more often they got frustrating in the heat of the action as half of the enemy team flew about the place in a slapstick manner. I appreciate Modern Warfare 4's commitment to placing its excellent gunplay front and center instead. Each gun feels great to wield, with assault rifles once again often coming out as my primary weapon of choice, with the occasional foray into SMGs and shotguns for some of Modern Warfare 4’s smaller maps.

Speaking of maps, there’s one new star of the show: Kill Block. An advanced, scenery-shifting military training facility, its unique quirk is that each time you play it, things will be different. The arena is split up into three sections, each randomised at the beginning of every other round of Gunfight — the tense, one-life-only team-based mode that has been a personal favourite ever since its 2019 introduction. For example, the match could begin with a smattering of shipping containers in the middle third of the map, only for that to change to the helicopter wreckage of the classic COD map, Crash, just minutes later. It’s a smart way to both keep each battle fresh and weave nostalgia and familiarity into its randomness. Plus, the way each component’s selection is presented as some sort of one-armed bandit of war spinning into position is good fun, too.

For now, only Gunfight is playable on Kill Block, in a fantastic 10v10 version, which gloriously mixes in early round chaos with nail-biting tension as the seconds tick down and only a few players remain. Over time, the more traditional multiplayer modes such as Team Deathmatch and Kill Confirmed will be added to the mix, though, and I can see the map becoming a real fan favourite by the end of Modern Warfare 4’s year-long cycle.

That’s good news, because I can’t say that the rest of the 12 maps included at launch grabbed my attention in anywhere near the same way. The tight streets of Mumbai can lead to some fun fights by offering a clear and easily readable three-lane structure, but Cachette’s central courtyard is a deathtrap surrounded by high windows that make it a nightmare to run through. Then there are the ones that elicit zero emotion from me at all, such as the rather nondescript snow of Sentry and industrial brown factory of Coal, neither of which have got me rushing back for more just yet.

Most of these maps suffer from what feel like significant spawning issues at this early stage, too. There’s no real pattern to where you start off after dying. Often I feel like I’m dumped into a corner of one that’s nowhere near any of my teammates and left to fend for myself, or sometimes right into the line of fire of an enemy. It can lead to a fairly miserable time if you get caught in one of these loops when several respawns in a row leave you up against it.

It’s always a challenge each year for Call of Duty’s developers to introduce new maps to the mix when so many classic crowd pleasers already exist, so it's a credit to Infinity Ward that Kill Block already feels like it could be heading in that direction, but I would have liked to see a bit more of that same innovation. I already have one eye on that incoming Shipment 24/7 mode just days away, craving some of that tight-quarters mayhem which never grows old. I’m glad it's here, but it doesn’t necessarily show a great sense of confidence in the launch set of maps.

One thing you’ll struggle to complain about is the sheer amount of stuff packed into this game. Just in multiplayer alone, there are many, many modes to pick from, ranging from core staples to riffs on other online first-person shooters. One of those is Collateral, a Search and Destroy-esque plant and defuse mode that pits attackers against defenders over the course of several rounds, with added buy stages like Counter-Strike or Valorant. It sometimes manages to capture the suspense that those other games thrive on, but lacks the tactical edge that makes them special. When the objective is prioritised, I enjoyed myself, but too often it devolves into a 5v5 version of Gunfight where the bomb is largely ignored in favour of just killing the other team. Call of Duty players (myself included) have never been objective-minded, so this isn’t a huge surprise, but it does hamstring the mode quite a bit.

Where I could at least find some fun in Collateral, I can’t say the same thing about Frontline — a spawn-kill hellscape. Basically Team Deathmatch but with fixed spawn points rather than ones that rotate around the map based on player position, it can lead to some particularly one-note matches. A brief invincibility window does prevent you from being gunned down straight away each time you spawn, but it doesn’t fully stop what I largely found to be a frustrating experience, whether you’re on the good or bad side of the deal. Either you’re well-positioned near the enemy spawn point and find yourself mindlessly shooting fish in a barrel or face the humiliation of running into a hail of bullets a few seconds after each death. It’s Edge of Tomorrow without any of the fun sci-fi story or Tom Cruise shouting at you.

Ground War is a returning mode that I also don’t ever have the desire to play. Large-scale 24v24 battles on huge maps full of tanks and other heavy vehicles with three points for your team to capture; it really is just a poor man’s Battlefield. Other than serving as a useful place to level up sniper rifles and RPGs, it’s not somewhere I go if I’m actually looking for a good time, as has been the case ever since its introduction in the 2019 reboot. I come to Call of Duty to play Call of Duty — fast-paced, small map action that I get a quick hit of dopamine from.

Modern Warfare 4 is at its best when it’s doing just that, building upon the sturdy foundations of what made the series the online multiplayer giant it is today. Whether that reminds us of the hours we lost in our teenage years to Deathmatch in Shipment, or innovates by remixing those memories through Kill Block’s novel approach to map design. I don’t come to Call of Duty to play poor imitations of Counter-Strike or Battlefield. It feels a little picky to complain about the sheer amount on offer, but it does feel like Infinity Ward is trying to have its cake and eat it too. I’d rather have one slice of amazing-tasting cake than bites of eight different ones if half haven’t been baked properly.

I’d be lying if I said I haven’t been having fun playing Modern Warfare 4, though. There’s enough good stuff here for me to focus on what I enjoy; it just so happens to be that outside of one map and one mode, all of that is stuff that existed years prior. It’s largely familiar, comfortable, and the thrill of unleashing a powerful killstreak in Deathmatch or pulling off a heroic comeback in Gunfight still hits as it should. The fundamentals are as strong as ever, but what’s new fails to build upon any of it in interesting ways.

Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun 2 wastes no time hooking you into its blistering, blood-soaked world. Seriously, there are only a few minutes of speedy exposition before you're sent diving through a battered spaceship, hurling bullets and slicing rogue enemy agents to pieces – all while shouting sanctimonious battle cries as innards slosh against the tarnished metal flooring. With a breakneck pace and plenty of pixelated gore, it's clear developer Auroch Digital isn't messing with the magic in this first-person shooter sequel. Instead, the team has elevated the original's frantic run-and-gun style with boosted enemy counts and demanding level objectives that'll have you shouting 'For the Emperor.'

Boltgun 2's story kicks off with a literal bang; your ship is destroyed at the hands of the Great Daemon Vashtorr. Hungry for revenge, you respond (somewhat reasonably by Warhammer standards, might I add) by launching a brutal intergalactic campaign, fighting through bile-filled swamps to demonic dwellings, frozen facilities, and beyond. Joined by a sassy Servo-skull companion to guide you through the crimson haze, your mission is all about survival, clearing out hordes of vicious heretics while collecting enough ammunition and health kits at a cadence that's unapologetically old-school. It's repetitive by its very nature, and the story can feel a bit like Warhammer word salad at times. Still, thanks to the mesmerising enemy designs and level variety, as well as the breakneck pace, it's easy to enter a flow state of slicing and dicing through some of Games Workshop's most imposing baddies.

There are four difficulty options to work through, ranging from Low, where your health is bolstered and your damage increased, to Exterminatus, which is about as terrifying as the term would imply. For those looking for more control, you'll also have your pick of game-modifying settings like the ability to disable head bobbing and screen shake, or toggle on invulnerability, too. While I opted to play on the recommended Medium difficulty – with the campaign taking around eight or so hours per protagonist – it's nice to see Boltgun 2 accounts for all kinds of player preferences here.

While there's a lot to shout about, my favourite new feature in Boltgun 2 is the addition of a second playable character. Joining the first Boltgun's Space Marine Malum Caedo is the badass Sister of Battle, Nyra Veyrath. While both are fanatical in their devotion, as often heard in their intense, toggleable taunts, the major difference between them lies in their combat styles. Where Caedo is akin to a hulking mech kitted out with a buzzing Chainsword and frag grenades, Veyrath is much more nimble, wielding a Powersword and hefty Melta Bomb. They feel pleasantly distinct in both their personalities and weaponry. Initially, I was enamoured with Veyrath's Fervent Slide attack, which lets you blitz forward and bisect any fodder in your way, but in playing Caedo's campaign, I was equally enamored by his Chainsword Lunge, which felt more decisive and controlled, great for dealing with squishy hordes. All this to say, there really is no wrong option when choosing your warrior, and the thrill of playing as either adds to the replayability of Boltgun 2, further emphasized by the campaign's branching level options.

As you complete levels, you'll make cartographical choices throughout Boltgun 2's campaign to determine your path forward. Alongside a few optional side missions, there are specific battle locations you'll have to choose between as you advance to the big finale. On my first playthrough as Veyrath, I had to choose between dropping into a dense rainforest overrun with blight or working through a fortified beachhead with enemies hidden in sandy trenches. While I initially opted for the former, it was energizing to know that on a second playthrough, not only could I choose an alternative character with a unique loadout, but I would also have entirely new levels waiting for me.

This dynamism extends into Boltgun 2's mission objectives, too, which often have you descending into a scourge-filled hellhole to manage a few rounds of gladiatorial combat and heroically escape. It sounds familiar on paper, but each level has tricks up its sleeve. In one location, I was blowing up blood tanks to weaken a Daemonic construct, and in another, I was working my way down a vertical chamber, breaking through panes of ice to drop enemies into the blades of a whirring fan. The surprising diversity of what you're tasked with does a good job of keeping progression fresh, mitigating the dreaded shooter fatigue from setting in.

That's not all, though, as each map has location-specific quirks to consider. Alongside Purges, which occur periodically and lock you into areas until you've painted the floor red, certain combat conditions introduce more complexity. This time around, you aren't always alone in battle, and are occasionally joined by friendly soldiers who help keep morale high and serve as convenient meat shields when the moment arrives. Additionally, there are plenty of physical hazards, from flaming pools to thick fog that clouds your vision. These moving parts not only amp up the chaos but also create ingenious cover for Boltgun 2's well-hidden collectibles: the combat-buffing Secrets and collectible Seals.

Though for all its guts and glory, Boltgun 2 unfortunately suffers from a handful of technical issues. Enemies can occasionally forget they're in a holy war and wander around idly like NPCs. While hardly a threat to survival, it does take you out of the action to see a roughed-up creep dawdling. Elsewhere, the infamous Purges sometimes wouldn't end, and despite killing every heretic, I found myself stuck waiting for an exit to unlock… but it never did. The movement isn't completely airtight either. It's suitable for dancing around a combat arena or jumping between and scaling platforms, but it can feel slippery when tackling the more ambitious platforming challenges that arrive in the latter half of the campaign. Though it's a list of annoyances that can give cause for concern, these issues are by no means dealbreakers when set against the slick shooting and spectacle that's so distinctly Warhammer.

I have to hand it to the art team at Auroch Digital because beyond the frenetic combat, Boltgun 2's strongest asset is by far its retro aesthetic. I've spent hundreds of hours toiling over miniatures and painting intricate details to make them pop, so perhaps I have a soft spot for these characters, but Boltgun 2 captures that digitised figure look with sharp precision. The way they appear and move fits the nostalgic boomer shooter dressing perfectly. And, while it's hard to pick favourites, I can't deny that the visually assaulting Daemonettes and the towering, beast-riding Bloodcrushers were particular standouts, their violent animations and vivid palettes both delightful and terrifying. If you pay attention, there's personality embedded in almost every character model, too. As you approach them in battle, you might notice a Tormentor flicking a knife around or a tiny Nurgling mooning you mid-attack. These kinds of fine details aren't necessarily essential and could easily be overlooked, but their incorporation speaks to an attention to detail at the core of Boltgun 2 that makes it such a compelling extension of the Warhammer universe.

The atmosphere is further heightened by adrenaline-bolstering, context-specific barks that your chosen protagonist can let off at the tap of a button. Rahul Kohli delivers an impressively commanding performance in his reprisal of Caedo, and Alanah Pearce's Veyrath is fittingly vicious. Similarly, I enjoyed the writing behind the aforementioned Servo-skull, my eternally irreverent companion who would lighten tricky combat situations with lines like, "Blood Ingress detected in the ocular module." It's one thing to engage me with combat; it's another to get a genuine laugh out of me – and Boltgun 2 manages to do both.

I’m taking a look back at each of the core Grand Theft Auto games and replaying them in the lead-up to the arrival of Grand Theft Auto 6. What we’ll be putting together won’t be traditional re-reviews, and they won’t come with any new IGN score, but they will re-examine what made each GTA remarkable upon the time of its release. By the end of the project, using GTA’s previously six-star wanted level, you should be able to get an idea of where each of these games roughly rank in my long-term love for this series.

Today it’s time to revisit Liberty City in Grand Theft Auto IV.

Grand Theft Auto IV is smaller than GTA: San Andreas. Significantly so, if you exclude water, as its land area is reportedly around only one-quarter the size of San Andreas’s physical real estate. GTA IV also has markedly reduced vehicle variety, with much fewer of them overall and zero car customisation. It has no asset management, less mission variety, no RPG-inspired skill system, a pretty paltry list of cheats, and the only thing you can alter about lead character Niko Bellic is his outfit. In fact, if you weren’t around for the arrival of GTA IV, I think it’s fair enough that you may actually find yourself a little confused about its place in the series pantheon. That is, how could this apparently smaller game with overtly fewer features than its predecessor have instantly become not only the highest-rated GTA in the history of the series, but one of the highest rated games of all time, full stop? Well, the devil is in the details. Countless, unprecedented, incredible details.

For all his faults as an Eastern European war veteran with a shady past and a short temper, who may or may not have spent 106 minutes trying to kill Owen Wilson back in 2001, Niko Bellic has actually carved out a place as one of the most likeable and accessible characters in the franchise. Lured by his cousin Roman’s lies of wealth and opportunity, it’s easy to both sympathise with Niko’s disappointment at his first encounter with the American Dream, and share in his distaste for the various bastards of Liberty City who seek to exploit him.

Released in 2008, GTA IV was the first game in the series to be set in the present day since GTA III. In 2026, it’s an interesting snapshot of the world just prior to the smartphone takeover – back when the internet was still a destination you took time out to visit on a computer, social media was still a novelty rather than the worst thing to happen to humanity since disco music, and your radio would always let you know you were about to receive a mobile phone call. However, despite the 18 year gulf between its setting and today, GTA IV doesn’t feel remotely as retro as something like GTA: Vice City did in 2002 – even though there were only 16 years between its setting and the time of its release. The aesthetic distinctions between the ’80s and 2000s are, of course, profound. What are the visual differences between the 2000s and now, other than the fact The Rock used to have hair? It’s not a long list. Monoculture is dead, fashion is looping, and – as remarkably detailed as GTA IV is – I don’t think there’s anything Rockstar could have done to dodge this phenomenon, Dwayne Johnson’s shaven skull notwithstanding.

Flashing Lights

However, even though the feeling I glean from GTA IV being a depiction of a specific moment in time may not be as strong as that elicited by either GTA: Vice City or GTA: San Andreas, there is no denying what a victory it is in terms of its capacity to represent a true sense of place. GTA IV’s Liberty City wasn’t just one of the most convincing virtual cities of its generation; I honestly don’t think it’s an overstatement to say its commitment to tiny details still stands up to scrutiny today.

Revisiting GTA IV’s Liberty City in 2026 – a game that my Xbox 360 play data indicated to me I haven’t touched in around 14 years – I’m immediately reminded of how fastidiously crafted every corner of this world is. Yes, it’s a smaller environment than that of San Andreas, but it’s one that is so much more crowded, dense, and dripping with depth. It’s more immediate, more authentic, and more intimate than anything that came before it – and it’s still a more credible and convincing city than those in most of the open-world action games I’ve played since.

Strolling though Star Junction – Liberty City’s glitzy Times Square proxy – I find myself in tourist mode. I’m too engaged by the fact there’s something to see, read, or admire everywhere I point the camera to be distracted by the temptation of causing anti-social chaos. Hoofing it through Hove Beach – inspired by Brooklyn’s Brighton Beach – and I’m once again impressed at how much mileage Rockstar extracts from the seemingly mundane. Garbage strewn on the sidewalks. Individualised storefronts that are faithful to the demographics of the area and are never repeated elsewhere around the city. Places with stories you’ll never get to the bottom of. Like, who is Mikey Pissroll, and how much better at pool is he than Anal Alan?

The architecture, the lighting, the lived-in grime; Liberty City here feels more than real. It feels aged. Rockstar didn’t just build streets; it built them, and then assaulted that asphalt with decades of simulated wear. As a result, those streets are a patchwork of potholes, road plates, and sporadic strips of more recently re-surfaced segments. The custom signwork, the bespoke graffiti – the fact that no piece of the city looks like any other. A multitude of elements combine to create what was an unprecedented sense of immersion at the time, and absolutely still holds up today. Sure, there’s an unavoidable murkiness to playing GTA IV on original hardware like the Xbox 360, where you’re obviously beholden to the resolution limitations of its age. It results in a soft and rather muted image, and one that’s admittedly exacerbated by the overly cool and slightly washed out colour palette Rockstar opted for. However, it’s still a stunning place to simply explore, whether walking, driving, or using public transport – which is a viable and realistic way to move around this tightly-packed urban metropolis.

One Vision

While Rockstar was committed to rebuilding its famous riff on New York City as realistically as possible within the fidelity it could muster at the time, it also placed an enormous emphasis on physical realism. The beating heart of this approach was NaturalMotion’s procedural character-animation technology, Euphoria – an animation and physics solution that completely transformed how people moved, reacted to impacts, and interacted with their surroundings. It wasn’t just a trivial technical flourish; it fundamentally altered the way the game felt to play, whether you were cutting enemies down with a barrage of bullets, or mercilessly bouncing them off the bonnet of an automobile. It reinvented GTA.

Traditional animation relies heavily on pre-authored movements, with developers creating and canning specific sequences that characters will perform in particular circumstances. That is, fill them with lead and they’ll sink to the ground the same way every time. Strike them with a car and they’ll fly up and flop down identically, regardless of the forces at work. Euphoria does away with all of this and, in 2008, it felt like a stunning glimpse of the future. Ditching those pre-determined animations, characters in GTA IV react realistically – both based on the forces impacting them, and the world within arm’s reach of them. A spray of gunfire may stagger an enemy into a railing behind, which they can tumble over dramatically. A well-placed shot may cause someone to lose their balance and fall off a ledge. Clipping someone in a car will skittle them in a totally different way to clobbering them head-on. One too many drinks may make putting one foot in front of the other temporarily tricky.

The results are often wildly slapstick – like when Niko flies through the windscreen after neglecting to use a seatbelt, or when NPCs insist on clutching the door handle of your car as it begins to peel away. I still live for these moments. In fact, I’ll often hesitate before getting on the throttle to allow carjacking victims a brief window to grab on before I take them on a brief trip to destination road rash. I don’t know what that says about me. Nothing good, probably.

So much of the endless experimentation on offer in GTA IV is a direct result of Euphoria, and the fact no two encounters will ever really play out the same way twice. But it also works because it’s part of a much wider commitment to granular realism. That is, what good is a world that oozes so much character and authenticity if the people feel painted on? Like they’re skating through it rather than actually inhabiting it? Everything about GTA IV is engineered to immerse us into its world; like we’re just another living, breathing citizen of Liberty City.

Goodbye Horses

Despite the incredible critical acclaim GTA IV accumulated, it remains one of the more divisive games in the series. While I am quite partial to the slower nature of its more pragmatic story and straightforward missions as a change of pace, it wasn’t to everyone’s tastes, nor was the relationship system. It was a smart way to disseminate rewards for fostering relationships with your in-game friends, but it admittedly could’ve benefited from a larger range of activities to do with them around the city – and preferably ones that were a little more fun, too. As it stands, the relationship system is too chore-like, requiring you to repeat the same cycle: pick them up, head to one of a couple of venues, and drive them home.

Similarly, GTA IV’s extremely weighty driving physics are another controversial topic. For mine, I’ve actually always been quite partial to the feel of GTA IV, particularly in certain cars where I think the exaggerated body roll and sluggish steering makes sense – like muscle cars and beefy 4x4s. I would’ve liked some more sharpness in its range of sports cars and supercars – they should have stiffer suspension as they ought to be the cars with the firmest rides – but I do much prefer GTA IV’s approach to damage modeling over GTA V.

There also doesn’t seem to be any real consensus regarding the radio stations, either, with sentiment that swings between high praise for the outright station variety to claims the song list is the most forgettable in the series. I have to concede I lean towards the latter; coming off the immense highs of Vice City and San Andreas I remember being a little underwhelmed at the time – although the soundtrack expanded and improved quite noticeably following the arrival of The Lost and Damned and The Ballad of Gay Tony, the two smartest pieces of DLC Rockstar ever produced.

But that’s a topic for a different day.

Verdict

Sentimentally speaking, Grand Theft Auto IV isn’t my favourite of the series – but I would say it’s the one I respect the most. It was bold to dial things back from the unhinged freedom of San Andreas in favour of a slower paced and more grounded crime saga, but it was a decision that allowed Rockstar to establish the importance of having a city so detailed it became a character itself, as well as flex a tech solution for character animation that has gone on to be a defining pillar of the series’ brand of emergent, slapstick fun. Obsessively detailed and impressively timeless, GTA IV is the prototype for modern Grand Theft Auto.

For more reflections on the incredible Grand Theft Auto series, you can read our new Legacy Reviews of Grand Theft Auto, Grand Theft Auto 2, Grand Theft Auto III, Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, and Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.

Running my dream menagerie in Planet Zoo is always going to feel a little different than the entertainment-focused spectacles of Planet Coaster or fantastical dino parks of Jurassic World Evolution. All of these gorgeous beasts and birds are real species we share the planet with and, in some cases, have put on the endangered list. So I was glad to see that Frontier's sequel put an even deeper emphasis on conservation as a main goal this time around, even if certain pieces of that – like wildlife reserves – feel a bit less fleshed-out than they could be.

When it comes to the daily tasks of building enclosures, hiring staff, and caring for animals, there isn't a ton that has changed since the original Planet Zoo. In that way, it feels more like a gentle evolution than a wildly ambitious one. And that's not necessarily a bad thing. If you played the first game, you should have no trouble getting your bearings in this one. There are a lot more options for adding detail, but building a functional zoo doesn't require you to learn all of them.

The species list is downright impressive, too, with over 130 creatures of all sizes to display. Some of these are exhibit-based, meaning they live in a smaller terrarium and don't have all of the same features of the bigger ones. And only around half of the list is eligible to eventually be released into the wild – more on that later. But at no point did the roster ever feel stingy. I even learned about a new species of horse!

The addition of aviaries and aquariums is the first big, shiny, new feature that isn't purely visual. And the flexibility allowed by this system is impressive. Whereas in the Jurassic World Evolution games, creating habitats for swimmers and flyers was a matter of snapping large, modular pieces together, Planet Zoo 2 gives you a lot of fine control over the shape, look, and in the case of aquariums, even depth of an exhibit.

I was really excited when I realized you can build glass tunnels through an aquarium exhibit. You can even build your entire zoo this way, as long as you stick to species that can share the same watery home without issue. Some species will fight or try to eat each other if placed together, just like in the first Planet Zoo. But there are also aquatic and semi-aquatic creatures who have different needs in terms of water temperature and salinity. If you want freshwater and saltwater exhibits in the same zoo, you even need two different filtration networks, which was an extra level of planning and realism that I enjoyed.

Money On My Mind

That brings me to the major advantage that sets Planet Zoo 2 apart from its coaster- and dino-based sister games: it's actually a challenging economic simulation. Of course, in the sandbox mode, you can turn off just about anything you don't want to deal with – from staff happiness to animal aging to the very concept of money. But as someone who very much feels that the difficulty of keeping the lights on is part of the experience, I was thrilled to find that task is not completely trivial.

If you check out my review of Planet Coaster 2, you'll recall I was deflated by the fact that I could put down one flat ride and a couple vending machines, walk away from my PC, and come back to find I had made essentially unlimited money from my sad little park. I tried a similar experiment in Planet Zoo 2, making one small exhibit with only warthogs to start and gouging my guests as much as possible to make a profit. It didn't work. And that's great!
Between six different types of staff members to manage, complex guest and animal needs, and the fact that visitors can be very realistically prickly about ticket prices if they don't think they're getting their money's worth, Planet Zoo 2 has a lot to chew on even before you start moving into the rich breeding and conservation systems. There are still a couple pieces of the management screen that felt a little underbaked. Your Sustainability rating is just based on which types of power generators and wastebins you install, which is a trivial choice with no major downsides that I never really thought about again after achieving five stars before the gates even opened. But the other components of building my zoo's reputation really gave me something to strive for.

The possibilities for customization have also expanded quite a bit in that nearly all buildings now have fully-modeled interiors that guests and staff can interact with. You can design your perfect break room inside and out, and even tweak the kitchens where the animals' meals are prepared. This system goes even deeper with new, modular gift shops and restaurants in which functional seating areas and shelf displays can be placed that actually affect dining capacity and items available for purchase.
I'm an absolute amateur at using these powerful tools to their greatest potential. But since the Steam Workshop once again lets me download little decorations or even whole buildings from far more talented and dedicated detailers, I can still benefit from their versatility.

There's also a campaign that serves mostly as a kind of extended tutorial. It's fine. I mainly used it as inspiration for what kinds of things I could build with the new tools. The characters still talk kind of like they're on a BBC children's program, but they're a bit less outwardly goofy this time around, which meant I had a bit more patience for them. And there is kind of a plot, even, revolving around exposing the crimes of a major corporation claiming to be environmentally friendly while actually putting fragile ecosystems at risk. It does the job well enough.

Back To Nature

The other substantial new element of Planet Zoo 2 comes in the form of wildlife reserves, which are completely separate maps on which you paint biomes instead of enclosures, then increase their rating by introducing appropriate plants and re-wilding a variety of native species. While it can be a lot of fun to drive around in my little cart and take pictures of my zoo's former residents back in their natural habitat, the management side of these reserves feels a little shallow.

There are tons of tags for different kinds of animals that can occupy necessary biological niches on your preserves, but establishing and maintaining ecosystems wasn't always quite so satisfying. Getting rid of invasive plants, for instance, is just a matter of clicking on them with the bulldozer tool. There's no need to hire rangers or botanists to maintain the land. You're doing it all with godlike powers. I will say, I do really like the new nature brushes, which can be used to paint a variety of different canopy and understory plants with one tool. You can even make your own!

The water tools don't hold up to the same standard. There's a lot of customization in terms of surface texture, color, opacity, and so forth. But every body of water is ultimately still a fixed height, and has to be placed in a trough. It's not really possible to make something like a convincing river that flows downhill without resorting to some clever special effects that require a lot of tweaking. It made me miss the dynamic waterfalls from Jurassic World Evolution 3.

Still, it's great to have a physical place I can go visit when an animal's time at my zoo is done. I can even snap pictures of them to earn Conservation Credits, Planet Zoo 2's secondary currency that is required to adopt certain higher-tier endangered animals. I also enjoyed being able to invest my zoo's resources into new conservation projects, which offer a helpful and reliable way to turn money into Conservation Credits if you don't have any animals currently ready for release.

Nearly two decades after the last mainline 2D Castlevania game,the team behind 2023’s Dead Cell’s Return to Castlevania DLC has been given the keys to Dracula’s Castle for real. Castlevania: Belmont’s Curse aims to breathe fresh life into this 40-year-old series with a creative blend of old and new ideas. With a brand new Belmont wielding the family whip, familiar foes in your way, and modern conveniences that have become expected in the genre, developer Evil Empire has largely hit their mark – but if you are a longtime fan expecting Belmont’s Curse to be a completely faithful revival of the series we played back in the early 2000s, then you will want to think again. This is a different breed of monster you're hunting, both for good and for ill.

Belmont’s Curse picks up in Paris about 23 years after the events of the NES/Famicom classic Castlevania III: Dracula’s Curse (the game Netflix’s original Castlevania series was based on). This time, the Belmont in charge of dishing out pain to the various creatures of the night – including big, bad Dracula himself – is Rose Belmont, the daughter of Trevor Belmont and Sypha Belnades. Trevor leaves Rose on her own to get to the bottom of what is going on in Paris, and the story that follows over the next 10-15 hours is one that boils down to what fans of Konami’s 40-year-old series would expect: Dracula comes back, and you need to kill him.

Belmont’s Curse does sprinkle some nifty twists into the cauldron here and there, many of which revolve around that titular “curse” and the mysterious set of Tarot cards Sypha left to her daughter before her off-screen death in childbirth. It’s a fun story overall, and I loved the nods and winks for dedicated fans like me to catch, but I’d be lying if I said plot was ever the reason I fell in love with these games.

In the line of Belmont heroes, I would rank Rose fairly high. While certainly strong-willed and focused as she sets out to prove herself worthy of her family’s legacy, you can also see she is still a bit rough around the edges. She can be impulsive at times, but learns from her mistakes – and while her tough facade occasionally cracks to reveal a more vulnerable side, Rose never comes off as a damsel in need of saving. She’d be the one busting down doors to save you. She carries the spirit of Sonia Belmont on her shoulders well.

Much like the other heroes of these games, a small cast of helpers joins her in the quest to put “Him” back in his pine box (seriously, this game really likes to lean into characters just referring to Dracula as “Him”, capital H and all). However, unlike in previous games, most of these interactions happen entirely inside of Rose’s head with the souls of bosses she has vanquished, who now find themselves sealed away in her Tarot cards. There are some fun moments of bickering between the main three – The Fallen, Joan of Arc, and Medusa – but I wish that the other bosses would more regularly chime in.

I also found myself missing actual people to run into. Scenes like Alucard first encountering Maria in Symphony of the Night gave a feeling of life to the castle and its surrounding lands full of death. By comparison, the mental arguments with Medusa are amusing, but just don’t land in the same way. Considering you start out in Paris (admittedly, a violently burning one), it feels a bit odd that there isn’t a single shop open or person left to talk to. It would have been great to randomly stumble on Grant from Trevor and Sypha’s crew from Castlevania III somewhere.

The map itself is divided into large, self-contained zones, more akin to Super Metroid than Symphony of the Night, with a boss typically overseeing each area. These larger zones are then connected to one another through the odd bridge or pathway, with special ferryman doors that you will eventually uncover to allow for quick hopping between regions, including the various parts of Dracula’s castle (and other even stranger places). As someone who tends to get lost or forget things in these sorts of games, Belmont’s Curse adopts some modern conveniences that are very welcome, including percentage trackers for each area and various markers that can be placed on the map. I used these tools liberally and frequently to help keep track of blocked paths I still needed a movement upgrade to get through or collectibles I could see but not reach.

Another especially handy feature (one you are never clearly told about, for some reason) is that you are also able to fast travel between the save rooms inside a given region, done so by holding down and crouching Rose just in front of the mirror for a few seconds. This will take you to a small hub of sorts where you can choose another mirror to pop out of. For a game that has just as much backtracking and exploration as this genre is known for, it’s a great help. Too bad it takes about 15 seconds from when you first crouch until you regain control of Rose in the Hub (at least on PS5). Handy as it was, that load time got old real quick.

For the most part, each Castlevania game has some sort of unique system or mechanic that helps differentiate it. The Aria games, for instance had monster soul collection, while Circle of the Moon had its mix-and-match cards. For Belmont’s Curse, it’s largely built around a magical whip ability and a protective shield of light – and to a lesser extent, the previously mentioned Tarot cards, which grant Rose other magic spells that can be improved (she is Sypha’s daughter after all).

The whip lets Rose swing from various objects or pull herself towards them. It can also be used on enemies, allowing her to not only quickly close the distance, but, when timed with her attack, deliver stronger hits. Zipping from enemy to enemy or nimbly swinging out of the way of a charging minotaur felt (and looked) so badass, regardless of how many times I did it. There are also some pretty challenging rooms that require precision to avoid spikes and other hazards in order to reach a reward at the end, so platforming fans have something to look forward to as well.

The light shield, on the other hand, is a far more defensive tool. When perfectly timed, it allows Rose to parry and reflect some damage back at the enemy hitting her, and also grants her the ability to pass through certain walls and floors. It’s a cool effect, but given how fast combat usually goes and how many enemies are around, Belmont’s Curse feels more tailored to keeping you on the offensive. A point further incentivized by the fact that the main way you restore your magic pool, letting you cast more spells, is by hitting enemies.

That said, Evil Empire has included several adjustable settings, such as the damage you dish out, how much experience you earn, or even the option to avoid dying altogether if you'd rather just enjoy the story. I opted to keep things mostly as they are by default with only a single exception, and it’s one I would recommend everyone make: you are able to check a box that lets you respawn just outside a boss room door if you die instead of back at a save point. To be fair, there did seem to always be a save room relatively close to the boss doors, so it doesn’t take too long to get back to the fight either way. But I much preferred being able to beat my head against a wall a lot really quickly until it breaks, as opposed to thinking of better ways to take it down between concussions. And hey, whether you love or hate boss runbacks, giving you the choice to remove them or not is a great bit of flexibility to have.

Regardless of your settings, you will find many classic Castlevania enemies along the way, all sporting a rather stunning and imposing refresh in their designs. Axe Knights tower over the comparatively minute Rose while flying possessed swords spin and shoot out smaller blades to skewer you. The bosses also look great – Dracula’s right-hand man, Death, sports perhaps my favorite of his designs in the entire series and what might be the coolest scythe I’ve ever seen. But despite their sick new looks, there is a surprisingly low variety of enemies overall, with some unfortunate notable omissions. Fan favorites like Legion, the massive ball of corpses, and even iconic monsters like the wall-mounted skeleton dragon head are MIA, with Belmont’s Curse relying more on palette swaps of creatures for the stronger foes you face in later areas. There are still a solid number of different monsters, but compared to the bestiaries in other Castlevanias (even the GBA games), this one is a little disappointing.

Thankfully, what I didn’t find quite as disappointing was actually killing those monsters. Nearly all of Rose’s fighting options feel good to use, with seven unique weapon types to choose from: sword, sword and shield, spear, fists, great sword, dual swords, and, of course, the family’s signature whips. Each type comes in four tiers of strength, which are found in hidden chests or as rewards for beating the occasional boss. Up until I earned the magical Vampire Killer whip, which blew the other options I had out of the water at the time, I found myself especially drawn to the fist weapons. It was a lot of fun to pull myself to an enemy and then uppercut that foe into the air, pummeling them with fast and fierce punches that each do slightly more damage than the last.

However, while all of the combat options were cool, the more I played of Belmont’s Curse, the less it felt like what I associate with the Castlevania series specifically. The big pillars are here: you have the castle, you have Dracula and his iconic minions, you will be backtracking with new abilities to access new areas. But so much else of what usually sets this series apart within this genre has been smoothed over with Belmont’s Curse, which leaves the whole package feeling a bit like a really solid metroidvania wearing a superficial Castlevania skin. Take Rose, for example: chaining punches into air combos is a lot of fun, but it doesn’t really feel like I am playing as a Belmont. Gone entirely are subweapons like the spinning bibles, hurled bottles of holy water, or arcing axes. There isn’t even a dagger to throw, which just feels kind of wrong. She doesn’t even start the game with a whip.

In a similar vein, Belmont’s Curse pulls from the soulslike playbook and gives you healing vials that recharge when you visit save points (which also respawn enemies nearby), removing potions to spam. Hearts from lanterns have been replaced by sterile blue globs of mana, and now there are heart piece-like collectibles that expand your health and magic bars when you collect four. A majority of the RPG systems have been pulled out, removing most of the stats, and equipment is now relegated to just three slots for you to put relics into – those have useful but not necessarily exciting special effects, like reducing Rose’s maximum health in exchange for dealing increased damage. Heck, with all the load times I ran into, it would be nice if they at least had Rose walking through a hallway or something as a throwback to Symphony of the Night instead of a static mural. (To its credit, that mural does look awesome, but you can only stare at the same picture so many times.)

Revisiting the lands of Castlevania in Belmont’s Curse opened my eyes to how much this genre has evolved in the 18 years since Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia on the Nintendo DS – highlighted even more thanks to the wonderful collections that have been released in the past few years. We haven’t been lacking in choice when it comes to awesome action platformers like this while the series slept, either, and I would put Rose’s debut as another great option in that surprisingly long list. But while I have had a fun time with Belmont’s Curse, it also hasn’t quite scratched that Castlevania itch in the way I hoped it would.

To the casual observer, Gears of War has always been a heavy-metal third-person cover shooter about a bunch of meatheads with chainsaws attached to their guns fighting aliens. But what Gears fans know all too well is that the real secret to the series’s two decades of success isn’t the killer graphics, the smart cover mechanics, or the gloriously gratuitous gore – although those things are all certainly significant parts of the recipe. It’s the heart. Marcus and Dom’s brotherhood. JD or Del’s sacrifice (depending on what you chose to do in Gears 5). Dom’s relentless love for Maria. And so my biggest question heading into Gears of War: E-Day, a prequel to the first game set 14 years prior on the day the Locust emerged from underneath the planet Sera, was how it would hang onto that heart when we already knew our armor-clad bros would definitely be alive by the end. I’m thrilled to say that E-Day carries its own satisfying emotional weight, with additional welcomed backstory for Marcus and Dom leading the way – oh, and the action is pretty top-notch, too.

E-Day begins with our Coalition of Ordered Government (COG) heroes, Marcus Fenix and Dominic Santiago, completing a ceremonial tour to honor their service in the finally-ended 79-year Pendulum Wars. We get glimpses of how each of them is reckoning with the end of the only thing they’ve ever known: Marcus is ready to re-enlist and hoping Dom will join him, while Dom is ready to go home to his wife Maria and their two young children, who are growing up without him. Of course, things quickly go to Hell – or rather, Hell comes up to them. Gears of War: E-Day does an excellent job of conveying both the uncertainty and the horror of what’s happening to these characters, even when we as players know exactly what’s going on.

By happenstance, Marcus and Dom get unofficially paired up with ex-Gear Mags Carter and rookie Gear Lucas Reyes, who happen to be at the same bar when the Locust tremors begin, before the quartet officially becomes Bravo Squad once the COG starts organizing its defenses. E-Day deserves a lot of credit here: In a prequel like this where you’re already attached to the leads, it would be easy for Carter and Reyes to be throwaway side characters who exist only to further the stories of our two well-known heroes. But E-Day makes time for your lesser-known Bravo squadmates, dedicating entire meaningful and enjoyable sections to establishing them in this world and getting you to care about them.

The unfolding nightmare of E-Day is reflected in both the types of Locust monsters you face as the campaign progresses as well as the sorts of weapons you’ll need to put them back in the ground. Easily-dispatched Wretches and run-of-the-mill, Hammerburst-wielding Drones are on the front lines as Bravo Squad wonders what the hell it’s up against in the invasion’s opening hours. You’ll take them down with Gears of War staples like the Gnasher shotgun and Lancer, both the bayonet-clad original version and the prototype of the chainsaw-equipped revision. Yes, you’ll get your hands on Gears’s most famous firearm pretty early, and you even get to witness its fun little origin story.

But as you move through the first hours of the Locust invasion, Bravo Squad is continually confused and terrified at the increasingly deadly horrors trying to kill them. The monster menagerie is, naturally, a mix of foes you have and haven’t seen before in other Gears of War games, and the battles get steadily more white-knuckle as you make your way through the five-act story. Giant, frog-like hopping freaks that arc multi-gallon acidic loogies at you. Heavies that come in multiple varieties, most menacingly the one that fires a medium-range Gorehook – a hook on a chain that will typically down you in one hit.

On that note, one of my few complaints about Gears of War: E-Day is related to the down-but-not-out situations you’ll find yourself in throughout the campaign. When, not if, you get downed, your allies will occasionally be standing right next to you and not revive you. In fairness, it wasn’t a constant occurrence, but there were numerous times throughout my 15-18 hour first playthrough when I got stomped to death by a Locust heavy because one of my buddies either stood next to me and didn’t get me up, ran off and left me for dead, or never even got over to me as I mashed the X button to cling to life for a while. The immediate solution for this is to play through E-Day in four-player online co-op (two-player split-screen is the limit on a single Xbox), but I sure hope a patch resolves this inconsistent AI behavior sooner rather than later as well.

Guns Aplenty

As with the Locust enemies, E-Day’s weapons are a mix of old and new, and my goodness do I love them. Every weapon has a unique purpose to suit a particular combat strategy. And man, it still feels awesome to blast a Locust Heavy to bits with the Gnasher shotgun, cut a Drone into pieces with the Lancer Prototype’s chainsaw attachment, or explode a Locust sniper’s head with a scoped-Longshot kill. But there’s so much more in there beyond those Gears classics. The Breechshot, first introduced in the often-forgotten Gears of War: Judgment, ended up being one of my go-tos the longer the campaign went on, as it offered solid range and stopping power without being as cumbersome as something like the Longshot sniper rifle.

But there are a lot of weapons I’d give shoutouts to as well, like the Incinerator, which shotgun-blasts a burst of flesh-melting Imulsion; the Ripper, which is basically the Gears-universe equivalent of a SAW; and the ol’ favorite Torque Bow, which has a hell of a windup but then unleashes an explosive arrow at your target. I loved the weapon complement here, as well as the options that deep roster of firearms afforded me in some of the campaign’s later battles.

And it’s not just that all of these weapons are fun to use in the right situation. They can also all be modified and upgraded through E-Day’s new Weapon Mod and Tactical Gear system. You’ll encounter dozens of yellow Hard Cases lightly hidden throughout the world for you to find. Each contains a mod for one weapon or another, such as accuracy enhancers, scopes, or clip extenders. Completing optional secondary objectives around the major industrial city of Kalona where E-Day takes place also grants these same rewards. Each weapon has four mod slots, which you’ll unlock as you go, and I found myself constantly tweaking each weapon to find the right mix of add-ons that suited my playstyle. As such, I was plenty motivated to find every Hard Case I could and complete every secondary objective possible.

In addition to this is the Tactical Gear that modifies your armor, giving you your choice of a few squad-affecting special abilities that recharge on a cooldown timer after you use them. Again, you’ll unlock more as you progress, but once I got my hands on the Stim that allowed me to heal myself and any teammates within its radius for a short time, I was never tempted by any of the other choices. All of these customization options evolve the classic Gears of War combat in a welcome but not radical way that I appreciate, while liberally placed Supply Caches let you cycle weapons and mods rather frequently if you so choose.

And you’ll be glad for the ability to rearrange your weapon loadout often in E-Day’s mini-boss fights and full-blown boss battles. Almost all of them are memorable in a good way. With, again, a mix of old and new “faces,” these were often barely-scrape-by bouts during my playthrough and ones I welcomed both when they arrived and when I emerged victorious.

E-Day is packed with beautiful locations. The destroyed downtown of Kalona; the pitch-black, Locust-dug caves underneath it; the almost sinister-looking Imulsion refinery; the peaceful mountaintops outside the city. Although the entire campaign doesn’t take place there, you’ll spend a healthy amount of time in Kalona, and the massive but dense battle spaces there are an excellent evolution of the mostly empty open-world areas from Gears 5. The freedom feels far more organic and meaningful here, as there are so many interesting things around almost every corner.

In addition to the aforementioned secondary objectives that grant meaningful Weapon Mod upgrades, there are hidden objects with optionally-viewed details that add a bit of color to a world in the process of recovering from a 79-year civil war, only to be invaded and destroyed by the Locust in a few days. The gorgeous visuals are brought down only by infrequent but noticeable framerate hitches, even while playing in Performance Mode on the Xbox Series X. As such, I can’t recommend playing on the 30fps Quality Mode – at least not before a patch or two.

On a side note, I appreciate that E-Day doesn’t do the all-too-common “make the player run the gauntlet of everything they’ve already fought, but multiply it” endgame sequence. Instead, your mettle is tested plenty of times along the way, with ample quiet moments to punctuate the loud action. And the ending is, I’ll say without spoiling anything, satisfying, which isn’t an easy thing to pull off when, as I mentioned, we already know that Marcus and Dom make it out of E-Day alive. And thank goodness, because I need more quippy Marcus Fenix one-liners in my life; I can’t get enough of them.

Multiplayer Impressions

With Gears of War: E-Day officially launched and live servers hosting multiplayer matches for about a week now, I’ve spent a good bit of time with each of E-Day’s online modes – though I’d already spent some initial time with Horde Siege in the beta weekends prior to launch. Horde Siege is what I want to talk about most, because I think it’s the tastiest dish on this prequel’s multiplayer menu, but I’ll first address the ol’ standby: Versus mode, aka the only multiplayer mode that’s been there since the very beginning.

Versus is, for better and for worse, a Gnasher shotgun wall-bounce-fest. As it always has been. There is a flow state you can achieve in it that’s just delightful. The Warpath mode helps keep things moving, with each team trying to secure and maintain control of rotating zones. It’s nothing we haven’t seen a hundred times before, but it works. It draws all of the action to one place, and Gears of War has always thrived in closer-quarters combat (no disrespect to the ace Longshot snipers out there). I never had trouble finding a match, and crossplay is enabled straight away. There’s also no shortage of items to unlock the longer you play, so you’ve got incentives to stay on the hamster wheel match after match, day after day.

While you can bring your four-person squad of friends into matchmaking and stick together round after round, E-Day unfortunately lacks private matches entirely. That is a disappointment, because if you’ve got a big group of friends who just want to face off against each other for a night of fun, it’s not going to happen barring a successful low-odds diceroll. E-Day does get points for allowing you (and your friends, if you like) to play against bots, though, if you’d rather eliminate the human element entirely. And laudably, those bots can be set to any difficulty level, so there’s fun to be had here whether you’re completely new to Gears or a 20-year veteran of the series seeking the highest challenge.

Horde Siege, meanwhile, is the star of the show. Heck, Gears of War arguably started (or at least popularized) the PvE trend with Horde’s debut in Gears of War 2. Horde Siege comes in many flavors, including an onboarding option for new players, a limited-time mission that I look forward to seeing future iterations of, shorter Blitz campaigns, standard Siege runs, and full-blown old-school Horde. Maps are sliced from the huge city of Kalona in the single-player campaign, so if you’ve completed it you’ll already be right at home.

What’s really cool is that three other four-person squads are running around the same massive maps you are, and they’re each fighting their own battles. It doesn’t suddenly turn Gears into a PvE version of battle royale or anything quite on that scale, but it does make matches feel a little more alive when you see another group trying to beat back a big Brumak in the distance while you’re trying to exfil on your King Raven helicopter.

In terms of moment-to-moment gameplay, I really like how random, optional secondary tasks will pop up between your main Horde Siege objectives, and completing them nets rewards like lowering the costs of upgrades between rounds. And yes, the Supply Caches are just as critical in Horde Siege as they are in the campaign. More so, probably. Killing Locust and successfully achieving objectives nets you points to spend on ammo refills, defensive items (which you will 100% need!) like Mortar Sentries and Spike Traps, and more.

Furthermore, there is very much a meta progression built into Horde Siege mode as well. It’s class-based, taking the campaign’s Tactical Gear,Armor Mods, and cooldown-timed powerups and divvying them up into Assault, Breacher, Marksman, and Medic classes. I opted to stick with the Medic, which was the same kit I used in the campaign, as I preferred being able to heal and revive myself and my teammates in tough spots.

And oh man, there are plenty of tough spots. I rarely encountered a calm moment when playing Horde Siege, especially after completing the first couple of objectives. Things get spicy in a hurry. My teammates and I frequently found ourselves under heavy pressure on all sides from crazy combinations of bad guys, like Heavy Boomers and Reavers, Heavies with Gorehooks and a Brumak, and those damn floating hot-air balloon-looking bastards with the last damn boss of the game. And that’s to say nothing of the e-holes constantly popping up and spewing more enemies out of the ground at you. Needless to say, working together is clutch, but surviving and thriving is a blast. I absolutely love what Horde has evolved into with Horde Siege.

I’ve gotta hand it to the people at developer One More Level: after well over a decade of countless variations on the soulslike formula, I’ll admit that going first-person with BioShock-like magical abilities shooting out of your hand in an alternate history of the Napoleonic era is… a pretty darn original idea, actually. Valor Mortis is a punishing action game that tries a whole lot of compelling stuff, from combat that mixes sword fighting, spell slinging, and firearms, to the platforming sections that have you wall-running around like you’re in Titanfall, to the bizarre 19th-century setting that kept me guessing. These experiments work out for the most part, and I have many fond memories of dying again and again as I fought my way through this bleak world full of zombified French soldiers. But there are also plenty of moments when this hodgepodge of ideas doesn’t quite come together, not to mention numerous bugs and crashes that turned an otherwise good time into my own personal Waterloo. So while the 20-hour campaign can be a bit uneven, there are still enough interesting things going on in Valor Mortis to make it well worth playing.

If you’ve ever played a BioShock game, you’ll probably feel unexpectedly at home here. Valor Mortis shamelessly cribs the channeling-magic-powers-in-your-corrupted-left-hand concept, and also has the whole alternate history thing going for it as well. But instead of blasting your way through enemies with guns, you’ll mostly be getting up close and personal with a sword, parrying, dodging, and getting killed a whole bunch in the time-honored tradition of the soulslike. It’s an odd combination of things that works out better than I expected, as using your dominant hand for swashbuckling and your off-hand for guns and magical abilities makes for exciting encounters. For example, you might use your mutated arm to light an exploding barrel on fire from afar to take out a group of baddies, block an enemy that’s aggressively rushing you, then back away to finish them off with a pistol. Having so many options for how to deal with deadly enemies helped to hold my interest longer than Valor Mortis otherwise would have, especially given its overall lack of enemy variety.

You play as William, a soldier in Napoleon’s army in an alternate reality where the legendary emperor defeated his enemies at Waterloo, which… well, caused the world to look like a disturbing piece of abstract art, I guess. As an undead warrior with supernatural powers and the ability to come back from death as many times as you need, you fight your way through a series of depressing, war-ravaged areas, meeting a few mostly forgettable characters along the way. Valor Mortis might give off BioShock vibes, but when it comes to story, it falls quite short. It delivers a fairly generic “war is hell” message that’s undermined completely by the silly stuff happening around you, like that time you’re walking in a cave and suddenly find yourself in Egypt fighting off some kind of Spinx thing? I dunno, man. In any case, I’d still say this tries much harder than the average soulslike, but ends up being mostly disappointing.

Valor Mortis’ biggest shortcoming is that, possibly because it tries so many things at once, it can be quite a rocky ride, and that includes its combat. Some of it is minor, weird stuff, like how if you’re fighting big enemies, it feels like you’re hitting them with a pool noodle from several feet away due to some really strange invisible borders. But there are also more concerning issues, like the fact that sometimes enemies will just aim their aggression in a completely different direction, attacking the air or even just standing there while you kill them. And like lots of its peers, Valor Mortis also has that issue where each of the enemies only has a few attacks, so you’ll often just be waiting for them to repeat the same series of strikes for the third time in a row before you can finish them off with an execution. While fighting these gross monsters usually feels just fine, these shortcomings crop up with regularity.

However, a decently sized arsenal of weapons and powers helps to break up that monotony. You have three different melee options, three guns for toting, and three powers to turn your poor hand into a monstrous weapon of war – each with their own upgrade tree to customize how that ability works. For example, you can upgrade your flame ability so that enemies explode if you shoot them with a gun after lighting them on fire, or you can upgrade your saber so that it restores your stamina when you attack after successfully executing a dodge.

Beyond that, you’ve also got a whole skill tree full of perks to choose from and modifiers to equip that help you customize your build a little. Perks offer ways to help William survive a bit better by upping his health or making his parries more effective, but the mods (called Ambers) are more interesting, since they can actually alter the way your character works to suit your playstyle. In my case, I equipped a bunch of mods that made it easier to top off my health, like one that healed me whenever I performed an execution on an enemy whose posture I’d broken – I then equipped another called Perfectionism, which made me do substantially more damage when I was at full health. This allowed me to be a deadly perfectionist, who was rewarded with speedier skirmishes when I successfully managed to avoid taking hits.

Most soulslikes are defined by their memorable boss fights, and this is one area where Valor Mortis feels strangely out of the loop. First off, there are shockingly few of them, to the point where you can make several hours of forward progress without running into one. Secondly, when you eventually do, they are often underwhelming, especially the ones that are just beefier versions of existing enemies or repeated foes you’ve already fought. But even when they are original encounters, they all have the same issue: you’ll mostly just stand around waiting for the boss to pepper you with a ridiculously telegraphed attack so that you can parry it and counter once you’ve broken their posture. I died way more fighting random enemies and falling off of ledges than I did against these wimpy, disappointing bosses. Frankly, it’s probably a good thing there are so few since most aren’t very memorable, and battling through each of the levels against regular minions is much more consistently enjoyable.

One of the best parts about Valor Mortis’ weird-as-heck setting is that it makes for levels that are fairly unique, like the torn-up 19th-century battlefields filled with scattered horse corpses and discarded bayonets, or a harbor of destroyed naval ships that have been raised up into the air unnaturally. You still have plenty of soulslike cliches, like one part where you navigate a flooded village overcome by toxic waters (effectively your poison swamp level if it were created by war crimes), but I was pleasantly surprised by how many areas had personality or some kind of compelling component to pique my interest. For example, one level had me creeping around a ruined town where the only survivors were children who had learned to use their small size to their advantage. Working my way through the destruction while doing my best to gain the favor of these creepy kids was a neat and memorable section that has definitely stuck with me.

Valor Mortis also tries its hand at a bit of platforming, and while I expected it to be pretty top-notch considering the studio’s track record with the Ghostrunner series, most of this sadly feels unpolished. I got caught on ledges, fell through the environment, passed through objects I shouldn’t have, and more, all of which really took the wind out of my sails. To its credit, these parts certainly try some interesting stuff, like one bit where you gain the ability to make platforms appear from afar using one of your nifty hand powers, and grappling through the air and wall running around is quite awesome when it works. But this feels like something that was a little tacked on, given how inconsistently it feels good.

I’ve mentioned a few times that Valor Mortis sometimes feels a bit janky. Some of that is due to specific game design choices and experimentation that doesn’t quite work out, but a much bigger share of that unpolished feel is due to the large amount of technical issues Valor Mortis has. I saw hard crashes, a recurring issue that straight up turned off my PC when I tried to launch from Steam, entire pieces of the environment completely missing, and tons of other wonkiness – the package just has a fairly duct-taped feel to it, which distracted from my journey through this compelling ruined world at times.

From the opening scene of Hellraiser: Revival, in which an intimate moment of sexual fetishism goes horribly wrong for its hero and his lover, this survival horror adventure inspired by Clive Barker’s bloodsoaked ode to BDSM makes it painfully clear that it’s not for the squeamish. So graphic is its ebb and flow between blasting gory holes and bathroom glory holes that the greatest moments of tension I felt playing it were not when I was fending off its hordes of gimp-masked cultists, but rather when I was nervously looking over my shoulder just in case my wife happened to walk in the room. However, peel back the sordid surface layer and Revival doesn’t have much meat to go along with its many buckets of blood. Heavy-handed storytelling, repeated chase sequences, and uninspired boss encounters meant that no matter how many meatsacks had their skin pierced and flayed by chains that tightened onscreen, Hellraiser: Revival never managed to properly get its hooks into me.

We play as Aiden, a one liner-spouting everyman with some troubling addiction problems who’s on a quest to bring his newly murdered girlfriend back to life the only way he knows how: by making a pact with pale-skinned series poster boy, Pinhead (voiced with trademark unnerving eloquence by original actor Doug Bradley), to slaughter several members of a local death cult and feed their hearts to her partially reanimated remains. It’s a disturbing premise that’s pretty faithful to the first (and best) two films in the Hellraiser series, but I wish its plot was presented in a more dynamic fashion. The exceedingly gory scenes that featured Pinhead and his cenobite pals always had me glued to the screen, but so much of Revival’s roughly nine-hour story is otherwise delivered in drawn-out exposition dumps spouted by secondary characters, and I never really felt too invested beyond the broad strokes. It’s not a great sign when the chatty in-game merchant is doing most of the heavy lifting here, and I’m not just talking about her ammo crates.

Still, at least the shooting is pretty solid, albeit fairly stock standard for the survival horror genre. To be honest, if Revival’s weapon and inventory system borrowed any more from the Resident Evil series you could probably squint and spot a Capcom logo watermarked somewhere onscreen. However, its assortment of upgradeable pistols, shotguns, machine guns, and breakable blades and bats facilitate some fun ways to decapitate and dismember the hedonistic hordes that stand in Aiden’s way, and ammo is scarce enough that I was forced to make use of absolutely everything at my disposal.

I admittedly had to toggle off the overzealous aim assist since it would regularly snap to a single enemy when I was trying to target an explosive barrel in the middle of a group, and I also lamented Aiden’s inability to vault over obstacles. This became particularly ludicrous in one instance where I could clearly see a room full of precious items through a wide open window, but instead of simply jumping through the gap, I had to stop and hunt around for a key to the locked door in order to access them.

Even so, Revival’s mixture of slash-and-sidestep melee encounters and skull-shattering shotgun blasts makes for some gory good times, even if the variety of enemy types is somewhat limited. Beyond the machete and gun-wielding cultists, it’s mostly the same gaggle of gangly ghouls, suicide-bombing beasts, and legless creatures crawling after you that you have to mow down.

There are ample opportunities for stealth, too, with bricks and bottles to throw for distractions and violent stealth kills to pull off. Although I wish there were controls to peek around corners like in the recent Silent Hill: Townfall, because too often I’d be spotted ever-so-slightly stepping out from cover and be forced to go in all-guns-blazing anyway. It was even worse during the occasional instant-fail stealth sections with stalker enemy types, who could sometimes spot me through bushes even when I was standing still.

The Sweet Suffering

What elevates Revival’s combat slightly above the norm is the introduction of the Genesis Configuration, a powerful reimagining of the series’ iconic puzzle box that gives Aiden the ability to grab objects like conveniently placed nails and sawblades from his surroundings and hurl them at enemies with forceful blasts of telekinesis. Use of these BioShock-style superpowers is tied to his ‘suffering’ bar, which must be continually topped up by staggering enemies and performing a grisly execution move that jams the hellraising Rubik’s Cube into their mouths and blasts nine inch nails directly into their skulls like they’re front row at Coachella.

I like that the limitations of the suffering bar means these supernatural abilities don’t make you feel too overpowered, and how the short timer on keeping an object suspended in stasis means you can’t confidently wander around with a fanblade ready to launch like you could in Dead Space. Eventually these powers are expanded to let Aiden play with fire, which allowed me to shoot explosive barrels to take out one group of enemies, before hoovering up the resulting flames and hurling them at other monsters hustling over to provide backup. There’s even a bar-draining super move that shackles clusters of creatures together and tears them all apart at the same time, chaining your attacks in a gruesomely literal sense. It’s just a shame that this devastating option for crowd control doesn’t arrive until much later in the story, giving you relatively few opportunities to really put it to use.

It’s also disappointing that Revival’s boss fights are so utterly flat and forgettable for the most part. There are some interesting exceptions like the flying Sister of Mercy, who shrouds the arena in a blood mist and darts at you through the crimson haze, and another beast that scrambles on all fours and locks you in a cage suspended from a tree branch, forcing you to desperately fend off ghouls clumsily climbing up the bars in order to escape and finish the fight. But too many of the boss encounters are boring, close-quarters clashes that barely raise a hair let alone hell, and are just not all that engaging to overcome.

A skinless freak that sluices down into a pool of viscera like some sort of blood-splattered Splatoon character certainly makes one hell of an entrance, but the fight itself demands little in the way of strategy beyond circle-strafing and shooting him until he’s done for. Ditto the second time you face him later on. Meanwhile a sluglike cenobite that has enough arms to give himself a group hug is equally one-note, and you have to fight him a staggering total of four times over the full course of the journey. For all the sharp objects that litter its environments, it's somewhat surprising that Revival’s boss fights can frequently be so dull.

Revival’s puzzles aren’t the sharpest either, typically limited to tried and tested tasks like searching for bolt cutters to bust open chained gates or scouring documents for clues to four-digit keypads. There are at least a handful of occasions where it really leans into its seedier – and at times sillier – side with quandaries that are designed to tease not just your brain but potentially other parts of your anatomy. (No judgement.) At one point I was asked by a latex-clad NPC to go on a treasure hunt for uncomfortable-looking toys in a bondage club in order to progress the story, while at another I found myself flummoxed by a combination lock that demanded I arrange the positions of a variety of couples in an orgy. Truly there are moments where Revival feels a bit like Resident Evil if you swapped out Leon Kennedy for Leisure Suit Larry, and while none of its puzzles are particularly challenging, a number of them are at the very least somewhat unique.

Yet while Revival might be sexually depraved, it’s also disappointingly deprived of any interesting new gameplay ideas elsewhere, regularly cribbing from survival horror classics without doing enough to match them, let alone improve on them. Remember the frantic cabin defense in Resident Evil 4 that saw Leon team up with Luis to board up windows and kick down ladders as crazed villagers spilled in through every entry point? Well, there’s a version of that here set in a much smaller, single-storey space that inspires considerably less in the way of panicked problem solving. How about a looping household hallway a la Hideo Kojima’s P.T.? Yep, that’s in here too, minus any interesting puzzle elements or baby-in-the-sink levels of genuine terror.

Even the absolute fundamentals are regularly fumbled. At one point I powered up an old elevator, and as I waited for it to make its agonisingly slow ascent to my level I steeled myself for a fight, since as we all know nothing spawns enemies faster in a survival horror game than the simple press of a call button. However, as the gun-toting goons inevitably started filing into the room from all corners, I discovered that I could just leave the building through the front door and gun them all down while they funnelled their way through the exit, which completely robbed the moment of its intended intensity.

Hellmazer

In occasional departures from the slaughter-filled hallways of sex clubs and cult leader mansions, Aiden is regularly whisked away to the Labyrinth for a brief break from combat. Although this MC Escher-inspired maze of concrete corridors is far more linear than it initially appears, it nonetheless does a great job of capturing the ominous feel of Hellraiser’s infamous realm of torture and pain. From the looming Leviathan on the hellscape’s horizon to the insect-like cenobites that scatter along the walls like grotesquely fleshy cockroaches, it’s initially a very intimidating place to explore. Every jagged surface looks like it could have your eye out, and Revival plays some clever tricks on you to keep you on your toes, like rearranging the walls around you to make you feel like you’re really trapped inside a tangle of impossible architecture.

I very much enjoyed the occasional use of Aiden’s telekinesis power to manipulate large chunks of the environment and create paths through this otherworld, as well as dashing past its spinning instant-deathtraps in order to snare optional upgrades to Aiden’s health and suffering bars. What I did grow tired of, though, were the overused chase sequences that see you pursued by Chatterer, the cenobite from the films that basically resembles a wind-up pair of chattering teeth being smuggled inside a stretched-out skinsuit. The first instance of me being hunted by this rictus-grinning goon certainly may have gotten my blood pumping, but by the third of fourth instance of sliding under the same clusters of chains and obstacles, my heart rate had dipped well below the speed of his perpetually pattering pearly whites.

Still, even though my repeat runs through Revival’s mazes eventually became monotonous, at least they consistently functioned as intended. Back in the story’s mortal realm, things didn’t always seem to go to plan. Beyond minor bugs like enemies glitching through walls and audio dropping out during boss fights that made them seem more silent than violent, there were a handful of more significant errors in the PS5 version I played that, while never completely gamebreaking, were pretty annoying to endure. In one instance, I’d fought my way to a cabin deep in a cemetery and puzzled open a locked safe, only to find that I had no inventory space to claim the gun upgrade inside it. So, I trudged all the way back to the nearest save point to temporarily offload some weapons and ammo into a storage box, only to return to the safe and be frustrated to find it locked again with no button prompt to reopen it.

Later on, I was surprised to find the door to a safehouse had somehow become stuck and wouldn’t budge. It was open wide enough to let me see the merchant calmly blinking back at me, but I couldn’t get close enough to actually buy anything from her. This meant that for about a 30-minute stretch at the more combat-heavy end of the story, I was forced to make do with the scarce amount of ammo I could scrounge from the environment until I finally battled through a number of enemies and a boss fight on my way to the next save point, which made that period substantially more of a grind than it probably should have been.

However, at least I’ll only ever have to suffer these problems once, because although Revival cribs plenty from other, better survival horror series’ like Resident Evil and Silent Hill, one thing it hasn’t replicated is their signature replayability. Although there are two endings to achieve, they each stem from the one binary decision made at the story’s climax, meaning I was able to instantly reload my last save and experience both without having to play through the full story a second time. No matter whether you opt for the thoroughly bleak or more optimistic of the two outcomes, this tale eventually closes with a Pinhead quote that reads, “Your suffering has only just begun, we have such sights to show you.” Apparently those sights don’t include a New Game+ mode or any other form of unlockables, though, because Revival simply boots you out to the main menu with nothing extra to reward you with for completing its story.

The first Dark Arisen expansion for the original Dragon’s Dogma has a well-lauded place in video game history as the expansion that “fixed” the base game, sanding down the rough technical edges and tweaking things to make the notoriously obtuse RPG more approachable. It also added hours of new content, spiraling an already heady story directly into the heavens on the back of dragon wings. Dark Arisen 2 isn’t as transformational as the first one was, primarily because many of Dragon’s Dogma 2’s biggest issues have been fixed through incremental patching since it came out in 2024. But the new content here definitely flies in the same ambitious skies as its predecessor, pushing the story and world design to new heights, even if some of the new progression options get left behind.

As with Dragon’s Dogma 2’s base campaign, Dark Arisen 2’s story remixes themes from the first game without being a simple retelling. Like in the first, another Arisen has been rumored to exist, something that shouldn’t be possible and demands your immediate attention. This takes you north to the frozen mountains of Norgan, a place that is largely abandoned save for the single settlement at its border (and the steady stream of visitors coming from other lands to investigate what’s been lost under all that ice besides you).

The expansion’s story also meanders in similar ways to the base game, with plot points getting sidetracked by little tasks or other happenings, but it didn’t feel as distracting since a lot of the “help me and I’ll help you” quests are relegated to side stories. As a whole, this roughly 20-hour main quest is solid, lacking in nuanced writing or ground breaking storytelling but bursting with a tangibly broody mood, big moments, and some genuinely interesting lore. It’s meditation on how a hero of destiny chooses their fate (if they get a choice at all) is unsubtle, and spends far too long at the end really sending the message home, but it sticks it.

For those who don’t mind a lot of filler with their killer, there are plenty of people with tasks thoroughly less vital to the survival of reality that need doing. A couple of those quest lines stand out – one where you help the son of the village’s leader become brave and tough enough to follow in his footsteps, for example – but most are just a flimsy excuse to run around the world and beat up enemies.

The frigid Norgan region is delightfully dense with things to find and see even if its smaller than most other regions in Dragon’s Dogma 2. What it lacks in square footage on a map, it gains in a sprawling sense of height that stretches from it’s jagged icy peaks down to winding underground caverns that spread wide and interconnect. Navigating up and down the rocks is a treacherous and daunting road at first, but climbing hooks can be used on specific poles scattered throughout to bridge elevations without the fuss.

Combined with how dungeons and caves tended to loop back on themselves, revealing exits or opening doors that served as their own shortcuts into and out of zones, and Dark Arisen 2 felt almost like a Zelda or Metroid game in ways this series never has before. The abundance of portcrystals scattered around the map is another navigational relief. There are more in Norgan than there are in Vermund and Bathall combined, making travelling to different zones far more reasonable than it was in the base game.

Note that reasonable doesn’t necessarily mean easier. The portcrystal’s abundance is a practical matter, as ox carts wouldn’t last long in the harsh environments. Norgan’s wintry winds often pick up, turning snowfall into blinding whiteouts that threaten to freeze you to death if you aren’t protected by special winterized gear or new consumables designed to stave off these frost effects for a limited time. These came in abundance pretty regularly so I never felt like my life was in danger out there, but the scrambling effect it has on the minimap and how generally hard it is to see or navigate in real time made them a threat worth waiting out at camp.

Norgan’s crumbling castles and snowcapped cliffs are a welcome change of pace from the rolling hills and dense hinterlands of Vermund and he craggy deserts of Bathall. It’s also not all snowy wastes. I was surprised to see a break in the snow drifts when I came across a festering poisonous swamp. It matches thematically in that everything in it is dead (or maybe wishes it was), but areas like that and the crystal caves deep below the mountains subverted my expectations for the region in a welcome way.

The bulk of what you’ll find hidden in the snow are Spoils, a new gear type that appears in generic shapes (long weapon, aegis, etc.) at first, but is revealed to be a usable piece of equipment when appraised by one of the new NPCs. Rolling the dice for new gear was not particularly exciting, and it further isolated me from having any real attachment to my equipment in a game that already had an abundance of junk to constantly ignore. There are at least things outside of raw stats to consider, as each piece of gear can potentially have special attributes that grant passive abilities or enhance specific weapon skills – but no single piece of gear stayed in rotation long enough to be something I relied on much, with the deluge of experience points I received strapping a rocket to my leveling almost immediately. I can see how these could fit into an endgame grind, but participating in a lottery in hopes to get incrementally stronger as my levels reaches the mid 100s is the sort of loop that I, like The Arisen, simply don’t have the heart for.

New skills and abilities for every vocation can be learned from obelisks that dot the ridges and tundra in Norgan. Each have multiple tiers of offerings, and while the first are available for purchase with rift points immediately, the rest need to be unlocked with offering flames, earned in Dark Arisen 2’s second big campaign: the repeatable 12 Lost Rites dungeons scattered across Vermund and Bathall. Each skill is welcome, though outside some of the powerful new spells available to casters, I don’t think many of them change the balance of vocations in any significant way. Trickster is more active now that you can do additional things with your incense clone, like possess enemies and have them attack their kin. But if you have a favorite class, I’m not sure these new offerings will change the tier list already in your mind.

The Last Rites dungeons range from short gauntlets of monster battles to sizable delves deep into danger. Some have unique designs that lean on a particular mechanic or require specific prerequisites before you can enter them – one where your Arisen must be an Archer/Magick Archer and whose rooms are filled with shootable support pillars to help collapse terrain onto enemies stands out. I haven't finished them all, as some only appear during the last act of the original story, but I haven’t found any of the ones I have completed to be a significant challenge, especially with the enormous power spike granted from grinding through Norgan first. The new recurring boss from them, a giant Beholder-like eyeball monster, is a fun fight, though.

Norgan’s new slate of monsters can be pretty gnarly early on. Some are just stronger versions of baddies you’ve seen in the past, like the barbarous beocarns who are essentially just bigger bandits. But the brand new foes, like that baphomet-shaped lesser demons who sling spells and enhance their own physical attacks with elemental boons, can be pretty intense dance partners. Giant yetis with gaping mouths that stretch the length of their bodies might be some of the most grotesque and memorable enemies in the series. I really loved the little freaks hiding out in the tundra.

When a troll blocking a bridge wants a photo of three goats, you get him a photo of three goats. Not only must you find goats to photograph, but you must perfectly position these goats – on three different ledges – to get all three in the photograph. TOEM 2 is full of these sorts of environmental puzzles that cleverly use a photo mode mechanic through the lens of your own in-game camera to define its gameplay. It is a hidden object game insomuch as you're searching for hidden objects, but it's no June's Journey, where you're searching through static images to pick out items. TOEM 2's world, like the original, is dynamic, surprising, and an absolute delight.

As the title would suggest, TOEM 2 is the follow-up to TOEM: A Photo Adventure from developer Something We Made, which was released in 2021. TOEM 2 is exceptionally similar to TOEM; the foundation remains exactly the same. You control a young lad who heads out from their quaint home to see an awe-inspiring seasonal event called the toem. Playing as that little guy, you travel from your home through three distinct towns in monochrome isometry. Bus tickets are necessary to keep moving from town to town, and those are earned through helping townsfolk. And to help these townsfolk is to take photos.

You'll take photos of all sorts of things: Hidden garden gnomes, stinky cheese, and cute little critters. Each town in TOEM 2 is a series of connected, isometric dioramas rendered in a soft, 3D style and only in shades of black and white. The townsfolk retain the flatter, more hand-drawn aesthetic from the first game, letting them stand out among the environment. Creatures skitter about, clouds linger in the sky. Along the way, an invisible man on one forest block of the town may need a potion to become visible again (he’s only visible through the camera lens). A potion maker resides several blocks away; once you stumble upon him, he’ll ask for toadstools, send you out once again. Only then you’ll be able to make your way back to the invisible man and hand over the potion. Most of TOEM 2’s objectives typically play out like this and work as a way to encourage further exploration of the world. A lot of the time, you’ll find something surprising, or silly – a cat hiding in a flower pot, perhaps – and snap a photo. It’s so curious that it probably means something, but you’ve just not figured that out yet.

Beyond taking photos, each of these towns has a little gimmick tied to the camera. In the quaint farmland town Cropten, vines are spreading, blocking entrances and pathways. One of the first townspeople you’ll meet will attach a pair of scissors to your camera. That first townsperson, in Cropten, is a little worm who's very concerned about the vines. Instead of point-and-shoot, it’s also now point-and-snip. Vines pop up every now and then, the little worm would panic, and I'd gladly take care of it for them. The two other towns, Taletorp and Deltburg, have their own respective tools and enjoyable little, ongoing storyline around using them. And you can't miss the charming townsfolk you're introduced to immediately at the start of each level; they serve to tutorialize your new tools, and become a friend to wander about with.

TOEM 2 is about four or five hours long, so its simple premise never feels like a chore. Each of the worlds are so individually delightful that I didn't want to rush through any one location. It's one of the very rare games in which I was eager to seek out everything there was to discover. There are many more puzzles to solve than there are bus tickets required to progress, and once you've collected those bus tickets, the only incentive for continuing is the sheer joy of seeking what happens. There is a scarecrow, for instance, that wants to see the world and you can snap him in-and-out of different locations: at much too high heights, near a cozy fireplace, or back with some pesky birds. It's the three hidden gnomes that I've got in the back of my mind throughout it, checking nooks and crannies to see if I can spot them. Joy, throughout TOEM 2, is hopping off objects and onto rooftops, navigating curving platforms to reach the farthest peaks just to gain a new perspective on the world.

Oddly, TOEM 2's biggest limitation is that the original TOEM is fantastic. Using a camera to engage with the world through a neat photo mode in its particular way felt exceptionally novel; TOEM 2's camera upgrades and tools don't necessarily elevate it beyond that level of uniqueness. TOEM's art is hand-drawn, in a way that feels more intimate and raw; While TOEM 2's characters retain that style, the world and its items are computer-modeled. It's still lovely and well-crafted, but it doesn't feel like an improvement or expansion on the first game.

Most prominently, though, TOEM's puzzles were a bit more engaging. TOEM 2 is very gentle, and effortlessly guides you through its photographic treasure hunt. It was breezy to play, and although that's not necessarily a bad thing, the touch of friction in the first game encouraged a deeper degree of curiosity. For instance, TOEM 2 has a quality-of-life sort of update to its camera – being able to lock the camera onto an object makes it much easier to capture photos of fast-moving objects, like a paper plane gliding in the air. It's a seemingly insignificant change that removes that stroke of friction that I wish TOEM 2 had. It wasn't exactly difficult to take photos without the focus lock, but it meant putting in some work for your perfect picture.

When answering the question of 'What does this all lead to?,' the end of TOEM 2 may seem disappointing. The toem phenomenon that the game is centered around isn't all too different from that of the first game. But TOEM 2 isn't disappointing on the whole, because it was never at all about reaching the end. Forgive me, but it really is what you've seen and discovered along the way.

There’s a theory that it’s impossible to make a piece of anti-war art set during a war – that, no matter what you do, the work itself inevitably becomes (or will be interpreted as) pro-war. I’m sympathetic to the argument; Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve is a war story about how awesome it is to be a heroic ace pilot. It is also unapologetically anti-war and plays with complex ideas like the role of propaganda, the power of symbols, nationalism and globalism. And it extends to the way corporations influence and manipulate world events, social media and the rise of news that may or may not be real, the price and horrors of war, and what a world without borders might look like. Its story is often startlingly relevant, but when I think about my time with it, my mind returns to a single thought: Wings of Theve’s never directly stated but deeply held belief that the best thing that could happen to this world and its characters would be for the war to be over, and for none of them to ever fly a combat mission again. It marries exceptional air combat with a melodramatic but moving story, one of the year’s best soundtracks, and incredible visual design to make a war game that never lets you forget how terrible everything happening here is.

Wings of Theve takes place about ten years after Ace Combat 7, though you don’t need to be familiar with its predecessor to enjoy it. The Republic of Sotoa launches a blitzkrieg invasion of the Federation of Central Usea using the power of its air force and orbital missiles strikes known as Tonitrus Spears. The FCU capital of Theve falls. Shattered and broken, what’s left of the FCU fights a hopeless, defensive war from the deck of the Endurance, an aging aircraft carrier that, in better times, would have probably ended up as a museum. Your character, a nameless fighter pilot, is fished out of the ocean by one of the Endurance’s rescue helicopters, and you’re quickly assigned to fly second seat to Jan “Rex” Cope, the legendary Wings of Theve, the FCU’s ace of aces.

Trouble is, it’s all a lie. Cope is an exceptional pilot, but he’s never shot anyone down. His kill count is a myth, fabricated to give the people of Usea hope. As long as the Wings of Theve is in the skies, the story goes, the fight isn’t over. Cope’s job is to bring his squadron, Joker Flight, back with him. And he’s done it well. But his luck runs out when you run into Sotoan ace Shadow 22. But the Wings of Theve cannot die, so you inherit the mantle and Cope’s old callsign. You have become the name. And when legend becomes fact, print the legend and watch it go viral on social media. But it’s not enough for Joker Flight to just run anymore. They need to produce results. And as you start to shoot down enemy fighters, the lines between the legend of the Wings of Theve and reality start to blur.

It’s a compelling yarn that developer Project Aces has spun, and it unravels into an earnest story with the Joker Flight crew at its heart. You've got Baxter (callsign “Professor”) a former teacher turned pilot, mentor to the other members of Joker Flight, and your wingman; Tasha, Joker Flight’s youngest member, a generationally-talented civvie stunt pilot forced into service by the war who refuses to shoot anyone down; and Coster (callsign “Noise”), a quiet rock and roll enthusiast who manages to fly Tasha’s wing while blasting tunes over your comms. Many other supporting characters feed into the myth of the Wings of Theve whether it be your commanding XO, your Queen Flight counterparts, or the media machine spinning you up. And through it all, the legend of Cope (and his spirit) lingers.

Maybe that sounds silly, but like everything else in Wings of Theve, it works surprisingly well and allows you to continue to build a connection to a character whose life and death are crucial to Wings of Theve’s world. And make no mistake, it is Wings of Theve’s characters that make this story work. They’re well-drawn, complex, interesting people elevated by genuinely excellent performances from the voice cast and your relationships with these characters drive much of Wings of Theve’s story. Whenever we sortied, I wanted to make sure I brought them home.

Ace Combat has long told its story from inside the cockpit, but Wings of Theve also puts your character on the Endurance’s deck, inside the mess with your fellow pilots and civvies who have sought refuge on the carrier, and inside hangars briefing rooms, among other places. These moments help you connect with the members of Joker Flight and the other people aboard the Endurance, but they also drive home the cost of the war, and make it feel like this world exists outside of the cockpit. You can’t really do much during them except look around and perform simple interactions, but they're home to some of Wings of Theve’s most memorable and affecting moments.

Ultimately, though, you’re a combat pilot; your place is in the air. And it’s here that Ace Combat soars (sorry), expertly weaving its story, moment-to-moment gameplay, and mission design into masterful, elegant maneuvers worthy of a state-of-the-art fighter jet. Like its predecessors, Wings of Theve is a mission-based game. After you’ve been briefed on your next sortie, you’ll select your aircraft, weapons, and parts – which you can buy (along with new planes) with points you earn by completing missions. All that affects everything from how many missiles or special weapons you can equip or how much damage they do to how well your plane handles. You can even outfit your crew’s planes if you want (or have them auto-assigned something that fits the mission at hand). Then you’re airborne, and it’s time to fly.

Often, things start pretty simply. Maybe you need to defend the Endurance, assault an air field, protect a friendly plane, or take out some transports. But these initial objectives are just a reason to take to the air. The beauty of Ace Combat has always been in its flying, when the infinite possibilities of the skies above intersect with the limitations of your aircraft and the realities of your mission. You could play with the standard controls, which substantially limit your aircraft, but you should absolutely play with the Expert scheme if you can. The joy lives in the complete control of the pitch, roll, and yaw of your plane, simultaneously opening you to rapturous moments of aviation choreography and shattering mistakes when you misjudge a turn or your altitude resulting in a devastating crash.

You find yourself in small moments: in the high-G turns to evade incoming missiles, locking onto a group of planes with a special anti-air weapon and knocking four of them out of the sky at once, or deftly weaving through a city and over debris. Wings of Theve captures the fighter pilot fantasy when you're getting on a target's six and downing them with a perfectly placed series of machine gun shots or in finding just the right air speed to stay behind a massive transport before turning your nose and shredding its engines with your guns without ever firing a missile.

You can be perfect in Wings of Theve if you try, and that's when pilot and aircraft merge and flight becomes an extension of human expression in spite of the limitations of weight and gravity. Each moment and small choice builds the future of your sortie in real time. It's in tailing a Sotoan plane, your reticle turning red, the lock on tone roaring in your ears, and launching a missile and watching it arc elegantly into the other plane’s fuselage before flying through the wreckage in search of your next target. Destruction as beauty. Wings of Theve consistently delivers on this thrill, and it is exhilarating each time.

But what is remarkable is how Wings of Theve marries these moments with its mission design and story. Sometimes, you’ll have your targets marked for you, but often it's on you and the rest of Joker Flight to figure out where to be. Maybe your radar is jammed, and you can’t track the transport planes you need to shoot down, so you’ll need to pick out the contrails they leave behind among the clouds and follow them. Or perhaps a ground detachment is under attack, and calls for aid on your radio. You’ll have to figure out where that detachment is, what you need to target to help, and how to approach it. Can they hold position for a minute while you handle threats elsewhere? Do you dispatch Joker Flight to help, authorizing the use of their limited special weapons, or keep them flying close formation to cover you and try to do it yourself? Missions in Wings of Theve change constantly, and your objectives will change depending on the state of the battlefield. It is a brilliant, graceful ballet where new dancers constantly take the stage, and you must improvise the steps accordingly.

My favorite missions put the ball in Joker Flight’s court. In one, we had to fight off a Sotoan land battleship (think a battleship with tank treads). As we dodged fire from its massive railguns, we also had to cover our ground troops and take out its weapons. It was a tough fight; I’d brought bombs that excelled at destroying its weapons but struggled when we needed precision targeting near the armor around its treads. In another mission, we had to take out airships that helped Sotoa target its Tonitrus Spears. They were hidden in the clouds and invisible from radar, so between fending off air attacks on the Endurance’s fleet, we would follow the massive lasers that guided the Spears once the airships aimed at their targets, and destroy them before they annihilated our fleet.

All of this is brilliant stuff that tests not only your ability to pick the right aircraft and weapons for the job – though you could stick with the capable default F/A-18C, just not as impressive as my beloved F-22A, for example. But it's also about responding on the fly to dynamic objectives that may be very different from your original briefing and the mission you’d planned for. I’ve stuck mostly to talking about the first half of Wings of Theve’s 30 missions here to avoid spoilers, but every single one is excellent, and the final missions pull out all the tricks for some genuinely showstopping moments.

Wings of Theve’s narrative triumph is in portraying most of its drama through the calls coming in over your comms. When your forces are taking heavy losses, some soldiers will urge their comrades to fight on because the Wings of Theve is protecting them, while others will question your usefulness or if the stories about you are even true. You’ll hear men and women die in combat because you weren’t fast enough or just couldn’t protect them. Joker and Queen Flights will react to what’s happening in real time. “Hello traitors, did the wicked get their rest?” Tasha will taunt a former FCU squadron now fighting for Sotoa. Coster will play music to inspire the rest of the crew, and you may end up flying with the guys who recorded it. Sotoan forces will come through on your radio, calling out for their friends as you shoot them down, talking strategy, or taunting you. And then the Shadows themselves might announce their presence by singing over an open channel – that’s when you know you’re in for a serious dogfight (I still can’t get that tune out of my head).

All of this combines with standard combat chatter, but it’s never overbearing as you’ll always know what’s happening. It’s a remarkable achievement in audio mixing, and more impressive that Wings of Theve manages to tell a compelling, emotional story this way. Like previous games in the series, Wings of Theve is a melodrama, and that might turn some folks off, but I found it exceptionally compelling and full of pathos. It’s most effective in its smallest moments – when Tasha confronts the cost of her pacifism, or when Coster gets to meet his musical heroes in the skies. And it extends to just the banter between the crew that fills the quiet moments before or after a mission.

When we had to listen to FCU ground forces calling for help and reporting their losses, wondering aloud if Wings had abandoned them, I felt bad. Keeping them safe was my responsibility, but much of what happens in any given mission is out of your control, no matter how well you fly. That’s war, but it always made me try harder, fly better, and refocus. I had to live up to the legend, whether it was true or not. And while shooting down Sotoan forces and watching them realize they had no chance in real-time was satisfying, it was easy to understand their anger over what had happened to their comrades or their fear when we turned the tide. As exhilarating as being a fighter pilot is, Wings of Theve never lets you forget that everything happening here is a tragedy. And it doesn’t shy away from portraying the toll of war not just on the people forced to fight it, but on civilians who live through it, too. There is a cost to all of this, and the storytelling drives that home every time it can. And yet, you can’t help but want to be everything the Wings of Theve are cracked up to be, to instill hope for desperate people fighting for their right to live free of oppression. Every time I climbed into the cockpit, Wings of Theve reminded me that I was a symbol, more powerful than any combination of pilot or plane could ever aspire to be. The challenge was to live up to it.

Some of my favorite moments in Ace Combat 8 are when there’s no fighting: flying through immaculately rendered clouds, drops of rain speckling my canopy, or landing on the Endurance or at an airstrip after a job well done, or unlocking a new plane and watching the massive hanger doors open and light spill across its sleek lines for the first time. There’s something beautiful about skimming the clouds and basking in the sun in a sky free of missiles and machine gun fire. While you can replay missions and aim for higher scores and S-ranks like me, Ace Combat is kind enough to let you fly around any map peacefully once you’ve completed its associated mission. Cope understood that feeling; maybe it’s why he never shot anyone down. And the longer I played Ace Combat 8, the more I understood him. Maybe he had it right all along.

Multiplayer Impressions

If the campaign soars, multiplayer is just a pleasant flight… provided you can get it off the ground at all. I like the modes, particularly Deathmatch and the PvPvE mode Co-op Warfare, though I only got to play the former pre-release; it is bizarrely unavailable right now, at least for me. The latter pits two squadrons of four against one another while dotting the map with computer-controlled air and ground enemies, and challenges you to outscore the other team. Do well enough individually and you'll be marked as an ace, which means more points for the other team if they shoot you down. It's fun to form single-match rivalries with other players, even if they're the Red Baron to your Snoopy, but I also like that you can contribute even if you’re not the greatest pilot by taking out your robotic foes.

If you don’t want to deal with other players shooting you down, Co-op Assault is basically the same thing without any of the PvP violence. It’s still fun and a good way to fly more relaxed, friendly skies. Besides, Team Deathmatch is where the real aces fly if you are looking to get sweaty, and you'll learn very quickly when another team is better than you.

The time-limited modes might be my favorites. Emergency Sortie is a standout, pitting an eight-player squadron against superweapons from past games – that could be Ace Combat 7's Alicorn, which is a submersible aircraft carrier (this is Ace Combat: things get goofy), or the Chandelier, a massive railgun platform for AC6. My teams have never beaten either, but we've come close, and learning how to fight these behemoths and improving each time made me want to get right back in there for another run. You can’t just jump into them any time, instead randomly earning access to them after playing Co-op Assault or Co-op Warfare, but getting another shot feels like winning a small sweepstakes you didn't realize you'd entered.

Win or lose, you'll earn in-game currency to purchase and upgrade your planes, as well as experience for (sigh) the battle pass. There are plenty of daily and weekly challenges to get you what you need without having to spend real money to buy more (which you can do, because we live in The Bad Place), but it still annoys the hell out of me that this is the form these systems take at all – especially because, just like in Ace Combat 7, progression is an issue. The default F-4E plane you start with is lousy, and while you can get a much better (and more familiar to anyone who plays the campaign) F/A-18C pretty quickly, leveling up your plane with blueprints and getting parts for it is a slog (doubly so if you want something nice like the F-22 or F-35).

It never feels great to go into a match and lose because the other team has better aircraft and special weaponry than you do, and I often wished I could just choose what I wanted and get airborne without being forced to deal with unlocks and a progression system. We used to make multiplayer games, man.

The menus are also confusing and kind of a mess. Every option is nested underneath some other option and it's not always clear where you need to go or what menu you need to be in the first place. Even putting together a party and joining a game can be a pain because everyone has to ready up for a mode individually, instead of just having the party leader select it and go. Halo 2 solved these problems in 2004, and we’re still chasing it 20 years later. Once you're in a match, it typically works great and cross-platform play is smooth, but I've also experienced several crashes and disconnects. This baby flies beautifully if you can get off the runway, but sometimes it feels like you’re dodging debris while you're trying to throttle up.

I really like the 100-player lobbies, too. You can head to the arcade and play classic Namco games like Galaga and Dragon Spirit while you wait for a match, or chill and watch someone else play on a big screen. And if you don’t want to sort through AC8's Russian nesting doll menus, you can just walk over to a friendly NPC and get where you need to be. It's also just fun to see other peoples’ customized pilots. I'm sure some folk will wish this was just a menu, but I found this to be a tasteful spice on an already solid dish. I dig it.

So do I wish Wings of Theve's progression system and menus were better? Absolutely. Do I wish it didn't have upgrades and currency and a store, and instead there was a way to just pick a cool plane and fly through the friendly (or unfriendly) skies? You'd better believe it. But I can still see this becoming a place where I spend a decent chunk of time, too. The engines on this old bird might rattle and whine, but she'll get you where you need to go – and it’s all incredibly easy to ignore if you’re just here for the exceptional campaign anyway.

For a series as storied as Star Wars – one brimming with more spacecraft and speeders than George Lucas has beard bristles – it borders on baffling that developer Fuse Games’ Star Wars: Galactic Racer can arrive in 2026 as the first new game of its kind in over two decades. I blame Super Bombad Racing, if only because Gungan isn’t a real language and using a portmanteau of bomb and bad in the title was probably never the perfect pathway to sales success. Galactic Racer, on the other hand, has a range of impressively customisable vehicle classes that expands the hangar well beyond classic podracers, gorgeous course design, and an impressively credible and explorable world outside the on-track action. It’s an eye-catching and rich resurrection of Star Wars racing that’s as fast as it can be surprisingly unforgiving.

Galactic Racer’s main hook is its run-based, roguelite-inspired campaign, which comes with a strict philosophy of no mid-race restarts. It is an interesting and genuinely fresh approach that bakes a very real and logical feeling of risk and danger into the action – a feeling that is admittedly absent in racing games with any sort of rewind functionality or unlimited restarts. Yes, you can still pause and, yes, you can still save and come back later – but you otherwise need to live with the consequences of what happens out on the track. It’s a structure that makes the racing tense and meaningful, even if racing over the same landscapes over and over does grow repetitive.

Now This Isn’t Pod Racing

Whether by intent or not, the huge time gap between Galactic Racer and classic Star Wars games like Episode I: Racer and Racer Revenge feels almost mirrored in Fuse Games’ original story. That is, where those games were set in the prequel period, Galactic Racer is set in the aftermath of Return of the Jedi, where the art of podracing is a distant relic of a bygone era. Unsurprisingly, podracing does still feature here, and it’s represented incredibly; lightning quick, and with impeccably authentic sound design. However, I’m hesitant to describe specifically how or when it pops up outside of the quickplay modes. Just know that I feel like the Fuse Games crew were paying close attention when Maverick found an F-14 in the heart of enemy territory during the Top Gun sequel, or when Bond retrieved his DB5 in Skyfall. I may be a pretty casual Star Wars fan by most metrics, but I do love stuff that imbues vehicles with a sense of old soul – even fantasy ones. That’s my jam.

For clarity, the bulk of the Galactic Racing League garage consists of landspeeders, speeder bikes, and a new vehicle type called skim speeders. Bikes are fast but fragile, and skim speeders have a podracer-esque ability to bank completely vertically to slice through gaps and turn harder, but landspeeders have proven to be my favourite class. They’re essentially floating cars, and I enjoy their more predictable handling and added durability.

As the mysterious and faceless human racer called Shade, our ultimate goal is to beat the Galactic Racing League’s moaning, arrogant, and entitled heel Kestar Bool in the final head-to-head race. However, for that to happen, we need a suitably fast vehicle. In simple terms, building and piloting a quick one requires a combination of general stat upgrades, performance parts, and various additional perks – from gadgets that can be activated during races to specific bonuses granted to you by allies you accumulate over the course of the story. These are rationed out randomly, or earned, as we progress (and re-progress) through the championship “tours.” I’ve grown to be a particular fan of the autopilot gadget, which is regularly a lifesaver to tackle particularly treacherous stretches of track. The fact that these gadgets are primed just prior to race starts with a series of specific button presses, like pre-flight checks, is a very clever touch that gives waiting on the grid a tangible sense of occasion. The sequence always ends with the final go-ahead to fire your engines, which cough to life and glow harder as you squirt the throttle. It was important to somebody at Fuse Games that we should be able to rev our speeders like hotrodders at a red light, because it looks cool. I love little flourishes like that.

Now, speeders are scrapped between tours, so you’ll need to choose and set-up a new one each time. It’s not a solution I find I’m loving, considering I was never able to establish any real sense of ownership or attachment to a vehicle. Theoretically, you can build a replica of the same-looking vehicle every time – with the same add-on cosmetic parts and the same livery – but you will need to wave goodbye to specific upgrades you might’ve really enjoyed. The more heavily upgraded your previous speeder, the more points you’ll have to spend on pumping up its general stats before you start – but it won’t behave the same as your last one. Not unless you can pick up the same upgrades in your next run, whether by chance reward or spotting them in your mechanic Hibi’s randomised selection. As a roguelite rookie and a traditional racing game meathead, I have to admit I didn’t much like losing powerful upgrades that really suited my racing style to what’s essentially a dice roll, but I do appreciate the novelty of needing to come to grips with something not typical of the usual racers I play.

Tours unfold over three (and later five) planets before culminating in a final knockout event. Failing at any point means you’ll have to start a whole new one over again. This is quite elegantly and thoughtfully implemented, thanks to the racing paddock at each event you can fully explore in third-person. Not only does this build an authentic world around the Galactic Racing League – which in turn crafts a world I feel like I’m inhabiting, rather than just shuffling through menu screens – it lets Fuse Games fill it with characters that can acknowledge your previous failures as you return for another crack at the title. That is, you’re not actually restarting, or simply being scrubbed back in time until you get it right – time keeps moving forward and you just need to keep racing until you emerge victorious. The story is split into three distinct acts, so note that messing up in the third act means you’ll just need to take another run at the third act. That is, it doesn’t send us all the way back to the initial League qualification phase, and for that I’m grateful.

However, Galactic Racer’s core weakness is that it unfortunately doesn’t feature enough planets to avoid feeling overly repetitive. While I’m conscious a roguelite structure brings with it an expectation of a certain level of repetition, it does become fairly tedious slogging through its small list of repeating planets over successive attempts. The specific circuits used, the order of event types, and how they branch over the span of a championship are shuffled from tour to tour. There are reverse layouts for the tracks, too. However, the backdrops are nonetheless always the same. Having a couple more planets that could’ve been swapped in and out would’ve gone a long way in reducing the fatigue that quickly sets in after several runs through the same locations.

Intergalactic Planetary

It is a fantastically realised array of planets, though, and the details of the track environments are as excellent as they are varied. Jakku, for instance, has routes traced through its immense graveyard of war wreckage – swinging from wide open blasts across debris-covered dunes one moment, to cramped sections of makeshift tunnels formed by half-destroyed spacecraft the next. Crait is characterised by sprawling caves and its flat, salt-covered surface – which speeders whip up to expose the red mineral beneath. Lantaana is covered in dense forest linked by lava tubes, and Sentinel I is a toxic wasteland where racers must negotiate narrow causeways over acidic pools.

Each planet and track has its own set of properties that can help you or harm you, depending on how you race and the upgrades you’ve applied. Perhaps my favourite example of this dynamic is Ando Prime, an entirely frozen planet, where heating tubes have been dropped sporadically around the circuits. Passing through these will thaw out the frozen control surfaces that numb your steering inputs, but staying out of these hot boxes allows you to run your delicate ramjet for much longer before it catastrophically burns out. It’s a racer that essentially never stops asking you questions.

On the topic of burning out, it’d be massively remiss of me not to mention how much I adore the Burnout-inspired takedowns that Galactic Racer actively encourages, with speeders on the wrong side of a hefty slam being speared into trackside obstacles and splintering into thousands of shards. Not only are they incentivised with a slow-motion takedown camera, which swings back to soak in the spectacle, but they can be factored into the upgrade system. Any time I spot it on a run, I always opt to grab the upgrade that replenishes my speeder’s battery for each successful takedown – since doing so gives me more bursts of my autopilot ability.

But while the Burnout connection is strong (and hardly surprising considering the roots of Fuse Games’ founders reach back to Burnout creator Criterion Games), perhaps what I love most of all is how much Galactic Racer surprisingly reminded me of a sci-fi MotorStorm. That is, the often wide tracks full of natural obstacles and multiple routes, the multi-class nature of the grid, and the fact that holding onto that ramjet boost a fraction too long results in a fiery and rapid unscheduled disassembly. Funnily enough, just like the original MotorStorm, Galactic Racer also has no splitscreen multiplayer. 12-player online racing (or eight, for podracers) has a six-event championship structure that works a little like a shortened version of the singleplayer tours (where your upgraded vehicle is discarded after the finale) – but that’s for a different sort of player than me.

As the fantasy RPG GOAT, it really doesn’t take a whole lot for me to replay The Witcher 3. I’ve happily done so the numerous other times developer CD Projekt Red has revamped this masterpiece, but The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt Remastered seems to be the biggest overhaul to the beloved tale yet. A free update for anyone who owns the original, so many different parts of this already excellent game have been improved – from combat to movement to skill progression (not to mention the modernized graphics). After about 10 hours working my way through White Orchard and beyond, it’s already extremely clear that this is the best The Witcher 3 has ever been.

Combat is less floaty and enemies are (slightly) less stupid

It’s probably not controversial to say that one of the worst parts of this otherwise amazing adventure was the combat. Even after at least a few updates to it over the years, it still mostly felt floaty, a bit on the sloppy side, and enemies were a huge fan of just standing there and waiting for their turn to get decapitated. The modernizations made to combat in this remaster are its biggest step forward, as a whole bevy of tweaks have been made to address various sticking points. Geralt attacks faster and enemies are quicker to match your pace, which makes the process of chopping through your ninth pack of wolves much less irritating.

The camera and lock-on functionality have been the highlight so far, as you can now toggle between large groups of enemies with ease, and without the camera losing its mind. I didn’t even use the lock-on system in the original specifically because it was so unreliable, so being able to do so now has taken some serious getting used to. In general, the camera feels much better – less tightly locked to your back so you can handle groups of enemies more reliably (though those darn Neckers still like to sneak up on ya), and so far I’ve encountered far fewer situations where I felt like I was fighting my view as much as I was the monsters.

I’ve also noticed some new enemy behaviors that make swordplay more interesting, specifically how they’ll now retreat instead of letting you trounce them with steel, launch less telegraphed counterattacks, and disappear and reappear behind you (in the case of ghost monsters). All that did a much better job of making me feel like I was fighting intelligent creatures. Of course, compared to some of the stuff we see in action games today, I still do feel like the enemy behavior shows its age, and it was never all that great to begin with. Still, this is enough of an improvement to make combat feel much more engaging than it once did, significantly upgrading one of this adventure’s weakest points.

Geralt moves so much faster and Roach is less of a cretin

Movement is one of those small details that can grate the heck out of you in a massive RPG like The Witcher 3, slowly filling you with rage over the course of hundreds of hours. In the original, Geralt was often slow and had a lot of trouble getting over things. His rigid animations sometimes made me avoid ladders altogether because I just didn’t have the patience for it. In the remaster, Geralt absolutely flies over fences and navigates vertical obstacles with relative ease, to the point where it actually felt weird to see him be so nimble. I recall losing over an hour of progress in the 1.0 version when Geralt fell off a ledge no taller than a barstool and managed to break every bone in his body. This was reduced already in the next-gen update from 2022, but combined with the other speed and mobility improvements here, it almost feels like a completely different game – to the point where I’ve begun to wonder if it’ll make the map feel smaller than before as I get deeper in.

Similarly, Roach is no longer the annoying idiot she once was, now sporting much more intuitive controls that make her less likely to get caught on trees (which she now passes through if she’s just brushing against them while galloping), or end up on top of a barn. Most importantly, you can now loot herbs and whatnot without getting off your horse, which is maybe the single best improvement this remaster offers (dismounting every 10 seconds to pick a flower drove me to the brink of madness in 2015).

Skill trees are less restrictive

A pet peeve of mine in RPGs is when skill trees prevent you from playing around with different builds until you get deep into the progression. This is something The Witcher 3 suffered from quite a bit in the early hours, as so many of the impactful abilities were locked behind walls you couldn’t remove until late in the journey. The revised trees in the remaster take a page out of Cyberpunk 2077’s book by making perks more readily available earlier on, so you can customize how you’d like Geralt to get his Witchering done. I’m still early in my journey on this run, but I’m already happy to see that I won’t have to wait until I’ve invested a whole 12 points in a branch before I can unlock any good skills – so long as I’ve purchased a skill along the route I’m focusing on, I can now progress down a certain skill path with fewer obstructions.

Oh, yeah, this remaster looks pretty great too

Maybe this goes without saying for a remaster, but this is a pretty massive graphical upgrade, even over the one The Witcher 3 got for the current generation of consoles just four years ago. The lighting is much more dramatic, environmental textures are way more detailed, shadows and reflections are much more consistent across the board (especially on PC), and Geralt’s hair looks way less like a blurry mess than it once did. Again, this is all stuff that you’d hope would be the bare minimum when remastering a 12-year-old game, but it still warrants a shoutout. There’s even a new photo mode for those of you who want to take glamor shots of Geralt in all his new, high definition glory.

The one thing caveat here is that performance is still not perfect, and I still ran into a dropped frame or two on both console and PC. It’s a small price to pay for how much better things look, though, especially with the incredibly short load times I saw. And considering that the original had some framerate issues of its own, it’s not like anything has gotten worse here.

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt Remastered’s greatest asset isn’t that it adds anything the original sorely lacked, but rather that it removes some of the biggest roadblocks to fun the 1.0 version was saddled with. Combat is more challenging but also easier to enjoy, movement is quicker and less irritating, and revised skill trees allow for more freedom. Even if it doesn’t manage to fix some of the technical issues (plus I’m sure there are some bugs waiting for me to encounter them that haven’t reared their ugly heads yet), it manages to make this classic RPG more enjoyable in 2026, and that’s worth yet another ride down its well-trodded roads.

The satisfaction of the metroidvania genre comes from a sensation of mastery – taking a place I'm unfamiliar with and slowly unraveling its complexities until I command dominance over its spaces and the threats that perpetually lurk within. For its debut game, End of Abyss, developer Section 9 Interactive tries to apply that format to an atmospheric horror adventure with twin-stick controls and instills a striking sense of dread inside a gargantuan labyrinthian facility. Its atmosphere only carries it so far, though; End of Abyss's exploration and combat slowly descend into a slog, and it never fully recovers from feeling like a routine procedure.

End of Abyss is centered around a young combat technician named Cel, who isn't given much in the way of personality. Cel is a silent observer who's trained to interact with the world through the scope of a gun. They skulk around this massive, desolate complex with only a few other soldiers four times their size, slowly attempting to discern what happened here. The place is abandoned, seemingly run by a series of AI boxes known as Security Control Units, which are trying to keep the facility from falling into total disarray. A mysterious voice calls out to Cel through these boxes, hoping they will help free this place from the zombified station workers who turned into enemy Husks.

Without much else explained, Cel is thrust into the cold concrete corridors and expected to survive. As I walked through dimly lit hallways and parasitic flea-infested tunnels, it was clear Section 9 was built of former Little Nightmares developers. The clay-doll aesthetic and isometric perspective is immediately recognizable. Atmosphere is the most captivating thing End of Abyss has to offer.

The grotesque detritus of vacant bedrooms litters the Habitation Sector, crafting a harrowing and bone-chilling opening section. I walked through every doorway with my thumb trembling on the right stick. Even with Cel's pistol drawn to keep my guard up, I was still terrified of what could be on the other side. The way a light flickers above an exit or how an enemy body encased in parasitic fungus is positioned all constantly feed into the uneasiness you want from a horror experience. These tricks work for the first few hours, but as End of Abyss dragged on, I began to see the seams of it all, and it eventually became too familiar.

What were once terrifying jump scares became predictable – corpses with important items conveniently placed in large open arenas consistently led to combat encounters I knew were coming. The supposedly dead enemies I used to fear waking up to chase me down always would, and thus it became routine to start shooting them before I even approached.

The mystery surrounding End of Abyss unsatisfyingly relied on the absence of information. Characters trade in vague uncertainties, often offering up little to no useful information about how or why we are in this facility. A few notes and documents are found scattered around its hallowed halls, but even slowly learning about what life was like here before our protagonist Cel touched down does little to actually paint a compelling picture. I pushed forward, turning on little AI boxes around this compound to activate an elevator, I searched for power cells to switch on a beacon, and I eventually descended into the dreaded lower levels to see what lurked below.

It wasn't until the back third of End of Abyss’ roughly 10-hour campaign that the plot started to gain momentum. The story suddenly took a front seat as characters began to explain the reason for our deadly trek through the compound. But because the buildup lacked tangible stakes, it was mystery for mystery's sake, and rarely did it feel of any consequence.

That's not to say that End of Abyss doesn't have its moments. Particularly in the last act when tiptoeing around the lower levels, I found note after note that brought me closer into the horrors of this world. Rooms filled with strange new oddities and remnants of experimentations piqued my curiosity and illustrated an underlying terror.

Atmospheric Pressure

A few new weapons to add to my parasite killing arsenal also kept me invested in the search-action. Your options range from the Pulse Gun, a trusty and reliable pistol with unlimited ammo, to a flamethrower that lights up entire rooms in a wall of fire. The twin-stick shooter part of End of Abyss is no joke, either. Combat encounters can swing drastically if you roll the wrong way or get caught in a corner. I always felt in control of the situation even as I dipped and dodged through large hordes of enemies. So when I would slip up and lose that control, it became a struggle to regain my footing. That's where the combat thrives: walking on the razor's edge between confidence and hubris with a little uncertainty.

Enemy variety pushed me to do some experimentation in the action. Grenades were a staple in large group encounters, learning to manipulate aggressive enemy behavior to my advantage became a small game on its own, and grouping up mobs to maximize a red barrel explosion was a key tactic. More challenging enemies, like the long-necked Husk Latcher, made keeping a safe distance difficult; it perpetually charged forward and swung its long-reaching, claw-like head in my direction.

While I found the moment-to-moment combat mostly strong, the boss fights feel rote by comparison. Circular arenas with large creatures played out largely the same – roll away from the boss, pop a few shots into them, rinse and repeat. Some bosses, like the Centipede Husk, mixed things up a bit by leaving the arena and popping out of different corners to try and catch me off guard. Other fights are more focused on dumping large amounts of ammunition into the boss, and that's disappointing for a game with flashes of brilliance.

With the exception of the pistol, you'll need to manage your ammo and craft more at workbenches found around the different save points throughout the facility. Early on, managing my Riot Breaker shotgun ammo and choosing to save my limited supply for the moments that mattered felt reminiscent of other survival horror games like Resident Evil. However, after only a couple of hours, I rarely thought about my ammo counts, since the materials required to craft more bullets at a workbench felt like drops in a bucket. This trend continued as I acquired the Security Rifle – an armor-piercing long-range gun – and that minimized a potentially interesting dynamic.

Fragments are found around every corner, and they're a plentiful currency throughout. I found them on dead enemies, stashed away in lockers and treasure chests, and just laying in optional rooms. It was so abundant that I eventually felt nothing every time I saw that blue glow in the distance.

Dazed & Confused

This resource problem began to seep into the cracks of the foundation and expose a larger problem: exploration is not truly rewarding. The interconnected hallways and twisting systems that make understanding how all of the locations fit together are part of the puzzle in a metroidvania. But here, the further I dove into the depths of it all, the more frustrating navigating this dilapidated station became. The lack of visual variety and identity across different areas made everything look the same, and it was difficult to pinpoint points of interest in an area to help anchor myself. End of Abyss became more about looking at the map every few seconds to ensure I wasn't going the wrong way than soaking in the foreboding atmosphere that surrounded me.

Unlocking shortcuts with keycards or opening a door from the opposite side didn't bring revelation or satisfaction. It often brought confusion about how or why these rooms were tied together and what use this shortcut would have. When every zone is the same gray-and-blue hue, it becomes a tired cycle to open up another cold steel door for the sake of it, or for a handful of Fragments I didn't really need. For every new weapon or piece of equipment I found, there were five rooms full of just Fragments.

And then there was the Containment Sector. This section of the map leaks radiation and would slowly tick away at my health if I stayed in the area. I quickly shifted gears and locked in, moving with surgical precision as I couldn't waste any time getting lost. Every few minutes my health would tick to zero, I would die, and I would respawn at a nearby checkpoint. It felt obvious that there was something I was missing, some sort of protection from the radiation, since the further into the sector I went, the stronger the radiation became.

Eventually I discovered a radiation suit mod that protected me from the constant damage. Instead of elation, all I felt was relief that I was done having to poke and prod random corners of this world for something that may or may not have existed. This entire scavenger hunt felt so detached from the Containment Sector and what I was trying to accomplish there, and it's a disconnect that even metroidvanias of yore didn't have.

Backtracking in End of Abyss is rough, even with a transit system that can take you to most zones. Cel does not move very quickly while sprinting, and the constant aimless roaming really pads out the overall runtime. These problems are exacerbated by multiple bugs that prevented me from progressing – random invisible walls that would stop me dead in my tracks on a ladder or prevent me from doubling back to a section I was just in. This caused me to have to restart at a previous checkpoint, losing 10-15 minutes of progress each time.

Despite the frustrations with exploration, the tone-setting audio design from Section 9 is some of the best I've heard recently. Pulsating reverberations of loud clangs and distorted gurgles rang through my headphones, sending shivers down my spine. The wet squelching of enemies as they scurried toward me made me want to crawl out of my skin. The audio gives End of Abyss a sense of scope that outsized its dark and tight corridors, making it feel like this facility goes far beyond the bounds of the screen.