I’ve always liked Dead or Alive – unfortunately, that sentence usually has to be followed by a “but,” lest people think you’re some kind of weird pervert. “Not like that!” you might yell. “I think the Triangle System is rad!” It’s tiresome, and Dead or Alive 6 is a mechanically rich fighting game that deserves better than that stuff dominating the conversation around it. That said, while everything that made it special in 2019 still holds up today, Last Round specifically just doesn't feel worth the cash if you already own the original – and there are several things missing from it that really should have been included in a re-release of a seven-year-old game.

Before we jump into the ring and throw some punches, let's set some ground rules and establish what Last Round is (and unfortunately is not). Last Round is Dead or Alive 6 bundled with five of the seven DLC fighters previously released for the original game (Nyotengu, Phase 4, Momiji, Rachel, and Tamaki), five new costumes each for Kasumi, Ayane, Marie Rose, Honaka, and NiCO, a new Photo Mode, and some small but solid visual updates. That’s it.

What is not included are several hundred DLC costumes (this is not a joke; the Steam page currently lists 440 pieces of DLC, though some are bundles and character unlocks), although you can import most of what you already own if you've previously bought an outfit in the original release of DOA6. What you do not seem to be able to transfer are unlocks for the guest characters Mai Shiranui and Kula Diamond from The King of Fighters series – you'll have to buy them for $11 each, even if you already owned them. Yikes.

And that's Last Round. There are no new characters or returning stages from older games, as there were in Dead or Alive 5 Last Round. There is no cross-platform play, no rollback netcode, and no Tag Battle, despite fans begging for these additions for years. Team Ninja has promised additional characters and costumes down the line, but this threadbare re-release is absolutely baffling. Dead or Alive 6 is seven years old. If all the existing DLC were included for free or some impactful new feature were added then maybe you could justify it. But as it is, Last Round just feels like an excuse to sell more costumes. Those costumes are nice, sure, but there’s really no excuse for why they weren’t just new DLC.

I’m a Fighter

That's a bummer, because Dead or Alive 6 is still a great fighter. The Dead or Alive series has always been extremely simple: one button for punches, one for kicks, one for throws, one for holds, and a “new” (as of the 2019 original) special attack button that performs a Fatal Rush autocombo and unlocks special meter moves. But more than a lot of fighters, Dead or Alive is, at its best, a chess match. Using what’s known as the Triangle System, every move invites a countermove – strikes beat throws, throws beat holds, holds beat strikes – and every attack is also an opening, if you’re good enough.

What makes this fighting system great has always been the holds. See, you can counter essentially any strike by pressing hold and the direction you expect the attack to hit (high, low, or mid, though mid punches and mid kicks require different directional inputs), potentially stopping any offensive in its tracks. Holds are inherently risky, though. They won’t stop throws and still lose to strikes if mistimed or if you don’t use the right one – but land a hold right and you can swing an entire round. It’s absurdly satisfying to pull off, even against the computer.

The mind game that creates rules, and it’s still here in Last Round, but it doesn’t change that Dead or Alive is also incredibly easy to pick up. It’s not quite as deep as, say, Virtua Fighter, but anyone can play Dead or Alive 6. Getting good at it involves really digging into moves and countermoves, knowing how both the character you’re playing and the one you’re playing against work, and using that knowledge to pick the right option at the right time. It feels great when you land a hit, and hurts to take one.

When you’re getting smacked around and watching your health bar go the way of the dodo, it stings. But it should. That means you made a mistake. Shouldn’t have mistimed that hold, ya know? But when you max out your Break Gauge in order to hit a Break Blow – think Critical Blows from Dead or Alive 5 – or get just enough Break Gauge to pull off a Break Hold and turn the tables with a nifty counter, the Triangle System sings. Adding a meter to a 3D fighter is always risky (just ask Tekken fans how they feel about Heat in Tekken 8), but I think Dead or Alive 6’s implementation has managed to stand the test of time.

Dead or Alive 6 Last Round also feels absurdly good to play on PC. Hits carry weight and impact, characters feel agile, and matches are quick and engaging. You can pull off some truly sick combos if you know how, but matches still revolve around risk-reward decision making and execution. I'm also still a big fan of the Danger Zones, which range from overtly silly things like “you got blasted into a pterodactyl egg and now the pterodactyls are Big Mad at you” to “it's funny when someone falls down a really big hill and hits everything along the way.” Positioning, poise, and proper timing are elements of any fighting game, but it’s hard to overstate how simple and clean and good Dead or Alive's moment-to-moment game feel is. Everything just flows.

As someone who played a lot around the original’s release in 2019 but didn’t keep up with every update since, one of the benefits of Last Round is getting to use the five included DLC characters I hadn’t tried out. I enjoyed them all, but really clicked with Momiji, Rachel, and Phase 4. Momiji trades power for speed and aggression, while Rachel is all brute strength through short strings that turn into lots of damage, which tracks if you’ve played as either of them in Ninja Gaiden. Phase 4, well… she can do a little bit of everything – one of those “feels immediately good to play” kind of characters, at least for me. I definitely want to spend more time with her.

What’s Old is New Again

Dead or Alive 6 is otherwise the same game I remember – and though that’s disappointing for a full price re-release, it’s mostly a good thing when it comes to the actual game stuff. It still has excellent teaching tools, including an incredibly detailed tutorial, command training, your standard training mode (complete with frame data), and combo trials for each character. If this is your first Dead or Alive, it's easy to find your footing, and if you’re knocking off some rust, these things still help a lot.

I'm also a big fan of DOA Quest, a challenge mode that puts you into a fight and gives you up to three tasks to complete, like doing X amount of damage in a combo or hitting an enemy while they're sidestepping. The best part is that if you don’t know how to do something, you can press a button and be immediately taken to the appropriate lesson in the tutorial, practice to your heart's content, and then go back to DOA Quest when you're done. Incredible. Fighting games are hard to learn and anyone who tells you otherwise is lying, so good teaching tools are essential to getting people in and keeping them around. DOA6 may be seven years old, but it got this stuff right, and that’s a big deal.

The other single-player modes are good, too. Say what you will, but I like the enjoyably silly if disjointed story mode. Sure, it's about tournaments and evil corporations and global conspiracies and ninjas and cyborgs and all sorts of crazy stuff, but it’s also very endearing. Where else can you see a guy yell “Hey, ninja man!” at an actual ninja before throwing a steel drum at him and immediately thereafter watch two women bond over their love of fighting, and then watch a couple of kids cheer on a New York street fighter after a sparring match? Not many places, and I would much rather play through this than something like Street Fighter 6's World Tour, or just watch a movie like in Guilty Gear Strive.

It’s also nice to see a fighting game campaign that puts women in its lead roles instead of relegating them to supporting parts like most others do. The boys play their parts and get their moments, but this show mostly belongs to Kasumi, Helena, Ayane, Honaka, Laifeng, and Hitomi. They make choices, have agency, and solve their own problems in a way people who have only ever seen them playing beach volleyball might not expect. And sure, the story is a little Looney Tunes, but every fighting game’s is. Ever paid attention to Street Fighter lore? There’s a guy who thinks he’s a car, and that might not even be the weirdest part of it. Dead or Alive even makes a hell of a lot more sense than something like Mortal Kombat (and I say this as someone who likes MK's nonsense), and while the overarching plot can be messy, the individual scenes and character interactions work well and are a lot of fun.

Of course, that’s not the reputation Dead or Alive is typically known for, and because one of the selling points of Last Round is new costumes and a Photo Mode, I suppose I now have to talk about the thing that consumes every piece of criticism ever written about this series: how everyone looks and moves. Yes, the women look Like That™. Yes, many of them are very bouncy. Yes, you can change their hairstyles, give them glasses, and even dress them in revealing outfits if you’re into that (though you’ll still need to pay extra for the truly egregious stuff). Personally, I’m here for the punching.

If we’re being honest, there is no shortage of sexy characters in fighting games; Soul Calibur’s Ivy is quite literally a dominatrix and Capcom’s sexy outfits for Chun-Li sell so well that the last couple Street Fighters made the GDP of a small country. If anything, fighting games have only gotten hornier as time has gone on. I mean, have you seen the Guilty Gear cast? Or Street Fighter’s Juri, who is now Foot Fetish: The Character? Compared to some of that stuff, Dead or Alive 6’s brand of horny feels kind of… quaint? Some of the outfits here are tacky or tasteless, yeah, but I also don’t have to purchase or use them, or let them define my entire perception of Last Round. And if someone does use one of the ones I dislike online? All the more reason to kick their ass.

In fact, many of the visual improvements that were dismissed in 2019 as Team Ninja “being weird” actually hold up quite well. It rules that characters sweat during combat and you can see cuts and bruises on their faces and bodies when they’re doing their win poses. You should be a little sweaty and beat up after a fight, and it doesn’t feel like those details have been added with purely exploitative, leering intentions. Fighting is a brutal, bloody business. I like that Dead or Alive 6’s characters look like they’ve been in a brawl after a knock down, drag out fight. Don't get me wrong: you'd never mistake Dead or Alive 6 for a fighter made today. It looks like a very pretty PS4 game, which it functionally is, but it at least holds up really well.

So yeah, Dead or Alive is still Dead or Alive, but you have to take the good with the bad, and there is certainly good here. Even with the DLC issues, I’d kill to have this many costume options in most modern fighters, and it’s nice that you can unlock so many of them just by playing as characters and spending in-game cash. Some of them are tacky, but I’d rather put Helena into one of her many fabulous dresses than a swimsuit anyway. There’s also an impressive visual variety across everyone’s designs, especially in an age when we’re seeing a lot of the same face shapes and body types be recycled. I want to be clear: I’m not saying Dead or Alive 6 is immune to criticism. Some of it is absolutely deserved; but spending time with it after a few years away also makes me think there’s stuff here that deserves more praise than we previously gave it credit for. I hope we can be normal about that.

Rollback Netcode, My Beloved

As for other single-player modes, well, there's no shortage. The lack of Tag Battle in this release is lousy, but there’s still plenty to do, like standard versus, arcade, and survival modes, a replay theater, a library with lore entries and trivia, and a music room (in addition to the aforementioned story mode and DOA Quest). Even if you never want to play online, there’s lots here to occupy you.

I even like the new Photo Mode (despite the fact that it will inevitably be used for evil). It’s easy to pick your characters and stage and go through their move list frame by frame in order to get the shots you want. I wish there was more freedom when it came to moving the camera; it's largely locked in place, though you can zoom in and out and rotate the characters to compensate. Photo Mode also doesn't work quite as well on a fightstick as I'd like because some options are mapped to the right analog stick, but it’s solid enough.

Finally, let's talk about online play. The lack of cross-platform play in 2026 is completely inexcusable, but the lack of rollback, while equally maddening, is easier to understand because it's famously difficult to implement in 3D games. That said, Last Round's netcode worked surprisingly well when I tested it. I live in New York and played someone in Texas and our matches were, aside from one minor instance of stuttering, incredibly smooth. However, we were both on wired connections. Now, I'm of the opinion that people who play fighting games on wireless connections are ninja dogs who will never see heaven, but the fact remains that a lot of people play that way and it's going to impact matches. It's wild that Team Ninja had the opportunity to implement a rollback solution here (which they could have then refined in future games) and simply chose not to. Is it gamebreaking? No. But it's an incredibly disappointing choice.

Minor spoilers follow for Season 5 of The Bear. All eight episodes are now streaming on Hulu and Disney+.

After becoming an overnight sensation in 2022, The Bear has come to an end with a fifth and final season that’s all about bringing it back home to the titular high-end restaurant and the people within it. The series, created by Christopher Storer, picks up the morning after the end of Season 4, where The Bear is on life support. Despite the Food & Wine Best New Chef accolade pastry wizard Marcus Brooks (Lionel Boyce) just won, Uncle Jimmy’s (Oliver Platt) money clock is still ticking down to zero -- with Carmen Berzatto (Jeremy Allen White) telling Sydney Adamu (Ayo Edebiri) and cousin Richie Jerimovich (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) that he’s leaving the restaurant business, handing them the keys to The Bear.

Over the course of a day (outside of a teeny time jump at the end of the finale), we watch as the staff at The Bear cope with what might be their last-ever service. Per usual, things are going poorly. With their funds dwindling, purveyors have shut out The Bear; the kitchen needs to stretch the little that’s on hand into a worthy course menu for an overbooked night. A recent bad investment has run Uncle Jimmy’s bank account dry, and he, Computer (Brian Koppelman -- get back to writing The Roman, brother) and niece Cheese (Elsie Fisher) hit the streets of Chicago to try to scrounge up any loose change to keep things alive another day.

Worse yet, the torrential weather outside matches the stressy mood indoors as the staff hustles to fix one setback after the next while having hushed, reflective conversations with one another. After four seasons that have often strayed outside of the four walls of the former Original Beef of Chicagoland with mixed results, here we get a renewed focus on the core staff at The Bear desperately trying to make a meal of the scraps of time they have left together.

Where you land on this season will largely depend on how invested you still are — especially after the preceding two seasons of meandering television — in this restaurant’s success and the endpoint of its staff’s emotional well-being. For me, with every familiar two-person scene that fishtails into a monologue, I had a difficult time rejecting the intrusive thought of the Dr. Manhattan meme format. It’s 2026 and I’m watching the characters on The Bear apologize to each other in the middle of their crumbling restaurant that may or may not make it. I think I might be tired of being caught in the tangle of their lives.

This isn’t to say this season is devoid of high points. The final three-episode stretch sends The Bear off relatively nicely. Episode 7, “Caramel,” is legitimately triumphant — and could be counted amongst the series’ best episodes — as The Bear executes on its potential final dinner shift. Every member of the staff finally locks in to pirouette through the high-wire act of an impossible service; for as awful as the situation is, everyone is “maximizing,” as Richie has demanded with newfound positivity.

It’s not even necessarily disappointing that each of its long-struggling characters have made (albeit predictable) personal breakthroughs. Carmy has learned to tame his rage and speak to those around him with compassion instead of red-faced screaming when his pot boils over. Syd, the quality of her cooking acknowledged by the industry, has learned how to be the confident captain of the ship. Richie has become exactly the kind of creative and caring hospitality manager he’s admired. Marcus begins healing the broken relationship with his father. Tina (Liza Colón-Zayas), Gary (Corey Hendrix), Ebra (Edwin Lee Gibson), and even Neil (Matty Matheson) reach new pinnacles in their restaurant careers. On paper, it’s a lovely, clean way to end things. In practice, it borders on mawkish, a sugary dessert that turns cloying after a few bites. It’s the happy ending you probably could have anticipated after Season 1; it didn’t need five seasons to get here.

“Restaurants suck, everything sucks,” cousin Richie says midway through this season that is often engaging in metatextual conversation with itself. While its characters continue to dig into their own personal ambitions, failures, anxieties, they’re also talking about the show itself, down to the impact The Bear (and the cottage industry of other glossy food TV shows like Chef’s Table) have had on how non-industry people perceive restaurants. The same kind of thinking is even reflected in the score. Instead of the same “New Noise” riff that’s become practically synonymous with The Bear, things are backed by a steady, synthy Hans Zimmer score that seems to say the show, like its namesake restaurant, has left its scrappier days in the past for something more streamlined and mature.

In its hour-long final episode, The Bear flies off into the lens flare to finish with a soft landing that — without spoiling too much — finally gives Syd her flowers and I think pretty clearly answers what Carmy’s up to next, even if he doesn’t say the words explicitly. The series’ extraneous cast of cameos gather around for one last family party, for once drama-free. By then, the score and dead wife-style camera work in tandem, The Bear has succumbed to the sentimentality it was teetering toward all season long. To use one last restaurant metaphor: It wasn’t a bad meal, but I wish the server dropped the check 20 minutes ago.

Spoilers below for Episode 5 of Cape Fear. New episodes stream every Friday on Apple TV.

Things are getting weird on Cape Fear. Like, really weird. Five episodes in and Apple TV’s creepy, moody thriller seems to know where it’s going, but insists on taking its sweet time getting there, forsaking forward momentum for outright strange (albeit well-acted) character moments and multiple scenes that had me literally mouthing “WTF” (and not in a good way). This is a show that probably could have been 6-7 episodes, but was stretched to 10 and is now suffering from a severe case of mid-season-itis.

This week, we’re treated to a look at Nevaeh’s (revealed last week to be Max Cady’s daughter) home life, and it’s just about as weird as you can imagine. Her mother, Faith, seems to be in a particularly bad spot. When Nevaeh shows up to her house, which is filled with candles and has old footage of a fire-and-brimstone preacher playing on TV, it’s obvious her mother is afraid of her. Backing Faith into a corner, Nevaeh smiles menacingly and gives her a tad-too-long kiss on the mouth (WTF #1). It seems the psycho menace doesn't fall far from the psycho menace tree.

Later, Anna tracks Nevaeh to a movie theater and confronts her outside. After claiming she’s messing with the Bowden family to pay them back for putting her father behind bars, Nevaeh bites Anna (WTF #2) and is promptly hit by a car (WTF #3). Don’t worry. She immediately gets up and runs off.

Meanwhile, Tom has drinks with his colleague / not-quite-mistress Lex, and who shows up? You guessed it. Max. Again. Why the Bowden family doesn’t just run in the opposite direction whenever this guy makes an entrance is the show’s most enduring (and annoying) mystery. If an accused murderer was even POTENTIALLY stalking my family, I don’t think I’d sit down for a round of drinks and a deep, therapeutic conversation with him, which is exactly what happens here. Max claims that he’s never met his daughter but that she frequently wrote to him in prison, swearing vengeance on Tom and Anna.

Later, Max is confronted by his still-unnamed stalker. She claims that now she’s on the “right pills” and asks Max if “they’re going to hurt each other again” before saying she visited Max in a dream. Instead of dismissing her, Max has a moment of recognition before (I swear to God) threatening her and spitting in her mouth (WTF #4).

Juliette Lewis pops every time she shows up on screen, but this side plot runs the risk of wearing out its welcome if the relationship between Max and the stalker doesn’t move forward even a little bit soon. It sets up a borderline supernatural element to the show that could prove to be intriguing, but may just be an annoying red herring.

Speaking of the occult, we later see Zack performing some sort of ritual in the family’s unfinished den while clutching a strange object covered in what look to be puka shells. Afterwards, Zack gets into a physical altercation with his sister and Anna eventually finds him in a trance in the kitchen, staring into an open refrigerator. In perhaps the episode’s best moment, Zack creepily looks at Anna and gives the scariest “I love you Mom” this side of Norman Bates (WTF #5).

Joe Anders’ performance as Zack, along with that of Malia Pyles (who plays Nevaeh), is undoubtedly the best thing about “Faith.” While the plot stalls out and the coincidences pile up, these two young actors give wildly different yet equally affecting performances that are at once memorable and unsettling. The mystery of what exactly is happening with both of them has (so far) been enough to sustain my interest in the show, even while many other elements are stuck in neutral.

Elsewhere, the murder suspect who Tom and Lex are representing tells them she wants Lex off the case because Lex has become a distraction for Tom. Lex, as you can imagine, doesn’t take it well and attempts to blackmail Tom with a series of explicit voicemails she claims he sent (but Tom denies). Is this yet another one of Max Cady’s potential bursts of vengeance? Probably, but we don’t know quite yet.

Meanwhile, Anna tracks down Faith and attempts to get information about Nevaeh. After some resistance, Faith divulges that she suspects that Max is grooming Nevaeh and tells Anna where she can find her daughter. Turns out, Nevaeh’s “home” is a mausoleum she’s broken into and that she’s been sleeping in a broken, above-ground grave (WTF #6). Anna then returns to Faith’s house only to learn that she's been brutally murdered. At the scene, Anna finds the odd puka-shell covered object that Zack was clutching earlier and (of course) refuses to call 911.

As the episode winds down, Tom and Anna reveal that they’ve both been suspended from their jobs (Tom for his alleged affair, Anna for being too Max-obsessed) and we get one final WTF reveal: Max has moved in literally across the street. This, while eye roll-inducing on its face, hopefully serves as a catalyst to force the Bowdens to admit once and for all that Max Cady is bad news and they should get the hell out of town (maybe even to the titular Cape Fear?). It also underscores just how neutered Max has been this episode, having almost fully passed the villain baton to his daughter.

Episode 6 of Cape Fear isn’t a bad episode of TV. It’s just more concerned with filling time and creating cheap thrills than actually advancing the plot. The camerawork and cinematography are, as usual, great (there’s a long shot through the Bowden’s ductwork that’s straight out of Panic Room) and much of the acting is still stellar.

But, in a 50+ minute episode of television, there probably should be more than a good 100 seconds of actual story advancement. That’s OK for one episode a season, but I sure hope Cape Fear gets back to moving the plot forward in a meaningful way, instead of just getting me to repeatedly yell “WTF.”

Little Brother will be released June 26 on Netflix.

After faltering a while back as a strong-jaw action hero, WWE's John Cena found his film stride with comedy, awesomely playing eccentric weirdos for Judd Apatow, James Gunn, Peter Farrelly, Seth Rogen, Tina Fey, Paul Feig, and more. Now, in Little Brother, Cena gets to be the tightly-wound character, a stressed realtor named Rudd who must deal with his own doofus in the form of calamity-magnet Marcus, played by Eric André... and the results are - hey! - better-than-average!

Little Brother breaks no molds, and clearly the blooper reel that runs during the closing credits shows you they had more laughs on set than were provided for the viewer, but there are laughs to be had here. The sheer level of ridiculous catastrophes that happen to Marcus are often a godsend, just so over the top that you can't help but cackle a bit. But this also won't be your new favorite go-to comedy. One watch is sufficient.

Little Brother is a latecomer in long line of "guy annoys another guy" comedies - from Planes Trains & Automobiles to What About Bob? to Cable Guy to even 80% of SpongeBob Squarepants. Co-written by Jarrad Paul, who co-created the severely underrated Fox comedy The Grinder, Little Brother borrows some of its best traits from that series, as both involve an uptight, insecure rule-follower being bombarded, and cuckoo'd in a way, by an oddball free spirit (though, no offense to Cena, but he doesn't top Fred Savage's ability to turn the straight man into an expert comedic performance).

Little Brother can be deviously funny at times, feeling like one of the Farrelly Brothers' better efforts. But there are also long stretches where it becomes a Plain Jane streaming comedy, and those moments make you notice the missed potential. That being said, if you're excited to see Eric André suffer a seemingly unending parade of physical indignities, most of which are timed hilariously, then you've found your Xanadu.

As Rudd sets his eyes on becoming a reality TV show star as part of a high-end NYC real estate series, Marcus re-enters his life. Decades earlier, Rudd was briefly Marcus' "Big Brother" in an after-school outreach program, which he participated in mostly because of the issues he had with his own older brother, Josh. Marcus, now a physical culmination of trauma and disarray, thinks he and Rudd have been keeping in close contact for years, though it's actually been Rudd's assistant Mia (Shrinking's Sherry Cola) running interference and answering the e-mails.

So now Rudd, at his most anxious and uncertain, has to deal with a disastrous stranger who upsets every single apple cart while also getting along smashingly with everyone in Rudd's life - including his wife (Michelle Monaghan) and the adult Josh (Christopher Meloni).

The players all have great chemistry, particularly Cena and André, but the story plays out as expected, with all the familiar beats leading you through. First you feel for Rudd, then you feel for Marcus, then you just feel good about everyone. Still, Little Brother has enough bodily fluids, bare asses, and fake penises to make for a decent couch watch, so have at it.

Ever since the Steam Deck launched in 2022, handheld gaming PCs have been growing steadily more powerful and expensive, and there’s no better example of that trajectory than the MSI Claw 8 EX AI+. Powered by Intel’s new Arc G3 Extreme handheld chip, MSI’s new handheld is an absolute behemoth, easily able to top 60 fps in some of the most demanding games at its native 1200p, albeit at medium to high presets.

However, this performance comes with a cost. The MSI Claw 8 EX AI+ starts at $1,799, making it the most expensive handheld from a mainstream PC maker. Part of that cost can be attributed to AI datacenters driving demand for memory and storage through the roof, but like the Steam Machine earlier this week, the price makes the MSI Claw 8 EX AI+ a niche product – at least for now.

Unlike the Steam Machine, though, performance is strong enough on this handheld that anyone looking for the best handheld performance no matter the cost just might want to give the MSI Claw 8 EX AI+ a look.

Wait, How Much?

Basically everything is getting more expensive in the face of our current RAM crisis, and handhelds are certainly no different. Just a few weeks ago, the Steam Deck, which had been a budget all-star for years, saw a price rise that put it neck-and-neck with the Xbox Ally. Likewise, the Lenovo Legion Go 2, which launched at an expensive-for-the-time $1,099 starting price, now starts at $1,499 for its plain Z2 configuration.

It’s unfortunate that MSI has to launch the Claw 8 EX AI+ in this AI-fried market, but the price tag absolutely reflects it. The handheld will set you back $1,799 for its one configuration, netting you the new Arc G3 Extreme processor, 32GB of RAM, and a 1TB SSD. That price puts it right up against the now $1,799 Lenovo Legion Go 2, and in that matchup, MSI looks incredible. Because while this new Claw 8 EX AI+ doesn’t have a fancy OLED screen, it’s up to 55% faster than the Legion Go 2.

But the elephant in the room is the Asus ROG Xbox Ally X, which will set you back $999 right now, somehow avoiding the price increases that are hitting basically every other product on the market.

The Claw 8 EX AI+ is much faster than the Xbox Ally X, and even has a larger, brighter display, but it costs nearly twice as much. For most people that just want the best value, the MSI Claw 8 EX AI+ just isn’t it right now. But, if all you care about is getting the best handheld performance at any cost, well, it’s hard to argue with the Arc G3 Extreme’s results.

Design and Features

The MSI Claw 8 EX AI+ almost looks like someone took the Xbox Ally X and then just stretched it out a little bit. MSI clearly took some notes from Asus’ handheld, with the same controller-like flared grip on the bottom left and right corners of the Claw 8 EX AI+. Honestly, I wish more handhelds would start to adopt this design, because it does feel a bit more natural in hand.

It helps, too, that these flared grips have a nice texture to them, stopping them from feeling slippery after a couple hours of gaming. However, the sheer size of this handheld stops it from being quite as comfortable as the Ally X.

The Claw 8 EX AI+ is 11 inches wide and weighs in at 1.7lb. That’s far from the heaviest, or even the largest handheld I’ve reviewed, with the Legion Go 2 weighing in at a massive 2.03lb. But, unlike Lenovo’s handheld which had comparatively narrower controllers, I seriously have to stretch my thumb a bit to reach the menu buttons on the Claw 8 EX AI+.

The menu buttons are about 3.5 inches up from the bottom of the device, and a little more than 2 inches in from their respective edges. And to add on to the finger-stretching, the buttons are laid out in such a way that the ‘start’ and ‘select’ buttons are further up, while the buttons that bring up the Game Bar and MSI’s software are lower.

I cannot tell you how often I accidentally brought up the MSI Center M software when I just wanted to pull up the map in Crimson Desert. That’s annoying on its own, but for some reason, whenever I dismissed this software, to tab back into the game I was playing, the Claw 8 EX AI+ wouldn’t automatically refocus the game window, which meant I had to tap the screen with my finger to get the controller to work again. Once again, the most annoying part of using a Windows handheld is software.

It’s not all annoying though. The Game Bar button on the left side of the display will bring up a quick settings overlay, where you can swap between different performance modes, as well as toggle a few settings like screen brightness and RGB lighting.

While the rest of the buttons are about what you’d expect on many modern controllers, with the regular face buttons and some back paddles, the Claw 8 EX AI+ has Hall Effect analog sticks and triggers. They feel great right out of the box, and the Hall Effect sensors mean they should last for years before you experience stick drift. I would have preferred TMR (tunneling magnetoresistance) sticks for their improved energy efficiency, especially at $1,799, but hey, I’ll take Hall Effect over a traditional potentiometer sensor.

Along the top of the MSI Claw 8 EX AI+ are two Thunderbolt 4 ports, along with a MicroSD card reader and a headphone jack. I love that having a second port has become the norm with modern handhelds, but I would have rather MSI found a way to move one of them to the bottom of the device.

Speaking of the bottom of the device, the Claw’s display extends a bit beneath the rest of the chassis, so that it’s flush with the flared ends of the controller. This design looked wild when I first saw it, but it is growing on me. It allows MSI to use a large 8-inch display while having a smaller chassis than last year’s Claw 8 AI+. I do wonder how durable this display will be over time, but the plastic is more than thick enough to prevent any kind of catastrophic bending.

Gaming and Performance

The MSI Claw 8 EX AI+ is powered by the new Intel Arc G3 Extreme SoC. This is extremely similar to the Intel Core Ultra 9 388H found in the Asus Zenbook Duo that launched back at CES 2026, but with two of the Performance cores disabled. However, while the CPU was cut back a bit to fit into a handheld’s needs, Intel included the full-fat Arc B390 GPU, with its 12 Xe-cores.

But, really, the biggest difference between the Arc G3 Extreme and the AMD Ryzen Z2 Extreme is its age. You see, when the Z2 family launched, it launched with dated architectures for both its CPU and GPU, which meant there wasn’t much improvement over the Z1 Extreme that preceded it. That’s not the case with the G3 Extreme. This is built on Intel’s Panther Lake platform, which is powering all of its current-generation laptops, and it makes a huge difference.

Just compared to last year’s MSI Claw, which was built on Intel Lunar Lake, the Claw 8 EX AI+ is as much as 47% faster in 3DMark Time Spy and 54% faster in Cyberpunk 2077. A lot of that comes down to the Arc G3 Extreme having 12 graphics cores to the Intel Core Ultra 7 258V having 8, but that’s only part of the story.

Even compared to the AMD Ryzen Z2 Extreme, the Intel G3 Extreme is a huge improvement. In Cyberpunk 2077, the Claw 8 EX AI+ gets 54 fps at 1080p with the High preset and XeSS set to performance. The Lenovo Legion Go 2, with the same settings, only manages 37 fps. That’s a 37% lead for MSI against a handheld that, at the time of writing, costs the same amount of money.

The Xbox Ally X hurts the Claw 8 EX AI’s value proposition quite a bit, though. While that handheld was tested at 1080p, rather than 1200p, the Ally X gets 44 fps in Cyberpunk at the High preset, with FSR set to Quality. That narrows the Claw’s lead to about 20% – give or take a few points for the difference between 1200p and 1080p – despite its 57% lower cost.

But while the Claw 8 EX AI+ has more raw graphics performance than other handhelds, it also has multi-frame generation. This tech uses the NPU to insert AI-generated frames in between each rendered frame of the game you’re playing.

At its core, this technology isn’t new to handhelds – AMD’s frame gen technology has been available since the Steam Deck. With XeSS frame gen, though, Intel is able to generate up to three AI frames for each “real” frame, which really helps saturate the Claw 8 EX AI’s 120Hz display.

Nvidia famously introduced multi-frame generation as part of DLSS 4 back in 2025, and since then the technology has been controversial, because it can introduce added latency and visual artifacts. The same is absolutely true for Intel’s iteration, but I will say that it feels fine on such a small screen.

Playing Crimson Desert, frame generation brought me from about 40-45 fps to around 155 with frame gen set to 4x. And while that came at the cost of some latency, I didn’t really notice, likely because the game is slow enough for 10-15ms of added latency to not matter all that much. Instead, the game looked a lot more smooth, just by virtue of having more frames sent to the display.

Your mileage will vary, of course, but whether or not you choose to use it, I’d still rather have the option than not.

When Intel was telling me about the Arc G3 Extreme, it said that two performance cores (or P-Cores) were disabled to promote better battery life. And, while that probably did make a big difference, the Claw 8 EX AI+ didn’t fare much better than the Z2 Extreme-equipped handhelds I’ve tested.

In Procyon, which tests battery life through Microsoft Office applications, the Claw did extremely well, lasting a whopping 13 hours. However, when I set a timer and just laid in bed playing Crimson Desert, the battery died after 2 hours and 14 minutes. That’s not worse than I’d expect from the Lenovo Legion Go 2 or the Xbox Ally X, but it’s not exactly better, either. In fact, it falls pretty much right in line with those two devices, which lasted 2 hours and 17 minutes, and 2 hours and 34 minutes, respectively.

However, baked into the G3 Extreme is a new Endurance mode. Basically, when this is enabled, your framerate will be locked to 30 fps (by default – you can configure this in Intel’s graphics utility), and power will be limited beyond that. In games where you’d otherwise get north of 60 fps, this will make a massive difference to battery life, but obviously it’ll have less impact if you’re barely hitting that performance threshold in the first place.

Jackie Thomas is the Hardware and Buying Guides Editor at IGN and the PC components queen. You can follow her @Jackiecobra

Jackass: Best and Last is in theaters on June 26.

“My butthole really hurts,” remarks Steve-O in the midst of Jackass: Best and Last. And hey, no surprise there, because just in the course of this movie’s new material – much less what he’s endured in the past – we’ve seen Steve-O allow a robot to stick its large, jagged finger up his butt. And that’s before one of the ever-nebulous Jackass “stunts” involves Steve-O and several of his cohorts violently soiling themselves while in the midst of playing a very physical, close-quarters game.

But it’s just another day at the office for this group, the core members of whom have been somehow doing their unique mixture of wild, raucous, impressive, foolhardy and sometimes outright nauseating things for the over 25 years since MTV’s Jackass TV series debuted in 2000. But the end is here, with the series officially wrapping up with this fifth motion picture installment - they swear for real this time!

The film’s subtitle hints at the construction of Best and Last, which intermixes brand new material with a clip show/greatest hits approach that revisits material from the past. The end result doesn’t quite live up to what’s come before, feeling like an epilogue of sorts more than its own full-fledged new Jackass movie. Yet it’s not as awkward or rigid as some fans feared it might be, because Johnny Knoxville and his cohorts are upfront about what’s going on from the start and how it’s all about looking over their history, with clips from the past often set up by modern-day discussions of these moments from the guys.

There’s also some nice layering here done by Jackass’ perennial director, Jeff Tremaine. For instance, rather than just cutting to a clip of Steve-O’s infamous “Poo Cocktail Supreme” stunt from Jackass 3D, we begin this specific trip down memory lane portion of the movie with a never-before-seen stunt filmed for the Jackass TV show that got Knoxville in trouble with the law. Then we see how Knoxville would go on to film the original “Poo Cocktail” stunt just after that bit (while worrying the show itself might be in trouble now, thanks to MTV’s unhappiness with what had just occurred), and then go into Steve-O’s "Supreme" version from the third film.

It’s appreciated how Tremaine, Knoxville, producer Spike Jonze, and all involved add in material we’ve never seen (or, in some cases, hasn’t been widely seen at least) to the archival footage. This includes some moments that are fascinating for die-hard Jackass fans, including a genuinely life-endangering stunt Knoxville filmed in 1998 as test footage – that you can absolutely understand MTV’s refusal to air – and an expanded version of the memorable “Silence of the Lambs” stunt from Jackass Forever that has been restored to include former Jackass member Bam Margera participating, whose footage was excised from that sequence after he was fired as a result of his ongoing substance abuse issues.

From test footage to TV series footage to deleted scenes to Bad Grandpa spinoff movie footage, the entire history of Jackass is culled from here in a properly nostalgic, fond farewell manner. Oh, and if you love the Brad Pitt “The Abduction” stunt from the TV series as much as I do, you’ll also be happy about getting both modern day context for how they pulled it off, and also a bit of additional footage included from the amazing night that Pitt led a bunch of Los Angelenos to believe they’d just seen him dragged into a van and kidnapped right in front of their eyes.

As for the new stuff, it’s fun and funny for sure and it doesn’t feel like a tiny or inconsequential part of the movie. Plenty of screen time is spent on new stunts involving stuff like a Jackass take on an Escape Room or a trivia game with dire consequences for the loser that involve the sizeable rear end of one of the younger crew who joined the team in Jackass Forever, Zach Holmes (whose butt is prominently featured in more than one stunt).

On the other hand, the new stuff does generally feel smaller compared overall to what’s come before. The fact that Best and Last was shot on a rather short schedule compared to other Jackass movies isn't surprising. That’s not just because new footage takes up less screen time, but also because it all seems more contained this time out, sticking to a few buildings or backlots versus the earlier films having some big location and weather/environment changes, sometimes including trips overseas. And as outrageous and legitimately funny as many of these stunts are, and as painful as it no doubt is to, say, have your penis be given a shock or to have a row of shoes spin around while hitting you in the crotch, it’s also clear that these stunts are rarely as large scale or daunting as what’s come before (and that a couple of cast members are present but rarely actively participating).

But look, the fact is most of these guys are in their 50s now. And so you can be a bit disappointed to not see them go as all out as they once did, but also understand that they just don’t have the capabilities to do so anymore. Hell, Knoxville has quite literally been medically ordered not to do what he once did, after the bad injuries he sustained on Jackass Forever’s bull stunt. So yeah, it definitely feels like it’s time to finally wrap it all up, but it’s also hard to begrudge them the indulgence of doing so onscreen. And the thing is, it’s a truly sweet and loving send off, which is funny to say about a movie that had me feeling queasy thanks to seeing so much onscreen poop covering a mat on the floor at one point. Yet that’s just the magic of Jackass and its depiction of a bunch of guys doing profoundly dumb and disgusting things who also love each other and have charmed the audience into loving them in turn.

Johnny Knoxville gets openly emotional and choked up more than once in Jackass: Best and Last, because this whole series and the people he makes it with clearly mean so much to him and it’s hard for him to say goodbye. As both that previously unreleased footage that opens the movie and the Jackass Forever bull stunt underline, Knoxville could have quite literally died more than once making Jackass, had things gone just a bit differently. Thankfully, he did not, and as much as it might be sad for him to see it come to an end – just as it can be for longtime fans – he can do so with his head held high, because he made something that made people laugh so much through the years. And something that showed them so much male genitalia in the process, in all of its many shapes, sizes, and forms.

In the Hand of Dante is streaming on Netflix now.

Star-studded yet defiantly dull, Julian Schnabel’s In the Hand of Dante crosscuts a turn-of-the-century mob saga with a Late Middle Ages tale of how Dante Alighieri came to write The Divine Comedy. The movie, which made its debut at the Venice Film Festival and is now on Netflix, is ambitious in concept, but squanders its artistic potential thanks to its languid unfurling, courtesy of a rote, observational aesthetic approach. It feels like studying poetry purely by reading someone’s academic notes rather than experiencing the verses themselves.

Adapted from the 2002 novel by the late Nick Tosches, Schnabel’s movie recreates the book’s narrative conceit by positioning Tosches as its protagonist. This fictionalized version of the author, played by Oscar Isaac, is roped into a harebrained New York mob scheme to steal a literary treasure: recently-unearthed writing penned by Dante himself in the early 14th century, the only artifact of its kind. But before the lost manuscript is revealed, the story begins with Tosches regaling his friend Lefty (Louis Cancelmi) about how much he identifies with Dante and sees himself in the poet’s work. The movie literalizes this by having Isaac play Dante too.

It’s a commendable flourish and creates the kind of connections that could only exist in a visual medium. However, the movie immediately over-extends itself by granting pretty much its entire ensemble similar double roles. Nearly every actor from the movie’s widescreen black-and-white present cross-pollinates in the vivid 4:3 period segments, but in a manner that seldom creates thematic resonance. While it makes perfect sense to have Gal Gadot play Tosches’ love interest in one timeline and Dante’s wife in the other, Cancelmi plays both the author’s low-level mob hoodlum pal and an Italian noble lording over Dante, while Gerard Butler is cast as violent mob enforcer Louie as well as the austere Pope Boniface VIII. This might lead one to assume the film contains some commentary on social or religious structures, but the actors’ reappearances feel largely incidental.

The main plot is set in the early 2000s and sees Tosches hired by mafia head honcho Joe Black (John Malkovich) to travel to Italy to retrieve and authenticate what could be Dante’s only surviving handwriting, which the mob hopes to sell for a hefty sum. With Butler’s Louie as his trigger-happy cleanup crew, Tosches’ scheme goes gradually off the rails across the movie’s oppressive 153 minutes. However, some initial flashbacks to major events in the author’s life lay the groundwork for a confrontation of religion that never truly materializes. Al Pacino makes an impact in his single scene as Tosches’ uncle, advising a younger version of the writer on how to reckon with his violent actions in a Catholic context, while a fleeting beat of personal tragedy leads to Tosches’ pivot away from religion altogether. These hints of meaningful personal drama are far more interesting than the sluggish heist saga that follows, which ends up bogged down by the kind of florid, repetitive conversations that are emblematic of a film student making their first mob picture.

If the movie’s surface-level struggle between religion and violence sounds a tad Scorsesean — down to the Rolling Stones needle drops ripped right from Mean Streets — this inspiration becomes even more overt when Martin Scorsese himself appears in the movie as Dante’s elderly teacher. It’s a worthwhile role that verges on engaging with the kind of soul-searching that led Dante to write his masterpiece in the first place, but it’s also a tiny piece of a much larger puzzle that fails to stir the soul. By the time the movie tries to combine its reflective elements with some semblance of propulsion, courtesy of Jason Momoa as a gruff Italian hatchet man on Tosches’ tail, the film has wandered off in too many different directions to meaningfully cohere.

Like the novel, its setting runs on either side of September 11th 2001, but the incident is mere background noise. Meanwhile, all the initial hubbub about Tosches seeing himself in Dante — the very reason for its casting conceit! — yields only nominal connections between the movie’s dueling timelines despite hints of something more esoteric connecting past and present. At the very least, the actual details of how one might verify an ancient document are a subject of intrigue, but they don’t take up nearly enough of the runtime.

As both stories lurch forward, Schnabel and cinematographer Roman Vasyanov employ a noncommittal approach wherein their handheld camera floats listlessly between close-ups, a visual trick (or perhaps visual tic) that recurs with no meaningful evolution or variation, making for a nagging irony (intentional or otherwise) given an early scene in which Tosches discusses Dante as having been trapped by his poetic form. Schnabel ends up similarly stifled by this mere sliver of style, part of a larger whole left on the table if his previous films about artists — Basquiat, Before Night Falls, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, At Eternity’s Gate — are any indication. Where he once made magic, he now pens a dry instruction manual that tries to explain the trick.

Avatar: The Last Airbender Season 2 debuts June 25 on Netflix.

The first season of Avatar: The Last Airbender felt like watching the Ember Island Players, but unironically — it was a season of TV that struggled to decide whether it was gritty and dark for the now-grown-ups who watched the original 20 years ago, or if it should replicate the silliness and fun for a new generation of kids. It wound up struggling to mix the two tones; thankfully, when the world needed him most, the avatar returned.

Season 2 of Avatar: The Last Airbender improves on nearly every single aspect of the first season in really impressive ways. The pacing is much better, though not perfect; the condensation of storylines makes for a meatier story that allows each character to have their own satisfying arc; and there are some original subplots that are genuine improvements on the source material. The show also finally resolves its tonal issue by aging up the story. Just like the original cartoon started maturing in Book Two of its story, the live-action version also takes a more serious approach with its cast grown up — quite literally in the case of Gordon Cormier’s growth spurt, which the season tries clunkily to explain — and the story growing up along with them.

With Book Two being such a sprawling chapter in the Aang saga, it makes for a hard story to adapt, as it covers too many locations and side stories. The live-action adaptation decides to pretty much jump straight into the Ba Sing Se portion of the story as soon as possible, building up the thrills and dangers of the metropolis. It works, as we get a good feeling of the inner workings of the Earth Kingdom capital and its culture, the sheltered life its citizens live, and the vast network of secrecy and surveillance they live under.

The season finds a nice balance of giving the main story a sense of urgency while justifying slowing down to allow the characters enough time to explore the city and have individual arcs. Particularly compelling are the side stories for Aang, who is forced to play politician with Long Feng to try and gain an audience with the king; for Toph, and her dealings with her horrendous family history; and for Zuko and Iroh’s attempts at starting a new life.

Miya Cech does a great job as Toph, embodying the character’s toughness and prowess, but also her vulnerability, especially when it involves her family. Speaking of family, the Fire Nation continues to be a highlight of this adaptation. Elizabeth Yu’s Azula is a phenomenal villain, and she gets an expanded role this season that gives us insights into her resentment toward both Zuko and her parents, and her desperate and ruthless pursuit of approval. Dallas Liu makes for an impeccable Zuko, and his take on the Zuko Alone storyline is a treat to watch even in a new medium. This time, however, it is Paul Sun-Hyung Lee’s Uncle Iroh who gets the absolute best parts of the story.

Much like the One Piece live-action adaptation, this show knows when to remix storylines and where to add original ideas to make later elements hit harder, as in the case of Iroh. Season 2 expands on Iroh’s history with the Earth Kingdom, not only with him losing his son, but in getting quite explicit in reminding us that before he was a fun and wise uncle, he was a war criminal. The Last Airbender takes Iroh to task and forces him to reckon with the lives he destroyed and the atrocities committed under his command. It’s working from nuanced and implied moments from the source material, presenting them in a way that Nickelodeon couldn’t allow.

Sadly, it’s not all perfect. Visually, the show is a letdown, mostly set at night with poor lighting that makes it hard to follow the action. Bending looks great, but there is some awkwardness with the CG and action choreography (though creatures like Wan Shi Tong look great). Worse yet is the constant use of CG imagery and virtual sets for nearly every location; you can count on one hand the number of scenes set inside physical sets that aren’t just enclosed rooms.

Likewise, even if a lot of the added material and rearranging of original source elements make for a good overall story, it does suffer by forcing some of those elements into perhaps the wrong places. It’s most noticeable with Appa’s disappearance; this happens early in the cartoon and becomes a driving force of most of Book Two, but the live-action show leaves it for the last couple episodes of the season, making it feel like an afterthought. It therefore loses most of its emotional impact and comes across as a forced, out-of-the-blue twist when there are already enough subplots driving the story to its conclusion. This continues to be the biggest issue with this adaptation; it feels compelled to include every single memorable bit from the original cartoon even if by the time it’s included, it no longer makes sense.

Supergirl opens in theaters on June 26.

Walking into Supergirl, I was excited. I had real expectations. Before you even get to the DCU of it all, I’m officially a fan of Craig Gillespie. He’s a guy who makes movies that are all better than you’d think they’d be – Cruella and I, Tonya and Lars and the Real Girl and even The Finest Hours, that boat-broke-in-half rescue movie was surprisingly really good. These are movies that could've easily become forgettable entries in their particular genres, like just another biopic or live-action remake or movie about a guy who’s in love with a sex doll. So the prospect of tackling a superhero movie with that particular ability to elevate a film in an otherwise tired category was intriguing.

Where the DCU is concerned, I’m here for James Gunn’s universe. I’ve liked what’s gone into it so far and I loved Milly Alcock’s first appearance as Kara in her cameo in Superman. I think this version of Supergirl is a blast and her solo outing didn’t do anything to change my mind on that front. But this is also where Supergirl starts to become a tale of two movies. For everything that the movie does right, that thing’s got an alter ego that’s doing it wrong. As a result, the movie is this shuffling, few-steps-forward, few-steps-back kind of slog that never really finds a rhythm.

For example, the reluctant hero thing is actually very difficult to pull off. It’s hard to play “I don’t care” in an engaging way, because if the character on screen doesn’t care, then I certainly don’t care either. Alcock manages it here about as well as you could hope for. Kara’s a mess and there’s no real concern with her ever not being a mess as part of her journey. It’s very fun. The other side of that coin, however, is that she doesn’t have much of a journey. She’s not a markedly different person at the end of the movie than she is at the beginning. Not because of anything she did or didn’t do as a character or an actor, but because the story she’s been put in doesn’t give her much to do and the result is a movie that sort of flattens out and drags.

When she first meets Eve Ridley’s Ruthye, the young girl out for revenge against the man who murdered her entire family, Kara is protective, sticking her neck out to do the right thing for a kid who’s in over her head. By the end of the film, Kara… does exactly the same thing. Part of the point there is that it highlights the impact she has on Ruthye. (Ridley ultimately gets the lion’s share of the character work in the film, and her character’s journey winds up feeling far more complete than Kara’s.) So while Milly Alcock’s performance is a real strength of the movie, and she does pull off the reluctant hero trope, it is still a very familiar trope and the shorthand that’s used in portraying it is a real weakness.

Familiarity in general is another villainous plot Supergirl tries to thwart. On one hand, the movie wears its influences proudly. The comparisons to James Gunn’s work on Guardians of the Galaxy have been obvious since the trailers first dropped, and we knew the True Grit/archetypal Western structure would be a big part of the film because of the source material, Tom King’s Woman of Tomorrow run. A Mad Max influence is just as obvious in the grimy, lifeless terrains and dying worlds on which most of the movie takes place, planets where people scratch for survival. But the old, reliable Mos Eisley Cantina should get a shout-out as well. The alien design and practical makeup FX and costuming throughout the movie are genuinely top shelf, and clearly the customers in Star Wars’ most wretched hive were on the filmmakers’ minds.

And yet, while I’ll happily take “True Grit meets Mad Max by way of Guardians and Star Wars,” there's still a dulled edge to the whole movie. Instead of taking the post-apocalyptic vibes of Mad Max, they lift a whole plot point straight from Fury Road and handle it, frankly, a little clumsily. And instead of the emotionally relevant needle drops of Guardians, Kara gets slow-paced montages set to a Jimmy Eat World cover that I found… well, it was baffling.

The film's two other headliners fall into these buckets as well. Matthias Schoenaerts as the film’s villain, Krem of the Yellow Hills, looks incredible. His whole appearance would make the creature design team from A New Hope proud. The beads studded into his face, the machinery grafted into his body, the weird little red button he needs to activate to speak, all of it adds up to a striking and genuinely pretty cool image that would have felt at home in the Thunderdome.

But… they don’t ever do anything with it.

Krem, for all the post-apocalyptic biker gang aura he generates, gets nothing else to go on. He has some affectations that Schoenaerts was clearly having a good time with, like how he’s eating something in almost every scene, but that’s all they really are – affectations. There’s nothing that makes him scary or formidable other than a few throwaway lines about his relative strength and the way other people on screen fear him.

Meanwhile, Jason Momoa's Lobo finds his way into the movie as well, and the mostly-impervious anti-hero bounty hunter is just as much fun as fans have been anticipating. Cigar-chomping gets thrown around a little excessively any time a J. Jonah Jameson or a Hellboy or a Will Smith and Jeff Goldblum from Independence Day show up on screen, but Momoa more than earns the descriptor in all the best possible ways in Supergirl. He looks the part as well, with face paint and prosthetics that cut the kind of imposing figure the fan favorite deserves.

But… Lobo doesn’t need to be there.

Characters come and go in movies, sometimes with very little fanfare, sometimes playing crucial roles in the story. And they don’t always have to be the latter. The issue with Lobo is that he feels a little extra tacked on. The one scene he has with Kara has real reshoot energy. It’s added on to a scene that didn’t need any extra motivation to get to the next scene, nor is he a particularly unique foil for Kara that propels her character in any meaningful way. He just happens to be looking for the same group of guys that Kara and Ruthye are after. The only real added value he gives the movie is a few (admittedly fun) one-liners. And maybe that’s all Lobo needs to be. Ultimately, he shows up to put his immortal stamp of approval on Kara’s actions, but that feels both unnecessary and more than a little pandering, and it leaves me not entirely sure what to do with him.

So the story of this movie continues to be, “they did it right on one hand, but on the other, not so much,” and as just the second entry into Gunn’s DCU, that issue spills over into all the stuff that comes with being a part of a currently-expanding expanded universe. On one hand, Supergirl needs to continue building outwards to some extent, and this is another of the film’s strengths. Her scenes with David Corenswet’s Superman are wonderful. That’s not to say that Superman saved the day here, or that Supergirl needs Superman to be interesting. It’s that the dynamic between the two of them is great – one positively looking toward the future, while the other still nurses old wounds. I’m definitely looking forward to more of this duo on screen.

But on the other hand, where her solo film is concerned, Supergirl needs to flesh out Kara’s backstory. The structure of how and when flashbacks are deployed in Supergirl aside – because my personal preference would have been a straight chronological telling of the story as opposed to stopping in the middle to tell us her backstory – I did find myself way more interested in her time growing up on a floating, life-boat of a city after the destruction of Krypton. There’s work being done there on both fronts, as the film continues to build on the changes made to Kal-El’s origin story from Superman while introducing another side to that story via Kara. The “present day” of the film, with all the cribbing from True Grit and Mad Max and Guardians, feels far less fresh and interesting than Kara's shielded childhood on Argo, even if both have their entertaining moments.

Again though, this is Supergirl’s biggest challenge. There are a lot of things that work throughout this movie, but there are just as many reasons why they don’t quite add up.

The Get Out will be released in select theaters on June 26, and on Digital and On Demand on June 30.

Russell Crowe's Albanian night club owner tries to retire from the money laundering business in the LA-set misfire, The Get Out, an underworld crime caper that tries but fails to capture the charm and richness of writers like Elmore Leonard (and filmmaker fans of Leonard like Tarantino).

Before delving into shortcomings, let's note that Crowe himself is the most vibrant part of the film. It's a good reminder of how fun he can be as a comedic performer, though the side effect of The Get Out could be making you watch The Nice Guys again (which also includes pining for a sequel). As earnest, hardworking Marco Kapak, who is truly in love with his much younger girlfriend, Sunny (Teresa Palmer), Crowe anchors the film while providing the best balance of tone.

Kapak is a quasi-criminal in a landscape of more brutal cartel characters (which allows for a Pope's Exorcist reunion with Daniel Zovatto), but The Get Out — originally titled Bear Country — feels like a mess of a story lacking the spark of cleverness to excuse all the rambling. Directed by Derrick Borte and adapted from a novel by Thomas Perry, the film isn't fun enough to warrant its '90s-style crime ensemble, nor are the moments of violence that are meant to act in contrast to its lighter elements captivating enough to add true excitement. Ultimately, it's a parade of half-measures.

After a heart attack makes Kapak rethink his current vocation, setting his sights on a relaxing future away from his current stress, he starts making moves to sell off his club. Enter Aaron Paul's Jeff, a poor schmo who's in over his head and forced to act as a sabotaging pawn. Jeff's story is the least satisfying of the bunch, as Paul is given only constant anxiety and frustration to play, with no narrative reprieve.

The Vampire Diaries' Nina Dobrev plays a wild card bank teller who attaches herself to Jeff (as one more melodramtic bad thing in Jeff's sad life), but she's just given the "crazy" card to work with and a token pop culture reference to wear as her identity. The Get Out sets up a lot of moving parts, including Luke Evans and Josh McConville as different parts of the law enforcement spectrum with secrets of their own. There's the whispered promise of things colliding in a twisty, rewarding way, but the third act is pretty flat, and we're never given a decent surprise or revelation.

With some format tinkering, The Get Out could have had some zigs and zags to make things more entertaining, but instead we're shown everyone's hand when we meet them, and then we just watch them randomly succeed or fail. Crowe maintains his charisma throughout, but the story — which aims for the comedy of errors/serendipity circus vibe — is too dry and toothless.

The story of Star Fox’s latest outing is one we’ve seen before – both because it’s literally a remake of 1997 Star Fox 64, but also because it follows the familiar formula of so many recent reimaginings like it. More than just a fresh coat of paint slapped onto one of my favorite childhood games, it introduces a rewarding Challenge mode, slightly improved multiplayer options, and a bevy of brand new well-made cinematics that take a deeper dive into Star Fox lore. Add all those elements to an original game that still largely holds up three decades later and it makes for the best 20 or so hours of Star Fox I’ve ever played. Here’s hoping this is the start of a whole new generation for the series.

Let me start where most people will: the main campaign. Star Fox games have always had a relatively unique structure, where a fairly short series of levels are full of branching paths and alternate exits, meaning you’ll never see all 16 stages (or even most of them) on a single playthrough. A full, seven-mission run might only last an hour or less, but it took me about 10 hours to see all the different paths and earn every medal on both the normal and expert difficulties. Some may worry that the shorter campaign might feel lacking, but while it’s not necessarily a Thanksgiving dinner that will leave you stuffed, there was still more than enough meat on the bone to keep me entertained across multiple runs.

Returning to these recognizable stages on the Switch 2 was a thrill, and I was amazed by how great everything looked as my muscle memory returned after all these years. Everything from the reflections on the waters of Corneria to the kaleidoscopic wormholes you travel through look fantastic, which makes identifying any of the alternate path objectives easier than ever. The revamped soundtrack stands out as well; it perfectly captures the vibe of each location and keeps every campaign run brisk and interesting.

The brand-new, fully voiced cinematics also really help to bring the entire cast to life. There is a unique cutscene between each stage of the campaign, and unlocking an alternate route will even give you a different version of that cinematic when selecting the mission you’ll take on next. These scenes are weighted more toward the war against the big bad, Andross, but they also help deepen your understanding of and endear you to each member of the Star Fox team (even Slippy), fleshing out their personalities to a level the original never did. Conversations with Slippy show his love of engineering and how much work he’s put into the Arwings while the oldest member of the team Peppy confidently displays his years of wisdom by offering insight on why a planet might be a target for Andross. Falco’s nonchalant bravado and cockiness comes through with every voiceline, and the cool and confident Fox now has an added bit of wittiness.

This is a spoiler-free review of Batman: Knightfall Part 1 - Knightfall. The film premiered at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival and will be released on digital and home video later in 2026.

After a bit of a post-Crisis on Infinite Earths lull period, DC’s direct-to-video line of animated movies is back in action. And DC certainly picked a whopper of a storyline to return with. Batman: Knightfall Part 1 - Knightfall kicks off a new trilogy covering what is arguably the most seminal Batman comic yet to be adapted (it’s certainly high up on our list of the greatest Batman graphic novels). Fans of that iconic ‘90s crossover story will be pleased to know that Knightfall succeeds in delivering a very streamlined but generally faithful and loving take on the source material.

The premise of Knightfall is right in line with the comic. The film chronicles the origin of the rivalry between Batman (Anson Mount) and Bane (Michael Mando), as the latter makes his way to Gotham City and sets about systematically trying to wear down the Dark Knight physically and psychologically. Even as Batman deals with this shadowy foe and an endless gauntlet of Arkham Asylum escapees, he struggles to mentor his newest Robin, Tim Drake (Jack Griffn), and help the tortured vigilante Jean-Paul Valley (Pablo Schreiber) overcome his mental conditioning. As Bane understands all too well, even Batman has a breaking point.

My main concern coming into Knightfall was how well this trilogy would be able to cover such an extensive library of material. The Knightfall/KnightSaga trilogy comprises dozens of comics on its own, and that’s not even counting the essential prologue material like Sword of Azrael and Vengeance of Bane. It’s a lot of ground for even three films to cover.

Fortunately, screenwriter Jeremy Adams seems to hit on the right approach when it comes to adapting that voluminous saga. Not unlike Denny O’Neil’s excellent Knightfall novelization from the ‘90s, Part 1 trims a great deal of fat from the original crossover, jettisoning those characters and storylines that aren’t absolutely essential to the bigger picture. The end result keeps the focus squarely on Batman himself, his small circle of allies, and Bane.

This is a time before the modern Bat-family was firmly established, and you have a film that sees the Dark Knight constantly torn between a pathological desire to go it alone and a growing need to let others in. It’s a particularly dark and brooding take on the character, but one that serves a purpose and builds a worthy character arc for Bruce and his alter ego.

Knightfall captures what made the Batman line such an exciting read in the early ‘90s. It certainly looks like a ‘90s Batman comic come to life, with the animation directly evoking the hulking, Gothic physicality of Kelley Jones’ art and Batman’s billowing, almost living cape as rendered by the late, great Norm Breyfogle. Visually, this is easily one of the more stylish and attractive offerings from DC’s long-running animated line.

When it comes to Bane, Knightfall delivers what may be the most faithful take on a villain who hasn’t always fared the best in other media. He’s an imposing force of nature who quickly emerges as a legitimate, urgent threat to the Dark Knight. Yet he remains a character with a sympathetic backstory and clear motivations, with the film taking pains to show us Bane’s tragic upbringing in the hellish prison Peña Duro. It certainly helps that Mando excels in the role. While it’s a bit odd that the character speaks in perfect, unaccented English, Mando brings exactly the right source of menace and bravado to the screen.

The rest of the voice cast is solid, as well. Mount already had experience playing Batman in the Injustice animated movie, and his gravelly voice is well-suited to a conflict dealing with a slightly older and more weary Caped Crusader. Mount gets bonus points for drawing such a subtle but firm distinction between his Batman and Bruce Wayne voices. Schreiber is also strong as Jean-Paul. While his delivery is definitely a bit melodramatic at times, that suits a character who carries as much psychological baggage as he does. Another highlight comes in the form of Bruce Boxleitner’s Commissioner Gordon, a troubled man who can do little but watch as his old friend pushes himself further and further beyond his limits.

No, Knightfall is hardly a perfect adaptation. As much as it focuses on cutting out what isn’t necessary and focusing on the core of the story, it does skip over a few critical elements. Not enough time is spent fleshing out Jean-Paul’s origins and history as Azrael. And as much as the film emphasizes Bane’s obsession with Gotham and the Wayne family, it skips over what I’d consider to be a crucial link between the villain and Batman. At a brisk 80 minutes long, there’s only so much room to work with.

Still, it’s impressive what Knightfall is able to accomplish with its modest runtime. It captures most of what makes Knightfall such a compelling read among the vast Batman canon, and it doesn’t attempt to cram too much material into too small a space. I won’t spoil where in the Knightfall crossover this adaptation ends, but it’s a logical stopping point that sets up an equally exciting Part 2.

The Invite will be released in select theaters on June 26 before receiving a wide release on July 10.

Olivia Wilde’s double date dramedy The Invite achieves the kind of artistic maturity and formal control that was missing from her first two features, teen comedy Booksmart and scattered sci-fi Don’t Worry Darling. Although a nearly scene-for-scene remake on paper, it’s arguably Wilde’s first good feature for the way it imbues the story of Cesc Gay’s 2020 Spanish original, Sentimental (or The People Upstairs) — and its subsequent Italian, Swiss, French, and South Korean versions — with energy and intensity from minute one.

Penned by Toy Story 4 scribes Will McCormack and Rashida Jones (yes, the actress), and purchased by A24 after its Sundance bow, The Invite follows a middle-aged couple on the rocks who host their attractive upstairs neighbors for dinner before one thing leads to the next. Its swinger/spouse-swap premise disguises a pressurized tale of domestic discontent, crowbarred open by exotic curiosities. In the process, its impeccably cast characters are forced to leave everything about themselves on the table… or at least, more of themselves than they’re comfortable with. This psychological unspooling holds your attention right up until it can’t; the film eventually peters out, but only near the very end, leaving quite an enjoyable experience in its wake.

Seth Rogen plays Joe, the film’s ostensible protagonist, whose life as a failed pop punk musician in the aughts has given way to a mundane music teaching job in California. He bicycles home at his wife’s behest, leading to a snappy introduction rife with split-screens and other economical tricks that introduce us to his high-strung spouse, Angela (Wilde), who meticulously prepares their apartment for a fancy evening while their tween daughter is away. Unbeknownst to Joe — though according to Angela, he simply forgot — they’re meant to host their idiosyncratic neighbors for an informal dinner, the prospect of which sends the unhappy couple spiraling through never-ending disagreements.

Wilde’s 107-minute version (about half an hour longer than the original) smartly delays both the arrival of the guests and their eventual proposition. This allows The Invite to marinate in the awkward atmosphere of a married couple putting on a cheery façade that threatens to crack at any moment. Joe and Angela barely talk to each other anymore, at least not in a way that doesn’t involve petty sniping, and to make matters more uncomfortable, their guests — the frank, filterless firefighter Hawk (Edward Norton) and his free-spirited therapist girlfriend Piña (Penélope Cruz) — see right through their ruse and aren’t afraid to call it out.

The ensuing evening is a tale of dysfunction forced into temporary alignment (and beyond that, painful honesty) by Hawk and Piña’s apparent harmony. Still in their honeymoon phase, the alluring guests are so seemingly in sync emotionally and sexually that their explosive lovemaking has long been heard by Joe and Angela downstairs. It’s a disturbance the hosts argue about bringing up, a minor point from which much of their conflict stems and which is subsequently magnified, including and especially their compunctions around sexual liberation. Maybe they’re too prudish for an orgy, but they’re certainly willing to demonstrate otherwise if only to prove each other wrong, leading to some hilarious escalations.

Wilde and cinematographer Adam Newport-Berra capture each conversation with dizzying verve, as though any given interaction were a make-or-break moment for the hosts. Their relationship rests on a knife’s edge, a sensation that Wilde carries throughout her haggard performance as a woman who struggles to see herself through anyone else’s eyes, or as anything but a bored, unattractive housewife. Wilde, despite being a conventionally beautiful Hollywood star, plays this insecurity in immensely convincing ways. Rogen, meanwhile, portrays a husband tipping so far over the edge of unhappiness that he practically exists in constant free-fall. He smooths over difficult conversations with weed and poorly-timed jokes at everyone else’s expense, and cuts through the film's overlapping dialogue like a hissing pipe.

Norton and Cruz play their opposites in fascinating ways, with an air of shocking honesty and self-confidence concerning their bodies and sexual proclivities. They disguise all of this under and around the conventions of polite conversation, even though they have only one goal in mind: sleeping with their hosts. Wilde captures this objective through careful movement and blocking as the characters move throughout the film’s single location, before she suddenly peels back the layers of the guests’ dysfunctions too. All the while, composer Devonté Hynes ping-pongs between jagged and melodic notes to mirror the characters’ states of mind before remarkably building to the familiar, seductive tones of Georges Bizet’s classic opera, Carmen; the Habanera has rarely sounded so mischievous.

All these wonderful aesthetic setups, however, demand payoffs the film isn’t really willing to engage with. Wilde’s remake goes much further with its chemistry and sensuality than Gay’s — whose version feels intentionally more mundane — but it cuts itself off at the knees without offering Joe and Angela a complete glimpse of the emotions and sensations their marriage has long been missing. Its climactic scenes seldom replace the movie’s initial bursts of energy with anything nearly as engaging or enveloping.

When it slows down to really dig into its characters and unveil their emotional cores, The Invite runs out of steam, becoming stilted and stage-like until eventually, its conclusions teeter halfway between something definitive or cathartic and hauntingly open-ended. It is perhaps a fitting irony that a film so effective at portraying festering discontent should close in such a dissatisfying fashion. Then again, accidentally or otherwise, few films more honestly replicate how a dwindling relationship feels like a chess game at stalemate.

Back in 1994, a guy named Richard Garfield — who you may remember from another one of his inventions, Magic: the Gathering — essentially invented the subgenre of programmed movement games with RoboRally. Over the years, this chaotic game of robots racing through a hazardous factory has become a cult hit, inspiring love and hate in equal measure, and enjoying a number of different editions and expansions.

Now, 32 full years after the original, it finally has a spin-off with some fresh mechanics: Robo Rally Dice. Interestingly, Garfield's name isn't on the box. Instead the design credit goes to Kane Klenko, who's made a bit of a name for himself as a fan of real-time play and dice rolling including his most popular game, FUSE; concepts which he’s now brought to Robo Rally.

What’s in the Box

Rules and How It Plays

In programmed movement games like this, the idea is that everyone pre-selects a set of actions which they unveil at the same time and then implement on the modular board that you’ve set up before play. In most cases, and the Robo Rally games are no exception, the entertainment value is in trying your hardest to figure out a turn in advance within limited parameters, only to watch your plans fall apart when they come into contact with everyone else trying to do exactly the same. And, of course, pre-programmed movement fits the theme of racing robots pretty well.

The original game gave players nine cards from a random selection and got them to plan out five moves. The cards were things like move forward, turn left or right, about-turn and suchlike. Robo Rally Dice jettisons the cards for, you guessed it, dice, with the custom symbols matching similar movement patterns to the old cards. However, you don’t just roll the dice and abide by the results. You don’t even roll them, put a few back, and re-roll the remainder Yahtzee-style. Oh no. You can keep on rolling as long as you like, as fast as you like, picking out dice one by one and adding them to your mat.

Obviously there's a catch, otherwise the game would go on forever. The first player to be satisfied with their selection of five dice picks up the black dice and starts rolling, calling out each time they roll a six. After three sixes, anyone who's still not finished has to stop and face a turn with an incomplete set of moves.

The in-game effects of this are interesting, and worth discussing at length since they’re the primary way Robo Rally Dice differs from the original game. First up, the dice make it easier to do what you want. It’s possible, for example, in the original game that you might desperately need to move forward and have no cards to do it. Here, you’ll almost always be able to make progress in the race. Rather, it’s the time pressure that leads you to accept compromises or even make mistakes in planning your turn.

As it turns out, the time pressure is as much of a weird psychological trick as it is anything else. Everyone wants to put down all of their dice, so whoever finishes first is unlikely to be that much further ahead of everyone else. So by the time they’ve grabbed the black dice and started rolling and even got one six, let alone three, most of the other players have probably finished. But, not always. Sometimes those sixes tumble out in quick succession. Sometimes players lose dice through damage, so they can end their turn plan much faster than their competitors. Sometimes, someone is left short when the third six is rolled and the fact that it’s rare doesn’t stop everyone feeling the terror that it might be them when it happens.

So you have this weird amalgamation of mechanisms which, in isolation, feel like a terrible idea but somehow, in concert, they work. The dice selection phase feels like a crushing timebox when, really, it isn’t, and the pressure leads to you planning suboptimal moves. That, in turn, substitutes for the lack of cards that stymied you in the original, without the heartless frustration that engenders. You’ll get the desired effect that the player’s robots speed through the factory at a satisfactory pace, but from time to time, they screw up. That’s when the game gets both more and less interesting.

After each die is resolved, there’s an ordered checklist of things to go through. If you’re not bumping into anyone else’s robots, or on any board icons, you can ignore this and play rumbles on. However, when those effects apply, you have to be quite careful about how you implement them and in what order, which slows things down in what’s supposed to be a fast-paced, madcap game. The results, however, are often enjoyably anarchic, especially when bots push each other into unexpected squares, which can then derail all the following movement dice, leading to a growing chain of chaos. Of course, the more people you have at the table, the more chances you’ll have of these interactions and this definitely plays better with a full complement.

Most board scenery is designed to add to the insanity, such as conveyor belts that move your robot unwittingly, or gears that change its direction. But there are also damaging elements like pits and lasers which can lead to you losing dice for the following turn: the robots themselves also have lasers that shoot at the end of their moves. To mix things up there are also positive icons that can be worth making a race detour for, adding further unpredictability to events. Missiles hurt other robots on the board if you land on them, while batteries allow you to add upgrades to your robot.

Upgrade cards are clearly there to add more strategic elements to the game but the reality is they’re a mixed bag. You can get them from dice rolling as well as batteries, and some need dice to activate, requiring a mish-mash of rules that are easily forgotten in the fast-paced play. As a result, the upgrades themselves are often easily forgotten, too, in the dash to cross the finish line first, and when they’re remembered, it just slows things down. It may be that leveraging these cards—a mix of movement and offensive capabilities that do things like let you move diagonally or rebound laser shots to their originator—is the hallmark of more skillful play, but it’s just not how they feel in practice. There’s also too few of them: a measly 20 cards, many of which are duplicates.

Where to Buy

• Get it at Amazon for $34.99
• Get it at Target for $39.99
• (Out of stock at Walmart)

Matt Thrower is a contributing freelance writer for IGN, specializing in tabletop games. You can reach him on BlueSky at @mattthr.bsky.social.

The Steam Machine is finally here after looming on the horizon for the last eight months or so. And while Valve has been adamant that the Steam Machine is an entry-level gaming PC, rather than a new, fourth player in the console space, this little box has captured the attention of console and PC gamers alike.

At $1,049, the Steam Machine is unlikely to win over the hearts and minds of PlayStation and Xbox faithfuls, but it is easily the best living room PC I’ve ever used, despite being a bit weaker than either of the base consoles. But what’s truly impressive is that it’s able to do that while also being one of the best ways to just get into PC gaming in the first place. PC gaming has always been expensive, and the Steam Machine is certainly no different, but Valve was able to cut away most of the tinkering and just get new players into the game.

The RAM crisis may have caused Valve to raise the price, but $1049 for a gaming PC is certainly not unheard of, especially for a rig as small as this. So, yeah, the Steam Machine isn’t going to be for everyone, but if you have the budget, it’s an incredible device to hook up to your TV.

Expensive, Or Is It?

The Steam Machine’s price has been a constant topic of conversation ever since it was announced back in November 2025. Back then, Valve made it very clear that the Machine would be priced competitively with a comparable gaming PC, and at that point, I assumed it’d land at around $800. But gaming PCs, and the components they’re made of, have become much more expensive since then.

Thanks to the ongoing RAM crisis, fueled by seemingly every company needing to build a hyperscale datacenter, the 16GB of RAM in the Steam Machine alone would cost nearly $250 by itself. And, with that in mind, it makes it a little easier to understand how Valve landed on a $1049 price point for the 512GB version and $1349 for the 2TB model, even if it makes it a bit harder to recommend.

That makes the Steam Machine around $400-450 more expensive than the Xbox Series X or the PlayStation 5 to start. That price probably disqualifies Valve’s new mini gaming PC in the eyes of many console faithfuls, but it makes a lot more sense for its intended purpose as an entry-level gaming PC.

Because as much as that $1049 price tag is shocking at first glance, Valve is still keeping its word about keeping the price competitive. I took a moment to price out a similarly-specced gaming PC on PCPartPicker, and it ended up being around $1050, and that’s with a full-sized ATX PC case, rather than the Steam Machine’s tiny little cube.

Whether you’re just getting into PC gaming and need a low-effort starting point, or if you already have a huge Steam library and you need a mini gaming PC for your living room, the Steam Machine is arguably a pretty good deal. Especially because unlike most gaming PCs, the Steam Machine is ready to play games as soon as it boots up for the first time. And, well, time is money.

Design and Features

Right out of the box, the Steam Machine doesn’t look like much. It’s a little cube, about 6-inches on each side, with an RGB light bar across the bottom. And that’s one of the main appeals about this little PC.

At the beginning of this console generation, the PS5 and the Xbox Series X both had out-of-this-world designs. The PS5 looked like some fancy space-age building in a gentrified neighborhood, while the Xbox Series X looked like a mini-fridge with green accents in the vents. Depending on your sensibilities, the Steam Machine is so small and unassuming that it might be the first console-that’s-not-a-console that actually blends in with the rest of your entertainment center.

Everything about the Steam Machine’s design seems purpose-built to blend into your living room, down to the cooling. There’s only a single fan on this thing, located in the rear of the device. That doesn’t sound like enough, but most of this cube is a giant heatsink that takes cold air from the front of the device and passes it directly out of the back. Just take off the magnetic faceplate and peek inside, and you’ll see just a block of aluminum fins to that effect.

This is such a simple cooling solution in theory, but it immediately solves the overheating problems of anyone that just wants to shove their console on a shelf and forget about it. You don’t have to worry about keeping the sides of the Steam Machine free to ‘let it breathe’ because the only air intake is in the front of the console, which then spits hot air out of the back. And, you’re going to want both the front and the back of the device clear anyway to access the ports.

There are three ports on the front of the Steam Machine, two USB-A ports to connect controllers or other peripherals and a MicroSD card reader. I love that the card reader is in the front here, because if you already have a Steam Deck, you can easily swap the SD card carrying your game library between the two, and have immediate access to whatever you’re playing.

Just like any desktop PC, there are way more ports ‘round the back. There’s an HDMI and a DisplayPort for displays, along with a power connector, an ethernet port, two USB-A ports and a USB-C port. That’s admittedly less than a lot of full-sized PCs, but with the size of the Steam Machine, it’s hard to expect anything more.

It’s important to note, though, that the power connector is the same as what’s found on other game consoles like the PS5 and the Xbox Series X. That certainly helped a lot in my testing, because it kind of just slotted right into my setup, but it also just means that the power connector will be super easy to replace, as there are a ton of cheap power connectors you can buy online for this thing.

If you don’t necessarily want the Steam Machine to blend into the background, the faceplate is swappable. It’s attached by magnets on each of the four corners, and the Machine comes with a plain black one preinstalled. If you have the cash for the 2TB model, it’ll come with two extra faceplates, but because the attachment is so simple, I expect there will be a little cottage industry that springs up selling 3D-printed faceplates with all kinds of wild designs.

There’s also the RGB light strip at the bottom of the device. By default, this acts as a sort of status indicator, glowing blue when the PC is on and blinking white when it’s trying to go to sleep. But you can go into the ‘Customization’ menu and either turn the light off entirely, or change it to any color or effect you want.

More Than Just a Console

It would be easy to dismiss the Steam Machine as an overpriced console, but it is so much more than that. There’s a reason that Valve repeatedly hammered home the idea that this is intended to be a gaming PC – it can do so much more than just play games.

While it’s true that the PS5 and Xbox have a slew of different apps that extend their utility, a lot of those boil down to watching Netflix or something similar. The Steam Machine, on the other hand, is just a Linux PC that launches in Steam Big Picture mode, so the possibilities are basically endless.

You’re not going to find much in the way of ready-to-install entertainment apps, but even without swapping the operating system over to Windows – which you can do – you can install a bevy of different programs. Yeah, you can just use it to watch Netflix through the Chrome browser if you want, but you can also plug in a keyboard and mouse and code on this thing. Try doing that on a PS5 without jailbreaking it.

Admittedly, that narrows down the appeal of the Steam Machine a bit. People who just want a little entertainment box might be better served with a traditional console, but I don’t think that necessarily matters. One of the beautiful things about PC gaming, and one of the reasons PC gamers are so attached to their machines, is because a great gaming PC becomes a sort of appliance in their home.

I already mentioned how well the Steam Machine fits into an entertainment center, but the small size and unassuming aesthetics also makes it a great fit on any desk. Simply plug in a keyboard and mouse, and the Steam Machine is powerful enough to be a little mini workstation, especially for lighter tasks like coding or writing.

That’s probably a big reason why Valve wasn’t able to use sales from the Steam Store to subsidize the cost of the Steam Machine. Even without playing games, the Steam Machine is just a great little mini gaming PC, and in that world the $1049 price that is so high compared to a game console actually starts looking like a bit of a bargain.

The Big Picture

Being more of a gaming PC than a game console doesn’t mean that the Steam Machine carries the same kind of baggage as Windows 11 devices. Just like the Steam Deck before it, Valve’s mini PC is basically plug-and-play. As soon as you boot it up, it’ll pull up a log-in screen that you can get past simply by scanning a QR code with the Steam Mobile app. And, then you’re just in Steam Big Picture mode, where you can just start downloading and playing games.

For a lot of people, that’s as deep as you’re going to need to go. And, even if you do need to tweak some settings, it’s super easy to just hit the Steam Button on the Steam Controller, or the equivalent menu button on whichever controller you’re using to bring up the Steam menu. From there, you can go into settings and tweak everything from default game resolution to the RGB lighting.

You can also use the Quick Access menu – brought up by the 3-dots-button – to tweak system settings like refresh rate and even how much power is being pumped into the GPU. It is surprisingly easier to tweak settings on the Steam Machine than it is to tweak things on an Xbox or PS5.

Of course, you can go into the Linux desktop and really get into the weeds. But unless you really want to add your Epic Games or other games libraries, you probably never have to even look at the desktop if you don’t want to. Although, being able to go to the desktop and just use the Steam Machine as an actual computer is what makes this thing one of my favorite PCs in years. There’s just something incredible about a gaming PC that’s connected to my TV that I can push a button and turn into an actual workspace, when typically it’s the other way around on Windows machines.

Performance and Gaming

The Steam Machine is packing a 6-core, 12-thread Zen 4 processor, paired with a RDNA 3 GPU with 28 CUs, the equivalent of a Ryzen 5 7600 and a Radeon RX 7600, respectively. That’s not exactly a recipe for a high-end gaming PC, but it is more than enough to run most modern games, although you will have to tweak settings to play at 4K.

Unfortunately, Valve came out the gate claiming the Steam Machine would be able to play games at 4K60 with FSR. The Steam Machine absolutely can do that, but not with all the eye candy enabled. And, it just so happens that when I’m testing a gaming PC, I benchmark with all of that eye candy enabled.

If my testing process was limited just to my regular benchmarks, the Steam Machine wouldn’t look too great. In Cyberpunk 2077 with the Ray Tracing Ultra preset at 4K, and with FSR set to ‘Performance’, the Steam Machine only managed to get 14 fps. That’s pretty dismal, but once I turned down ray tracing, that number skyrocketed up to 42 fps at the same resolution.

Then, in Forza Horizon 6, with the Extreme preset without ray tracing, the Steam Machine got 30 fps with FSR set to ‘Performance’. And in Total War, Warhammer 3, on the Ultra preset at 4K, the Steam Machine gets 23 fps. These numbers don’t exactly bode well for Valve’s ‘4K60’ frames, at least until you remember that, at its core, the Steam Machine is a gaming PC.

All it really takes to hit those 4K60 numbers is to tweak with the settings. Once I turned those games down to their respective medium presets, Forza Horizon 6 was able to get 57 fps, and Cyberpunk 2077 was able to get up to 64 fps. And that’s exactly where I’d want the Steam Machine to be, if I’m just connected to a TV in the living room.

The same was true across all the games I played in my time with the Steam Machine: I had no problem hitting averages between 50-60 fps in pretty much every game I tried. There are some games, like Death Stranding 2, which averaged around 45 fps with its medium preset, but even that is still very playable. It’s important to keep in mind too, that the image quality that comes with ‘Medium’ presets on PC, is typically about the same as what you’d get from the base PS5 and Xbox Series X.

For instance, in 007 First Light, I set most of the settings at around medium or high, and managed to get around 55-60 fps. That’s not quite the same locked 60 fps that the PS5 or Xbox Series X gets, but those consoles typically use dynamic resolution in games, which means the resolution will scale up or down in order to maintain a locked frame rate.

That option will certainly be available in some games on PC, but for the most part, you’re going to have to tweak games until they run at the frame rate you’re comfortable with.

It’s also worth noting that a driver update came out after this review went into edits, which may improve performance. We’ll be testing that soon and will have those results in a performance deep dive in the coming days.

Warning: This review contains full spoilers for Rick and Morty Season 9, Episode 5!

I'm of the mind that Rick and Morty should reference past episodes and storylines more often than it does, so theoretically, I should be all over "Jer Bud." This episode is basically a sequel to Season 1's "Lawnmower Dog," finally bringing Morty's (Harry Belden) old dog Snowball (Rob Paulsen) back into the fray after years' worth of visual cameos and Easter eggs. But instead of being a fun callback to a simpler and more innocent time for the series, "Jer Bud" merely argues that Snowball was better left in the past.

Sometimes the series struggles to take a fun premise and build on it in a meaningful way. Episode 5 is different in that it never really seems to have anything worth building on in the first place with the Morty/Snowball storyline. It starts off a little bland, and it never gets off the ground when Morty finds himself dragged into another conflict involving the fate of an alien civilization.

In this case, Morty finds himself unwillingly thrust into the role of liberator of a race of grotesque, inbred humanoid pets called Mups. This episode leans a lot on the idea that, once they're granted sentience and given power over their own destinies, dogs wind up behaving an awful lot like humans. And sure, that tracks, but there's never much humor to be found in the whole situation. The concept of the Mups is never particularly funny, nor is there much visual humor to their physical deformations. None of it clicks as it should.

The one thing I'll grant this storyline is that at least it makes an effort to shuffle Rick (Ian Cardoni) to the background and allow Morty to shine on his own. Rick has such a tendency to dominate the series from week to week, so it's nice to see a concerted effort to shift the spotlight to the rest of the Smith family. It's just too bad that Morty's storyline is so underwhelming.

Thankfully, at least we can usually count on Jerry (Chris Parnell) to salvage the show in its weaker moments. The Worm Jerry subplot is far more successful than the Morty/Snowball storyline. Not unlike in Episode 4, the show gets a lot of mileage out of the fact that Jerry is possessed by a larger force and acting a bit out of character. It's a lot of fun watching the worms inside Jerry push a simple job interview to bizarre and inane heights. Parnell is clearly having a blast exploring this different, much cooler side of his chronic loser character.

The Worm Jerry storyline takes a lot of amusing twists and turns by the end, spanning from a seedy alien drug den to a plane falling through the sky while Jerry cooly guides a woman through childbirth. This storyline makes solid use of the supporting characters around Jerry, including Rick himself and both versions of Beth (Sarah Chalke). Season 9 hasn't done much with Beth or Summer (Spencer Grammer) yet, so it's good that at least one of them gets a bit more attention here.

The two halves of this episode are wildly opposed in terms of quality, and ultimately they sort of cancel each other out. The result is definitely the weakest installment of Season 9 overall. But hey, take solace knowing that it only gets better from here in the latter half of the season.

Full spoilers follow for House of the Dragon Season 3, Episode 1.

High stakes. High seas. High treason. This season opener has everything. This is the Battle of the Gullet and it is every bit as spectacular as we could have hoped, all pirate battles and flaming missiles and hand-to-hand combat. It’s surrounded by the sort of scheming, seduction, confession and devastation that makes for good character drama too. If the rest of the season is anything like this, this Game of Thrones spin-off might finally have a way to outfight its predecessor.

We’ll come back to the character stuff. The centrepiece of this episode is a hugely exciting air-and-navy clash between Lord Corlys Velaryon’s (Steve Toussaint) fleet and the Tyroshi fleet led by Sharako Lohar (Abigail Thorn). For Lohar, it’s a grudge match; for Corlys, it’s only part of his blockade of King’s Landing on behalf of Rhaenyra (Emma D’Arcy) and her “Blacks” in the civil war called the Dance of Dragons against her cousins, the “Greens.”

Lohar’s determined to hit the Sea Snake where it hurts, sending half her fleet to burn his home: “High Tide is a monument to the Sea Snake himself. Do you think his focus will hold when he sees his treasure aflame?” She’s right: it is another devastating blow to a man who already lost a wife and two children. Happily, he’s also a badass. He lures Lohar away from the fleet, sinks two of her companion ships thanks to some fancy-pants sailing through a narrow channel, and then fights hand-to-hand against the ferocious Tyroshi captain. Abigail Thorn is great as Lohar here, absolutely convincing as a leader of men and a serious threat to Corlys. She’s already come close to taking down a dragon before getting to this personal vendetta.

Given that Corlys begins the episode having a moving heart-to-heart with his formidable illegitimate son Alyn (Abubakar Salim) and that he then earns Alyn’s respect as a sailor and a captain during the battle, you have to wonder if he’ll survive this fight; he’s missing at the end of the episode. If this is how he goes out, fair play. It’s an exceptionally well-shot, almost entirely practical battle; apparently the ship tanks and sets were so massive at Leavesden Studios that they overshadowed the new Harry Potter’s Privet Drive.

The battle in the air goes less well. Yes, Prince Jacaerys (Harry Collett) and Baela (Bethany Antonia) ride into the fight and decimate the Tyroshi fleet, but Jace’s dragon Vermax is almost taken down by Lohar early on, and then Rhaena (Phoebe Campbell) joins the battle to devastating effect. In this episode, we see that she’s finally wooed a dragon of her own, but in one of those rabbit’s foot scenarios her half-feral beast refuses to obey her and attacks friends and foe alike in the heat of the moment. Her attempts to help contribute to the battle’s biggest loss as Vermax is harpooned in the chest and drags Jace into the drink with him. It’s a devastating finale.

On the bright side, at least it saves Rhaenyra from having to confront her son’s high treason: the reason she is not there on her own dragon is because he locked her in her room for her own protection. She’s on a high this episode, convinced by Alicent’s (Olivia Cooke) offer to surrender King’s Landing and confident in her new dragonriders, who are waiting grumpily near Harrenhal to ambush awful Aemond (Ewan Mitchell) and his massive dragon Vhagar. (So oversized. What is he compensating for?) Of course, this follows two seasons of dithering, so you can understand why her team isn't so convinced. It’s a bit late for her to start quoting Elizabeth I now. Rhaenyra’s line, “I may appear to have the weak and feeble body of a woman but I possess the heart and spirit of a king” is a historical lift from a speech that also preceded a major naval encounter. Anyway, she sends for her husband, Daemon (Matt Smith), who’s just destroyed a Green-aligned Lannister army at Red Fork with the help of the Riverlords, and enjoying the blood-splattered look.

The late-arriving Starks bring Daemon the head of Lord Jason Lannister (Jefferson Hall), while his fully-armoured twin Tyland tries to keep control of his Tyroshi allies on the Gullet. So much for one Green army, but the spoiled, rather prissy Ormund Hightower (James Norton) has another on the way, including the dragon Tessarion. Oh, and Ser Criston Cole (Fabien Frankel) is out there with his forces, alongside Ser Gwayne Hightower (Freddie Fox), who’s increasingly horrified by Cole’s nihilism and his lack of control of his thuggish men. That’s a lot of potential fighting men still on the board.

Then there are the main members of the Green royal family. Alicent is horrified, on her return to King’s Landing, to find Aegon (Tom Glynn-Carney) missing and Aemond all too present, when she had promised Rhaenyra precisely the opposite. Aegon’s run for it is interrupted by Rhaenyra’s troops and Lord Larys’ (Matthew Needham) scheming, unbeknownst to his mother, but it takes all of Alicent’s considerable powers of persuasion – and a hint of something closer to seduction on Aemond’s part, ewww – to send her son off to Harrenhal and clear the way for the deal she has made. As for that kiss, we needed something to really turn the stomach this episode, right?

In summary, we’ve got dragons in action; ships sinking and burning and firing; armies clashing; Larys and Aemond and Aegon and Cole being awful; and Alyn and Corlys and Daemon being badass. If the show were always like this, it wouldn’t just match Game of Thrones, it would outshine all but a handful of episodes. Two years ago, rounding up Season 2, I speculated that showrunner Ryan Condal had held back on the action last time to build a war chest for this season. I thought I was joking, but this episode makes me wonder. If this signals the path for Season 3, it’s going to be a feast.

Spoilers below for Episode 4 of Cape Fear. New episodes stream every Friday on Apple TV.

Over the last three weeks, Apple TV’s Cape Fear has settled into a Morse code-like cadence: long, meandering, and richly shot dashes of vibes with heavy plot punctuated by quick outbursts of violence and drama. Episode 3 followed the pattern with the shocking return of actress Juliette Lewis to the franchise, and Episode 4 — ominously titled “Pierced” — is no different.

In the immediate aftermath of Lewis being unveiled as Max’s (Javier Bardem) as-of-now unnamed stalker, we’re plunged right back into the creepy torpor of the show. Max is shown praying at a shadowed, candle-lit altar, later approaching Tom (Patrick Wilson) at a bar and telling him that Zack (Joe Anders) “really needs a father;” if he’s not intent on disrupting the Bowden family’s lives, he certainly has a knack for accidentally running into them. Natalie (Lily Collias) lashes out at her parents and calls her stepfather a cuck, and later, Max confronts a used car salesman and torments him with the fact that he slept with the man’s wife.

While Episode 4 commits the same sin as its predecessors by frequently trading forward momentum for digging deeper into mood and tone, it’s not completely out of bounds. “Pierced” does more with swish pans, off-putting camera angles, and explosive musical cues than most series could do with an army’s-worth of in-your-face edits. Here, the style elevates the story instead of papering over its defects. It seems the point of Cape Fear is to make you feel unsettled, and in that regard, the show has been an unfettered success so far.

This week’s A-plot sees Anna (Amy Adams) attempting to free Ruben Ramirez (Roberto Sanchez), another wrongly-convicted man, from prison. This time, the inmate has all but given up and says he’s dropping his appeal, but Anna is determined and goes to the house of a man named “Smiley” who may be able to provide an alibi. What follows is a scene straight out of Silence of the Lambs as Anna talks her way into Smiley’s house, which is full of snake enclosures beautifully lit by a rainbow of lights, and tries to trick him into a confession. When he lashes out, pulling a gun while throwing her phone to one of his snakes, Anna gets the hell out of there.

Meanwhile, Navaeh/Amber — the girl who seduced Natalie in last week’s episode —takes Natalie to a friend’s house and badgers her into getting a body piercing, generally further ingraining herself into Natalie’s life. Later, the two girls break into the house of Natalie’s friend Callie and have sex in her bed. Navaeh is definitely bad news, and we’re about to find out why.

As all of this is going on, Tom tries to bond with Zack at an art show, only to find that Zack is using the opportunity to approach the girl he distributed lewd photos of the year before. This triggers Tom flashing back to his brother’s suicide, which he tells everyone was a car crash. We even see Tom repeatedly hit himself as Zack does when he’s ashamed of his own actions; it seems the apple doesn’t fall far from the sneaky adulterous lawyer.

Later, Anna asks Max — why does she keep reeling this guy back into her life? — to help convince Smiley to talk. After a shocking moment in which Max grabs and kisses her, and Anna reacts somewhere between “Get the hell away from me” and “I don’t totally mind this” (is there more to their relationship than what we’ve seen so far?), Max murders one of Smiley’s precious snakes with a fork and threatens him. We don’t see what happens next, but Max reveals a taped confession that exonerates Ramon.

We also see Anna approached by Max’s stalker. It’s frustrating that we weren’t able to dive right into the aftermath of Juliette Lewis’s Episode 3 appearance at the top of “Pierced,” but what we’re left with here is equally as compelling and disconcerting. The stalker asks Anna if “she’s his whore now,” and says to stay away from Max. She also intimates that she had something to do with the murder of Max’s wife.

The episode ends with yet another jaw-dropping revelation. Anna’s co-worker Ray (Jamie Hector) has been digging up information on Navaeh and it turns out — surprise! — that her mother was a prison nurse known to have “relations” with a high-profile inmate; in other words, she’s probably (definitely) Max’s daughter. Thus, a huge piece of the puzzle falls into place, and another giant flashing sign blaring “Stay away from Max Cady, Bowdens!” lights up.

While Episode 4 of Cape Fear takes way too long to get to the good stuff, the slow pacing and conveyor belt of jump scares and moodiness serves it well in big moments like sudden acts of rage (sorry, Mr. Snake) or series-turning reveals. While it does sometimes feel like the pacing could be sped up a bit — the show could probably be 6-8 episodes instead of the planned 10 — the artistry and cinematic scope of the story are still a welcome sight in an age of Volume-shot shows. “Pierced” isn’t a revelatory episode of television, but if you’re into Cape Fear’s richly macabre sensibility, it’s still a treat… even if it’s more of the same.

Some spoilers follow for both seasons of Sugar. Sugar Season 2 is available on Apple TV now.

As detective shows go, Sugar is one of the more intriguing offerings of recent years, and not just because Colin Farrell's eponymous PI is revealed to be an alien. Through the eyes of this otherworldly sleuth, series creator Mark Protosevich endeavors to grapple with what it means to be human — the way we act, the way we feel, and the choices we make when faced with right and wrong. Do we just observe the horrors of the world, or do we try to do something about them? Must we take a life to save lives or achieve some sort of justice?

In Season 1, John Sugar faced those existential questions against a Los Angeles backdrop. His investigation into the missing granddaughter of a wealthy studio head led him to the serial killer son of a senator whose murderous machinations were being covered up, not just by powerful figures of Earth, but also by Sugar’s own people. Their secret presence had been revealed, causing some to be targeted for death while others (by the final episode) decided to return to their home world. Not John, though; he chose to stay in order to get answers about his presumed dead sister, Djen (Maeve Whalen), from his treacherous best friend, Henry (Jason Butler Harner), and to find out just who sold his people out.

Season 2 kicks off — again — in East Asia. Sugar locates a near-dead Henry, who succumbs to his wounds before the PI can learn any more about his sister. The PI looks around a hideout covered with blown-up black-and-white photos and "Beware Assimilation" painted on the wall before destroying all evidence of it and Henry in a fire. Farrell continues his velvety voiceover, waxing poetically about home, isolation, and the emotions of living, yet that warning of assimilation will hang over the eight episodes once Sugar returns to Los Angeles to take on a new case.

Protosevich certainly offers a compelling neo-noir plot for Sugar to get caught up in. This time, he's not working for the wealthy elite, but Korean-American immigrant Danny Moon (Jin Ha), a poor up-and-coming boxer whose chaotic brother, Ji (Raymond Lee), has gone missing. With the help of Sasha Calle's cool, street-smart protégé Val, and Shea Whigham's gruff, cancer-stricken government operative Tom, Sugar unearths a conspiracy involving Ji, narcotics, the sheriff's department, and the homeless community. Season 1 might have touched on the wealth gap in LA, but here it becomes part of a cogent critique of societal prejudice toward those pushed to the margins.

Sugar has always been an empathetic hero and a sparkling-eyed contradiction to the world-weary dicks of Old Hollywood that he's long idolized, but his privilege has rarely been checked. He drives a classic Corvette Sting Ray and lives out of a Chateau Marmont-esque hotel with a closetful of pristine bespoke suits to boot. Spending time with people like Val, Danny, and Ji while navigating the less affluent sides of LA awakens him more convincingly to the very human struggle of living a good, moral life. Throw in an endearing romance with Laura Donnelly's "is she/isn't she?" femme fatale Charlotte and a vendetta against Tony Dalton's charismatic antagonist Sheriff Ray Vega, and Sugar's got a persuasively entertaining and evenly-paced storyline to rival that of The Big Heat.

Protosevich has never been subtle about how much those kinds of Hollywood films are an education on Humanity for Sugar. The alien moves with a cineliterate lens: His mind flickers to Paul Newman in The Hustler as he hustles a woman for information on Ji at a pool hall; later, Here Comes Mr. Jordan, a 1941 classic about maintaining your identity and inner worth, is playing on his TV at a moment of pensivity for what bad thing Sugar had to do to save innocent lives. Yet this meta-contemplation fails to illustrate the vivid character study of a lonely alien hiding out in the body of a human.

This is not a question of Farrell's performance. His kind gaze and warm, earnest presence evoke memories of Bruno Ganz's angel in Wings of Desire and David Bowie's alien in The Man Who Fell to Earth. Still, it's a struggle to comprehend Sugar's unease with human assimilation when the series shrouds so much of his alien heritage in ambiguity. If Sugar is worried about being too nurtured by human behaviour, what inherent nature is at risk?

It's a frustration inherited from Season 1, where many of the science fiction elements were breadcrumbed in. Here, a few flashbacks to Sugar's interactions with a rogue alien, his sister's secretive work, and a hint of his telekinetic powers are not enough to stave off hunger for meatier details about this alien race's behaviors, their backstory, and their purpose on Earth.

By the final episode, Sugar resolves his initial conundrum — and we get to see exactly why these aliens are allergic to cinnamon — but this subplot leaves us with more questions. A third season would hopefully clear those up, but maybe if Sugar was as much of an homage to sci-fi as it is to film noir, Season 2 would be a far more satisfying slice of cinematic cake.

Wins and losses. Knockouts and submissions. These sensational headline-grabbers are essential to MMA, but they only make up one part of the bigger, brutal picture. The pieces that are arguably more important — the countless bloody knuckles, cuts, gashes, and bruises it took to reach that point — often get lost in all the pre- and post-fight commotion. Luckily, these unforgiving journeys full of sweat, sacrifice, and punishment are the stories EA Sports UFC 6 aims to deliver, and, man, does it do that well. With an impressive roster of legendary fighters and a handful of curated stories that captured my complete attention the minute I dove into them, I’ve found myself enjoying and appreciating the violent art of MMA more the longer I played, even if EA Vancouver’s latest creation has strayed further than ever from the sport’s reality.

No, I don’t mean how the fighters’ joints will occasionally bend in awkward ways during a fight (although that still cracks me up whenever I catch it). I’m talking about Flow State, the newest and most significant feature added since the series moved to the Frostbite engine in UFC 5. For the uninitiated, Flow State is a boost that, once activated, practically turns you into Bradley Cooper in Limitless. You know, that movie where he takes a pill to unlock 100% of his brain, making things easier and more predictable? It’s pretty much like that.

In UFC 6, though, it’s harder to trigger since you can’t simply choke down a sketchy tablet mid-match. Instead, filling your fighter’s meter depends on the perks they have equipped and the boost conditions each one has. For example, a grappler like Islam Makhachev will enter Flow State much faster by chaining together offensive submission moves than by unleashing a flurry of well-timed hooks and roundhouse kicks.

Look, I get that “flow” is a very real thing because I’ve repeatedly watched Anderson Silva dodging a hailstorm of punches like he’s Neo from The Matrix (Chris Weidman is Agent Smith in this scenario). But his instinct was born out of endless reps in the gym, and probably a bunch of behind-the-scenes knockouts, too. The flow in UFC 6 is the opposite; it’s manufactured and gimmicky. Out of place like a Street Fighter move dropped in the middle of the octagon’s bloody canvas. After getting so used to the straight-up, no frills fighting that all the previous games in the series were known for, it’s hard to take a feature like Flow State into account. I’m not even kidding, I always forget to activate it when my meter’s maxed out because it’s the last thing on my mind. I’d much rather focus on my hit-and-run fighting style, not losing my advantage on the ground game, and avoiding getting my face beaten to a bloody pulp, thank you.

It’s also a double-edged sword in online fights, whether that’s in full-rules Ranked, Stand & Bang, or Online Career. Even though you can use Flow State to push the advantage or turn the tide of battle in your favor, your opponent can just as easily do the same. As of launch, most PvP brawls have pretty much turned into a race where the person who fills their meter fastest wins. Or, at the very least, gains a big lead in the scorecard with it. Either way, Flow State is an obnoxious feature to keep track of when there are already so many things to juggle within the octagon.

Still, even something as unrealistic as Flow State can’t knock down UFC 6’s hard-hitting combat, which is otherwise as savage as ever. I’ll be honest; the revamped controls and button combinations had me reeling at first, as if I was on the receiving end of a Jon Jones elbow. But once I got used to it, my vision cleared and the wild haymakers I was throwing turned into a coherent string of jabs, uppercuts, and leg-buckling hits.

My return to familiarity only became more satisfying because each punch and kick that I dealt felt like it landed with even greater force than in UFC 5. The result of those blows — the dripping eyebrow gashes, flying sweat, and spittle — that decorates the canvas once both fighters collide and start exchanging vicious strikes also looks as vivid as ever. Even more than these moments of brutality, UFC 6 has greater physical realism, with the unexpected body contortions — those weird, jerky animations that come up when a limb flies towards an opponent — happening less during fights, which is great when that’s an issue I saw all too often in its predecessor.

Remember the Titans

Now, the Flow system does have its moments, especially in my favorite mode, Hall of Legends, which features three UFC greats in Max Holloway, Alex Pereira, and Zhang Weili. It’s where I’ve spent most of my time because everything in it, from the videos of each champion’s humble beginnings to the thrilling reenactments of their most iconic fights, is all so easy to get lost in. And it was one of these bouts — Holloway’s BMF title win against Justin Gaethje in 2024, to be exact — that helped Flow State shine, if only for a little bit. Of course, the most iconic part of that fight is the last 20 seconds, and I was able to recreate it with the help of Max’s Flow Boost, which has him actually point down at the canvas when it’s activated. You would not believe the noise I made when I saw and did that for the first time — like a caveman discovering fire. And no, my primitive side didn’t stop there; I made more of the same grunting sounds after playing through Weili’s and Pereira’s own curated experiences.

You would think that, having seen some of these scenes live, rewatching their digital reruns years later wouldn’t be as exciting. But they still are, at least for me, and I think they’ll only continue to retain that same electricity into the future, which is a big part of what makes UFC 6 particularly special. These interactive memories are all so expertly told and uniquely individual in the way they unfolded that experiencing them again and again (yes, I went through them multiple times) didn’t feel like a chore at all. And I hope that whenever the seventh installment does come out, EA Vancouver doesn’t just dispose of this mode and instead gives Hall of Legends the same care and attention it did here.

Still, you’re probably wondering why this would be anyone’s idea of a favorite mode when there are a few other exciting ones to choose from. Well, reader, it’s because I’m a sucker for a good story, and it doesn’t get much better than immersing myself in the lore behind three legendary champions. Although the dedicated UFC Career story, called The Legacy, is a close second. That’s right, there are now two separate Career modes you can pick from: the former, which drops you straight into Dana White’s octagon, or the latter, where you star as Chris Carter, a relative no-name who starts from the bottom. Do I even have to tell you which one I was drawn to first?

Yes, as soon as I saw The Legacy, I pressed select faster than you could say “Chama”. Don’t worry; I won’t be spoiling much of the plot here because I would like everyone to experience it knowing as little as possible. But I will say I love how it immediately got me invested in the journey with a rivalry, a career derailment, and the promise of revenge. Sure, it may sound like the overused plot of a Rocky movie, but that stuff works; just ask Sylvester Stallone. There are so many more pre-fight events that demand your attention this time, too, which makes this mode both more entertaining and less repetitive than UFC 5’s.

If going through a rags-to-riches story isn’t your jam, you can always jump headfirst into the big leagues with the newly rebranded UFC Career mode (EA Vancouver added UFC at the beginning, if you didn’t notice). Although I wasn’t as invested without the standalone story to back it up, it’s still plenty of fun – not only due to the improvements I mentioned before, but also because Ken Shamrock and Randy Couture are finally included in the roster. At least now I don’t have to create them both from scratch just to start a modern career with them, even though it is hilarious to see a 62-year-old be called a newcomer by the commentators.

Overall, developer EA Vancouver’s decision to create a separate prologue tale from the UFC Career mode is ultimately what distinguishes UFC 6 most from its predecessor. Not only does it give you more options and a better onboarding experience, but it also doubles down on the overall pitch for this version: that every fighter has a story, a central concept I have seen consistently and resonated with the more I’ve played UFC 6.

The Gym-fluencer

Still, even decent stories have their shortcomings with parts that drag and feel unnecessary in the grand scheme of things. And this tale of MMA, which so far has had more highs than lows, has one such blemish called The Gym.

When I first heard about it, I thought it would be like MyTeam in NBA 2K or Ultimate Team in Madden. Unfortunately, it’s neither of those. Instead, it’s where you can recruit (collect?) a bunch of different fighters so you can train them…to earn cosmetics. Remember that thing I said earlier about straying further than ever from reality?

That’s right, training in this mode is purely for the sake of looking good — not in the “lift weights to get buff” way, but in the style of a vain influencer who does it just to get free stuff. Instead of Lululemon apparel, though, UFC 6’s The Gym grants fighter-specific rewards, like coins, backgrounds, multicolored fight kits, and belts. So, let’s say you train Max Holloway up to level 14, which seems to be the current cap for all fighters; at that point, you’ll have earned five different shorts, 500 coins, a background, a profile pic, and the biggest prize of all, a UFC Champion belt. See that, people? Hard work does pay off!

Again, it’s all just so unnecessary when the only point of training the fighters you collect in The Gym is to earn accessories that you probably won’t even notice once you’re in the octagon. I know I don’t, because I’m much too mesmerized by the bleeding cuts and blood spatters that practically turn the canvas into a brutalist Pollock painting. Sure, there’s beauty in the hundreds of punishing hours that fighters put in to eventually reach peak form and conditioning. But not when it’s minimized and turned into a sideshow for knick-knacks like this.