King of the Hill Season 15 will be released on July 20 on Hulu and Disney+.

If the 13 original seasons of King of the Hill were great and last year’s 10 new episodes were even better, Season 15 of the animated masterpiece is something else entirely: a rare season of television that is somehow better than everything that came before it.

When King of the Hill returned in 2025 after a 16-year hiatus, it was a spectacular, if not jarring, homecoming for one of the greatest animated series of all time. The characters that we had come to love over 13 seasons were suddenly back in our lives, aged up and facing new challenges big and small. They were the same Hank, Peggy, Bobby, Dale, Nancy, Boomhauer, Connie, Minh, Khan, and Bill that we’d always known but they, like the rest, of us had evolved.

Hank was semi-retired after he and Peggy spent years building a nest egg in Saudi Arabia. Bobby was the head chef at a Japanese-German fusion restaurant in Dallas. Connie was in college. Dale had served a stint as mayor of Arlen. Bill, well, he was still Bill.

As that season progressed we moved past the excitement the new episodes provided and slowly sank into the warm bath of the King of the Hill we’d always loved, even if the characters had changed and grown. If Season 14 was slightly burdened by being novel (Hank and Peggy moved to Saudi Arabia! Look at how much older Bobby is! Will we get answers about what happened to Lucky and Luanne?), Season 15 is completely unshackled from any need to explain, indulge, or prove anything to anyone, and stands as one of the most expertly crafted and profound seasons of television of the past 20 years.

The show walks a tightrope of being one of the few animated series that actually allows its characters to change and grow while still feeding its audience a steady diet of what truly makes the series great -- a beautiful, steady rhythm of slice-of-life stories and familiar characters that resonate episode after episode.

In true King of the Hill fashion, every episode of Season 15 centers around a storyline that is instantly relatable: Hank is annoyed that someone keeps parking their electric truck in front of his house; Hank is frustrated that the toothpaste is locked up at Mega Lo Mart; Bobbie and Connie decide to “hard launch” their relationship; Hank and Peggy get scammed; Dale raises chickens; Hank and Bobby visit a fan convention; Peggy experiences menopause; etc. Yet nothing ever feels tired or dull. The beautiful writing and expert voice acting are always hand-in-glove, so realistic and relatable that you often forget that you’re watching a cartoon.

Mike Judge (Hank, Boomhauer) and Kathy Najimy (Peggy) are still at the top of their game after all this time. They deftly lean into their characters’ golden years and breathe life into every “yep” and “ho-yeah!” There’s nothing particularly new that they’re doing here, but their continued grasp of what are easily career-defining characters after nearly three decades is a testament to their incredible skill. Similarly, Pamela Adlon (Bobby), Stephen Root (Bill), Ashley Gardner (Nancy), Lauren Tom (Minh, Connie), and the rest of the cast continue to shine. Adlon and Tom in particular excel in aging up their two main characters in a nuanced way. Thanks in no small part to their performances, Season 15 lets us grow more comfortable with the grown-up versions of Connie and Bobby as Tom and Adlon transform them into distinct yet familiar versions of the characters we love.

Similarly Toby Huss, who took over voicing Dale Gribble from Johnny Hardwick, who passed away in 2023, has fully come into his own as the lead voice for one of the show’s most iconic characters. In Season 14, Huss shared the role with Hardwick, but this season it's fully his. I’ll admit that it was originally a bit of a jolt to hear someone new voice Dale last year. But over the course of Season 15, Huss flawlessly performs the difficult task of paying homage to Hardwick’s creation while making Dale fully his own.

Outside of the core group of characters, Season 15 is full of fan-favorites who we haven’t seen in a while. Hank’s Strickland Propane colleagues Joe Jack, Booda Sack, and Enrique come to Hank in a bind late in the season. Hank’s propane nemesis M.F. Thatherton makes an appearance. Reverend Stroup shows up for an episode. Even ne'er-do-well Jimmy Wichard makes a cameo.

Beyond returning characters, the new episodes are jam-packed with Easter eggs and callbacks to the show’s original run. King of the Hill Season 15 threads the needle of giving diehard fans nearly everything they could possibly ask for while never digging too deeply into gimmicks or fan service. For example, we see the return of Bobby’s ventriloquist dummy, Chip Block, a character tries out to be a sports mascot, Bill joins another cult-like organization, and the list goes on.

But none of these callbacks drag the show back into the “glory days” or lean too heavily into sentimentality. They’re just lovely moments in a well-executed show that acknowledge the love that fans have for what the cast and crew have created. And therein lies the magic trick of King of the Hill: It knows exactly how to let their characters learn, grow, and progress through life while never shying away from what made the show great to begin with.

The series is not the same as when it premiered or even when it first went off the air. In Season 15, Hank and Peggy walk in on Bobby and Connie in flagrante. There’s a plethora of wonderful, appropriate and hilarious cursing (at one point, Peggy exclaims “Shit on a shingle!"). In another episode, characters gleefully consume what, in the '90s, would have been considered an illicit drug. But King of the Hill is still the show we’ve always loved. There’s still heart, warmth, and plenty of propane.

Never is that more evident than in the season finale. Dating back to the beginning of last season, the one minor nitpick I had with the King of the Hill reboot was that it thrust us right back into the characters' lives without explaining much about what had happened in the intervening years. Episode 10 of Season 15, titled “Propane Recall,” sees Hank’s former colleagues pull him back into the propane game to help save their flailing business.

What follows is a near-episode-long flashback showing a good chunk of what happened during the eight years of screen time between Seasons 13 and 14. Revisiting Hank, Peggy, and the gang as they were years ago is heartwarming, even if 16-year-old Bobby had a bit of a punk phase (blue hair and all). We get numerous answers about why Hank took a job in Saudi Arabia, why Bobby became a chef, and more. There’s even a brief mention of Luanne and Lucky (voiced by the late Brittany Murphy and Tom Petty, respectively), which I won’t spoil here, but it ties together a few loose ends and serves as a simultaneous gut punch and touching moment. The whole sequence is a reminder of why we loved the show during its original run and why we still love it now.

Season 15 of King of the Hill is as perfect a season of television as you could hope for. The team behind the show has taken a beautiful prime cut of story, coated it in top-tier vocal performances, and expertly grilled it on an open (clean-burning) flame of nostalgia, heart, and warmth. For fans of the series, or just good storytelling in general, it’s lightyears beyond whatever you could ever possibly want from a new batch of episodes. And given the show’s history, that’s no small task, I tell you what.

Spoilers below for Episode 8 of Cape Fear. New episodes stream every Friday on Apple TV.

As Cape Fear barrels toward its inevitable explosive conclusion, I find myself queuing up each new episode with the same thought: This one can’t be as flat-out nuts as the last one, can it? And every time I get the same answer: Yes, it absolutely can.

This week’s episode, titled “Los tiempos de Dios son Perfects” (Spanish for “God’s timing is perfect”), is so surprising, so melodramatic, and so propulsive that it left me in a state akin to Jack Torrance’s “all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” moment in The Shining in which I repeatedly wrote “BONKERS” in all caps on my computer. Because this episode, filled with floating body parts, double crosses, and revelations is BONKERS.

Episode 8 picks up moments after where we left off last week, when Tom and Anna tried to frame Max by convincing Anna’s father, Brandon, to plant suspicious medication in Max’s house. Soon, the police arrive and take Max into custody. Max glares at Tom and Anna while he’s loaded into a police car, and the look on Natalie’s face signals that she suspects something’s up as well. Meanwhile, back at Zack’s psychiatric facility, the doctor thinks he has Zack on the road to recovery. But, this being Cape Fear, things aren’t that cut and dry. Zack gets angry and begins spiraling, signaling that he might still be under Max’s control.

The next morning, Natalie goes for a swim in the back yard, leading to what is perhaps the most jarring and grotesque scene in the entire series. While swimming laps, Natalie spots a box at the bottom of the pool. What could possibly be inside? Is it the missing gun? Evidence of Anna and Tom’s plot for framing Max? No. Natalie swims to it and pops open the box only to see body parts come spewing out. Lots and lots of body parts. Ray’s, to be specific. Natalie recoils in horror as the scene cuts to the best title sequence to date.

What makes this scene special — my second favorite of the series so far, after Episode 6’s acid trip — is not only the shock and gore but the fact that it finally, conclusively shows that Max is 100% behind all of the Bowdens’ misery. We always knew this (the show is titled Cape Fear, after all, and its main character is Max Cady) but it’s a relief to finally have Max’s treachery laid out explicitly. The revelation frees the show from some of its long-running questions and hopefully portends an action-packed finale.

After the Bowdens call the police, Natalie comes to the realization that Max used the gun she stole from her parents to kill Ray. When the cops ask Tom if he owns any guns, he goes to the safe and realizes that one has been fired. So what does Tom do? Surely, as a lawyer, something sensible, right? Nope. Once Tom realizes something’s off, he decides to give the cops a different gun.

After confronting Max in the street after he’s released from custody (why do so many tense moments in this show happen in the middle of the street?), Anna goes to see her father. She tells him to get out of town so the cops don’t tie him to the plot to blackmail Max. Brandon, ever the loving father, agrees as long as Anna pays him $100,000.

Next, after talking to Max on the phone, Natalie goes to see Neveah in jail and begs for her help. Neveah instead screams at Natalie to the point where she has to be escorted away by guards. Later, Anna and Noa use iCloud to access photos Ray took on his trip to North Carolina and find pictures of the houseboat. Tom and Anna show the photos to the police, who are dismissive. They question Tom again about the gun and tell them they know he gave them the wrong one.

At home, Natalie comes clean with her parents about the gun and her trip to North Carolina just as the police arrive and arrest Tom for killing Ray, who they think discovered a plot for Tom to frame Max. Anna sees Ray on the news with Max and realizes that her father was the one who betrayed them. Anna visits Tom in prison who asks her if Max is Natalie’s daughter. She obfuscates and says the situation is complicated.

All of this is essential to the plot if frustating; setting up what looks like will be another delay where we will be denied real answers to one of the show’s biggest questions. I was afraid the show was slipping back into its early season habit of spinning its wheels and putting off the inevitable good stuff but, fortunately, was immediately proved wrong.

Just as we’re left wondering when we’ll (if ever) find out about the truth of Anna and Max’s prior relationship, we’re given an answer in the very next scene. Natalie asks Anna point blank: “What did Max Cady do to you?” In an eerie analog to Zack’s missing memories, Anna reveals that she experienced blackouts back when she was Max’s attorney, sometimes for a few hours, sometimes for whole nights, and even entire weekends. Anna says she was a “disaster” at the time and didn’t really suspect anything because it had “happened before” with other men. She claims not to know who Natalie’s father is, but what’s certain is that Max Cady’s machinations are even more evil than we suspected.

At Max’s house, he experiences another seizure and has a vision of his dead wife and son before Natalie comes bursting in with a gun and tries to get him to “tell the truth” about what he did to her mother. Thinking he’s diffused the situation, Max pulls Natalie close before she pulls the trigger and shoots him in the stomach. Soon, the police show up for the third time this episode and take Natalie into custody. As she’s loaded into a police car, Anna runs out and asks Natalie what happened. “I missed,” she replies.

At the hospital, Anna pretends to be Max’s sister Crystal to confront him once again. When she asks what he wants from her, Max – who miraculously survived, thanks to the bullet missing all of his major organs – lays out his fundamental motive: “This is what I wanted. For you to feel this. To feel your family ripped apart. Broken. Caged. Your children taken away. This.”

Enraged, Anna storms out and returns home where she’s able to pull up location data from one of the iCloud photos. She grabs a gun and hits the road while a literal hurricane bears down. She’s headed to the Cape Fear River to find Crystal. God knows what happens next. The sequence showcases Amy Adams’s best acting of the entire series, effortlessly pivoting between despair, confusion, and rage as she steamrolls her way into an all-out war with Max Cady.

As the episode ends we’re left with glimpses of just how dire Anna’s situation is. Her husband? Jail. Her daughter? Jail. Her son? Involuntary psychiatric hold. “Los tiempos de Dios son Perfectos” is simultaneously the culmination of a few long-simmering storylines and the launching pad for the show’s endgame. While it’s not as action-packed or humorous as some previous entries, Episode 8 of Cape Fear is a rollicking hour filled with outright horror, long-awaited answers, and the best acting of the show so far.

The Hawk debuts on Netflix on July 16.

It can be uncomfortable seeing someone that you know can easily be funny as hell just totally misfire with a new comic character, but hey — it truly happens to the best of them. If it’s just one comedy sketch among many, you can just move on to the next one, but if it’s a movie, that’s more difficult because there’s more of a time investment. Still, after 90 minutes or so, the movie wraps up and you can still be hopeful for the next time out.

Ah, but if it’s a ten-episode TV show, and neither the central character nor the show around them is ever really coming together and rarely delivering laughs, it’s a much more frustrating experience to say the least. And sadly, such is the case with The Hawk, the new Netflix series starring Will Ferrell.

Mugatu, Buddy the Elf, Ron Burgundy, Ricky Bobby, Brennan Huff: The list of standout Will Ferrell characters is a long one, and I’m only pulling from his movies with that list and not even including the huge amount of awesome, memorable Saturday Night Live characters and sketches he gave us. After he left SNL and became a genuine movie star, beyond some guest star roles, Ferrell’s dabbled back in TV here and there with projects like The Spoils of Babylon. The Hawk, however, marks his biggest foray into playing a continuing character so far; he’s Lonnie "The Hawk" Hawkins, a past-his-prime golfer attempting a comeback.

Lonnie has all of the trappings of several classic Will Ferrell characters in terms of his man-child vibes, his unearned off-the-charts self-confidence, and his penchant for accidentally hurting himself. And yet all of these traits never come together in a satisfying manner; Lonnie always feels like a patchy idea of a comedy character rather than one who’s actually fully formed, but since he’s at the center of the series, he’s inescapable and increasingly annoying.

This awkward vibe is there from the start with an early scene where Lonnie plays a golf game to the tune of “The Thong Song,” singing and dancing along and then revealing he’s wearing a thong himself. You can see why the idea of Will Ferrell wearing a thong could be funny, and yet this is just not funny, and isn’t really motivated by anything occurring nor really ever returned to again as far as who Lonnie is. It’s one of many scenes where you can’t help but think of great Ferrell bits from the past being semi-echoed, like that SNL sketch where he wore the tiny red, white and blue shorts to show his post-9/11 patriotism, and how hysterical that was vs. this just not landing at all.

What’s notable is that Ferrell is surrounded on The Hawk by many other skilled and usually very funny people too, all to no avail. The series was co-created by Ferrell and two longtime collaborators, Harper Steele and Chris Henchy, with Steele in particular standing out for writing so many awesome SNL sketches, plenty of which starred Ferrell. Two of Ferrell’s lauded SNL co-stars, Molly Shannon and Chris Parnell, are among the cast, as is his Old School co-star, Luke Wilson. Andrew Guest, fresh off the triumph of serving as showrunner on the excellent Wonder Man, is among the writers. So much talent has assembled here for something so flat.

What went wrong? It’s hard to say. The Hawk was originally going to be a series co-created by Ferrell, Ramy Youssef, and Josh Rabinowitz, with Youssef intended to star alongside Ferrell. That sounds like a really interesting blending of sensibilities, and perhaps once Youssef and Rabinowitz departed the series — over the requisite "creative differences” — so did the show’s actual inspiration for existing, with this remaining as the hollow leftovers. Or maybe it’s just the dreaded Netflix curse that so often occurs when proven stars make some of their most career-mediocre to career-worst films and series for the streaming service (there are of course some genuinely good or outright terrific exceptions).

Whatever the reason, more often than not, the ten episodes of The Hawk are just meandering and dull. With this many legitimately funny people involved, there are some genuine big laughs to be found at times throughout the series, and a really clever line or an amusingly surreal imaginary sequence will pop in now and again, but they are way too few and far between.

The center of the series is Lonnie’s struggle to reconnect with his son, Lance (Jimmy Tatro), who’s followed in his footsteps and become a skilled pro golfer in his own right. But the push-pull between these characters — who, inevitably, find themselves facing off on the golf course — is neither amusing nor engaging enough to feel worth investing in. It doesn’t help that Tatro, who’s been a very witty scene stealer in projects like American Vandal and Theater Camp, is put in the straight man role for much of The Hawk’s running time. Aside from some Vegas-set bits later in the season, he’s mostly asked to play annoyed and exasperated in reaction to Ferrell rather than given the opportunity to try to create many laughs himself.

An absolute comedic pro like Molly Shannon does all she can to elicit laughs as Lonnie’s estranged wife, occasionally connecting through sheer force of will, yet she still struggles thanks to being given a character whose main trait initially is “curses a lot.” Various subplots burble in and out, including a potential love triangle for Lance, or Lonnie’s caddy (Fortune Feimster) reconnecting with her own dad, but little of it comes to life or feels worthwhile.

That being said, kudos to Patty Guggenheim, who made such a big impression as She-Hulk: Attorney at Law’s transcendent Madisynn. King has a relatively small amount of screen time compared to others in the cast, playing the love interest to Parnell’s mega-jerk character, but still manages to make the most of it, bringing some decent wry humor into a show that desperately could use more of it.

I’ve always admired how much effort athletes put in to be the best at their craft. Those training montages in movies might be exaggerated, but there’s truth to them; you can’t stay stagnant if you want to improve. Sometimes, things click, and all those hours bear fruit. Others, it doesn’t, and the changes end up doing more harm than good. The new Backyard Baseball is the latter. While this series reboot from developer Mega Cat Studios retains the nostalgic charm of those classic kids' sports games, the rest of it falls victim to its own progress. The simplicity of pitching, hitting, and fielding has been needlessly refreshed; in their place are “optimized” versions that just don’t work as well. So while this new Backyard Baseball might pass the eye test, it falls short of home plate on the things that really matter.

It’s pretty ironic that many of the tweaks here don’t feel like they’re able to round the bases, because most of the actual hits I’ve gotten while batting have either been home runs or line-drive singles. I’m not tooting my own horn or anything – it’s just because of how offense and defense are set up now. Hitting in particular is easier than ever, at least compared to how it was in the Backyard Baseball ‘97 re-release from 2024, which isn’t exactly a good thing.

The swing spot assist was less specific in the original games; it would show you a large circle within the strike zone where the ball might land, but it was up to you to guess where exactly to swing the bat. Here, however, you always know the exact spot the ball is flying toward. The old method led to whiffs, of course, but at least the hits you earned were more satisfying and less routine. Now, it’s like these kids are in the MLB steroid era: way too many players going yard every at bat. If Barry Bonds were still in this version of Backyard Baseball, Rob Manfred might’ve already launched an investigation. Mark McGwire is still one of the included pros, though, so a probe from the commissioner might not be out of the question.

Hitting does at least get tougher once you unlock the highest difficulty option, Backyard Legend. That’s mainly because the opposing pitches fly at you faster, and since I initially played with a controller on PC, I often moved the reticle a hair too slow to account for the increased throw velocity. But after I switched over to mouse and keyboard, it’s like the difficulty change never happened and I started getting consistent hits again.

Really, the only way to make batting not be a complete cakewalk is to turn off the swing spot assist entirely, but that presents its own problems; it’s nearly impossible to hit a breaking ball because it’s very difficult to tell where it will land in the strike zone. I suppose that’s true to real life, but it means the only options are extremes: make things too easy with swing assist or unnecessarily hard without it. There is no middle ground. You’re either Babe Ruth or a dazed rec league player who just got caught looking at three consecutive right hooks.

Pitching goes similarly unchecked, so much so that anyone I put on the mound starts to look like Greg Maddux reincarnated. At first, I thought this side of the offense didn’t matter, that anyone on the other team could get a hit off no matter the type of throw I chose. They still can, don’t get me wrong, but it became less frequent after I got the hang of the new pitch release timing system. That’s when the blowouts really began. I’m talking about multiple games ending in either shutouts or landslide wins: 26-to-0, 19-to-3, you name it. It’s nice that it turns what used to be a one-dimensional position into one that requires a tad more skill, but you can reach the ceiling of it far too quickly.

It can get so out of hand that, once I reach a double-digit lead, I usually start to purposely hit grounders into opposing players just to end the game earlier. I’m a little baffled that Backyard Baseball still doesn’t have a mercy rule to account for this. When you’re up by double digits in the fourth inning of a six-inning match, it’s probably best to call it there, right? Do you really want to see little Billy Jean Blackwood curled up in the outfield while Kiesha Phillips hits another home run to put her team up 33-5? You’d have to imagine the losing team’s parents are in the stands yelling at the umpire to end the misery.

Fielding feels worse as well. If it was anything like it was in ‘97, ‘01, or even the GameCube version from 2003, I wouldn’t be as disappointed. In those games, you could at least throw a rocket from right field to first base to try to get an out. Now, it’s like your players don’t even try. Sure, you can turn off errors to try and minimize mistakes, but even that can’t make up for all the slow defensive throws that seem to be embedded in every character. You want your shortstop to throw it fast to second? Nope, can’t do that; how about a lob instead? Next thing you know, the other team has two runners in scoring position when a quick double play should have ended the inning five minutes ago.

What’s even more frustrating is that, for some reason, you can’t make your players run after line drives or pop flies, even though you can force them to sprint and slide when they’re baserunning. It’s as if these kids are programmed to make an effort on offense but not defense. Look, I get it; it’s more exciting to rack runs up than it is to prevent them. But scoring a lot is only enjoyable the first few times; over the course of a season in League Play, it becomes monotonous. Where are the defensive highlights? I’d argue there’s just as much excitement in turning a double play as there is in hitting a walk-off homer. Sadly, it’s hard to know because you can’t even make those types of run-stopping plays. Here, offense is king and defense is just the silly court jester everyone tries to ignore.

All of these issues are made glaring because the CPU can’t seem to adjust or use them to its advantage. Going up against your friends in local multiplayer can at least help keep things competitive, but that isn’t an option in the season-long solo mode that is supposed to be the main attraction here. An online PvP mode was delayed just before release, and these problems might not feel as bad if it were already accessible since going up against real players could help keep things fresh. But that’s only wishful thinking until it arrives.

Now, ask any little league coach what the most important quality a player should have is, and one trait they’ll probably always mention are good fundamentals. Unfortunately, right now, this Backyard Baseball’s issues are foundational, influencing the rest of its performance and play. Take the Wiggle Ball mode, for example – apart from the improved art and animations, which really are huge steps up from the originals, this is one of the most significant additions to this remake. It’s a very different option from the usual 9v9 matches you can find in Pick-Up and League Play, instead putting you into a fast-paced 4v4 game where you have to toss and hit a slippery wiffle ball; a decent alternative if you don’t want to worry about lineup management or pushing through an entire season.

But again, the problematic changes to hitting and pitching make it so that the result of each match is pretty much predictable before they begin. As always, I had to get used to things first, especially the ball’s erratic movement, but it was lights out after that. Oh, little Luanne Lui is serving me up a triple-loop left hook deluxe? Let me send that over to the neighbor’s front yard in right field with a quick contact hit. Then on and on it goes until the score looks like Chipper Jones’ career batting average.

There are, at least, some things that these fundamental problems don’t affect. No, not the tutorial or the batting-only modes; I’m talking about a pretty neat addition called the Card Shop. It’s where you can buy and open three different packs that contain various cards of different characters, items (Achmed’s headphones, Reese’s inhaler), and offensive moves (Line Drive hit, Slowball pitch). Don’t worry; there aren’t any real-money microtransactions in this version of Backyard Baseball. Instead, you can use Tokens you earn by playing through Season or Quick Play games to purchase them.

With the tears of so many defeated children turning the soil of Backyard Baseball’s field into salted earth, the Card Shop is like a patch of freshwater, flushing out some of that grief. Even though it occupies such a small plot, taking a dip every now and then was refreshing, especially because of the REMIX Cards, which I couldn’t get enough of. These feature unique character artwork created by several excellent artists, and since the thirty kids featured throughout the series are back (plus a few more), I’ll admit I may have taken too much time looking through each one.

And yes, you read that number right; you can choose from all 30 original Backyard Baseball kids as soon as you start a team. In addition to the always-popular mainstays (Pablo Sanchez and Jocinda Smith, to name two), you can also pick a few of the generic players from ‘97, such as Leah Wayne and Chico Pappas, along with a handful of MLB legends, like Vlad Guerrero and Jason Giambi. Although it isn’t quite at the same level of Backyard Baseball ‘01’s lengthy roster, these familiar names are always welcome and round out an impressive list.

Unfortunately, unlocking those special characters isn’t as straightforward as buying them from the Card Shop. They all have their own unlock requirements, like hitting a certain amount of home runs or stealing a specific number of bases. I wish the conditions were all laid out from the get go so I knew how much grinding I still needed to do, but getting these names into your roster is, at least, a cool little incentive to keep playing.

The Odyssey opens in theaters on July 17.

“Couldn’t you have shown some mercy?”

That line is the crux of Christopher Nolan’s much-anticipated adaptation of The Odyssey, a film that is truly huge in scope while also at times emotionally acute. Using Homer’s foundational epic poem as a lens through which to offer a surprisingly modern lesson about war, PTSD, and the very question of why we still have to deal with those things almost 3,000 years since The Odyssey first came into existence, Nolan’s opus is resonant and often bold. Unfortunately, it also occasionally misses a step in its storytelling, and frequently feels rushed despite its nearly three-hour running time. The result is a must-see if sometimes frustrating film that is marked with moments of brilliance.

Anyone who bothered to read at least the first few chapters of The Odyssey in 10th grade English class should know the story, but a quick refresher: Matt Damon stars as Odysseus, the king/warrior/husband/father who has been missing from his home island of Ithaca for some 20 years, flung across the realm of ancient, mythological Greece after being summoned by the king of the Achaean kings, Agamemnon (Benny Safdie). Told in nonchronological fashion (hey, this is Nolan after all, but also hey, Homer did it first), Odysseus’ wife, Penelope (Anne Hathaway), and their now-on-the-verge-of-manhood son, Telemachus (Tom Holland), suffer back at home, wondering if their king will ever return, even while the greedy and very un-cool suitors, led by Robert Pattinson’s Antinous, run roughshod over Odysseus’ home, vying for his wealth – and his wife.

It’s a story that has been told on film before, if never very successfully (2024's The Return, starring Ralph Fiennes, is great, but it only depicts the last act of Homer's work). And Nolan, perhaps inevitably, makes tweaks to the original poem that might bug Homer enthusiasts, changing bits here, compressing story threads there, adding in elements from other Greek mythology works, and even occasionally removing some of the most iconic moments from the original (don’t hold your breath if you’re waiting for Odysseus to pull his “I am Nobody” trick on the Cyclops here). That said, there is no way to translate all of The Odyssey into a feature film without nipping and tucking and (in the spirit of the work) dismembering some elements. And besides, the folks who never made it past Chapter 3 in high school are not gonna notice anyway.

Among the most thrilling aspects of Nolan’s film are the horror elements that he brings to the highly episodic escapades of Odysseus and his men as they struggle to find their way back home after the Trojan War, only to fall on bad luck time and again. For example, the run-in with the aforementioned Cyclops (achieved via visual effect but the performance of which was “guided” by the great Bill Irwin) removes much of the dialogue between the one-eyed monster and Odysseus from the book, but in its place the director inserts a sort of existential dread as the thing goes about its day-to-day business of waking up, herding sheep, eating Odysseus’ men, and going to sleep, before doing it all over again the next day. The beast’s grotesque design and otherworldly sound design add to the creep factor, but the Cyclops also seems to exist on a sort of higher level than mere man, barely aware of the crew’s presence when not chomping on them. As Damon’s Odysseus notes, we don’t try to talk to ants, so why should this beast try to talk to us?

A trip to the Underworld is spectacularly realized, as Odysseus encounters, among others, the men who have died under his command. “I died for your lies,” says the Shade of Elliot Page’s Sinon (the actor is not playing Achilles here, despite fan speculation). And therein lies the rub for Odysseus, for how many have died because of his machinations over the past 20 years?

Another memorable/horrific moment comes when Samantha Morton’s witch Circe transforms Odysseus’ men into pigs, morphing them and sculpting them with her bare hands Rick Baker-style, but only after a gross-out meal of magic stew sets the stage. That Circe winds up coming across as sort of justified in her actions just serves to underline the film’s thematic examination of what war does to man… or is it more a question of why man does war?

But that’s also one of the problems at the core of Nolan’s The Odyssey, despite its strokes of beauty, ugliness, and ingenuity in re-telling Homer’s story. Damon plays the hero as a conflicted warrior whose invention, the Trojan Horse, won the war for Agamemnon. But to what end? After the war, the character is set adrift emotionally as much as he is literally lost at sea.

The issue with this notion, however, is that Odysseus arrives at this state of mind early in his story chronologically, and yet we see him continue to make the same kind of mistakes time and again that landed him there in the first place, as if he hasn’t learned his lesson despite his revelation. Additionally, while Damon is perfectly serviceable as Odysseus, he’s also lacking the mischievous, trickster edge which is inherent in the classic take on the character. In Greek mythology, Odysseus basically pulled a Klinger from M*A*S*H, trying to get out of having to go to war by acting like he was insane. But in the film, he dutifully and nobly heeds the call of Agamemnon. (Interestingly, it’s Pattinson’s Antinous who’s the draft dodger here.)

Speaking of which, the Batman actor does what he can with what is basically the main villain role, but the suitors are essentially just depicted as bad guys doing bad things. The nuance that some interpretations of The Odyssey have brought to the suitors – the idea, for example, that Odysseus drafted their fathers, grandfathers, and older brothers to go off and all die in the war, only for the king to be the sole survivor to return home – is not really explored by Nolan, unfortunately.

As for Tom Holland’s Telemachus, this is another character who can be frustrating to watch (or read), since he’s frustrated as well by his inability to act against the villains who have overtaken his home. Holland doesn’t quite find a way around this dilemma, and even when the cathartic final battle with the suitors arrives – those guys are so screwed – Telemachus doesn’t get much to do. Hathaway, however, is perfect as the long-suffering Penelope, working her loom and waiting for a husband who may never return, and who she may not even recognize if and when he does. Her scenes with Damon shine, including pre-war flashbacks invented by Nolan, and when she confronts the interlopers in her home, she can be vicious.

This being a Chris Nolan movie, the cast is chockablock with stars and highly recognizable faces, even if most of them don’t get a ton to do. Jon Bernthal does his Jon Bernthal thing as Menelaus, but Lupita Nyong'o, in her brief scenes as Helen of Troy, adds texture to the enigmatic character in a way that hasn’t often been done. (The actress also plays Helen’s twin sister Clytemnestra, wife to Agamemnon.) The face of Benny Safdie’s Agamemnon is never fully seen, but his looming presence is always feared, even by his own men. Himesh Patel gets a bit of depth as Odysseus’ questioning lieutenant, Eurylochus, while Mia Goth’s handmaiden to Penelope, Melantho, is memorably Mia-Gothian for what little time we see her. And O my swineherd! John Leguizamo is funny and touching as Eumaeus, Odysseus’ loyal servant (and caretaker of the best old dog in literature, Argos).

There’s also the matter of the gods, who are frequently invoked here but not seen the way they are in Homer. Charlize Theron’s Calypso is a nymph in the myth, but could just as easily be interpreted in the film as a less scary Annie Wilkes who just wants to keep Odysseus for herself. Zendaya’s Athena pops up at key moments, typically when Odysseus is at his most introspective, but she doesn’t pull any of the tricks that she does in the book, and how Nolan chooses to ultimately depict the character is one of the film’s best conceits, as the question of what a god – or the God – actually is, and how such a concept would inform a character like Odysseus’ journey, is central to the film.

What must also be acknowledged with The Odyssey is how skillfully Nolan has taken the many preposterous elements of the book (and please be aware that I say this as someone who absolutely loves Homer) – pig-men, giant cannibals, living whirlpools, more giants – and makes them at best terrifying, and at least interesting and believable. The much ballyhooed IMAX 70 mm production was no small feat to pull off, and moments like Damon’s hero helplessly watching his ship get torn apart around him during a vicious storm are as visceral as a filmgoing experience can get.

But that doesn’t mean that everything in the film works. One recurring idea, about “Zeus’ law” of hospitality receding while mysterious invaders from the sea are apparently slowly eroding civilization itself, just doesn’t ring true. It’s a hook Nolan attempts to hang The Odyssey on, but like Odysseus’ arc itself, it gets lost in the tide of the film’s spectacle.

You know what’s great? MagSafe. It’s not just because it’s a nice way to charge my phone (questions about how the waste heat affects my battery’s lifespan notwithstanding); I love being able to easily add things like grips or cooling fans to my phone, or quickly slap it on my dashboard before a drive. It’s just nicer than fiddling with clamps, and charging that way keeps my phone’s USB-C port in good shape for when I want faster charging or data transfers, and I haven’t had to deal with a cable whose housing splits open by the plug in literal years.

What if you could do the same thing with your gaming handheld? Well, you really can’t yet, but you can get a little taste with this Belkin Charging Grip for Nintendo Switch 2, a grip accessory I’ve been testing that goes beyond just protection and ergonomic enhancement, to include a back cover and a Belkin-made, magnetically-attaching 10,000mAh battery onto the back of the console. With the grip, you can more than double handheld Switch 2 playtime without fussing with wires or a fully separate external battery. Just slap Belkin’s battery on, plug it in – despite my MagSafe comparison, it doesn’t magically add wireless charging to your Switch 2 – and go.

Design and Ergonomics

If you’ve used the Dbrand Killswitch or Jsaux Split Protective Case, you’ll be familiar with Belkin’s approach here. The Charging Grip, minus the battery, comes in three pieces: two Joy-Con 2 grips and a backplate that clips onto the Switch 2’s main body. The grips slip on over the controllers just like the Killswitch ones, only instead of hooking over the top of the controllers, they hug them near the release triggers. I found that they were actually easier to slip onto the Switch 2’s detachable controllers more easily than Dbrand’s are, and they fit like a glove, with no wiggle once they’re in. As with the Killswitch Joy-Lock grips, you can also force them to detach from the console if you hold it by one Joy-Con and shake it enough, but I wouldn’t call my test of that “normal use.”

I found that I didn’t like how the Charging Grip felt to use. The grippy texture is fine, but something about the way they flares out makes it feel like my hands were pushing them out of my grip during certain movements. It wasn’t bad in full-on handheld mode, but it was distracting when I played with the Joy-Cons detached, and it made my hands reflexively tense up a little bit. It’s not as cramp-inducing as playing with naked Joy-Cons, but it didn’t do as good a job making me forget about the controllers as my Killswitch Joy-Locks do.

One big advantage that Belkin has over other Switch 2 accessories is that it actually fits in the Switch 2 dock. Whether that’s an advisable way to use it, I’m not sure. Belkin assured me its engineers hadn’t found issues with the system overheating, and the cover does have big holes to let the console vent, but the system also seemed hotter than usual when I removed it from the dock after a long play session. It may have been my imagination, and when I removed it I didn’t notice the exterior of the console itself was hotter, but on the plus side, the cover is as easy to remove as it is to put on.

The cover also has cutouts for all the buttons and the Switch 2’s ports. I wish the company had gone with buttons over the top of the power button and volume rocker, the way you might find on a phone case, though. Having to contend with a cutout amplifies the awkwardness of using the Switch 2’s buttons, which are nearly flush with the system, and I kept finding myself accidentally putting the console to sleep when I wanted to turn it down. Also, the slimness that lets the case slip into the dock makes it feel like it’s not terribly protective. (Did I do drop testing to find out? In this video game economy? Hell no.)

With regard to the battery itself: it’s slender and flat, with a single USB-C port and a short, embedded cable that folds into its body and loops up just over your Switch 2 when it’s plugged in, using its right-angle USB-C plug. The magnetic connection between the battery and case is strong enough to to easily snap the battery onto the back of my Switch 2, but only just. The battery never flopped off of my console while I was idly using it, but it only took one firm shake for me to send the battery flying onto the couch I’d aimed it at. I wouldn’t buy this for an excitable kid, lest they fling it off while it’s plugged in and tear a chunk of the inner USB-C tab off, a risk made plain to me, once, when I tried to walk away from a big, heavy power bank with my still-connected phone in hand.

Unsurprisingly, slapping a 10,000mAh battery onto the back of your Switch 2 adds a lot of weight to the console. The Charging Grip itself weighs 0.44 lb, or about half of an original Nintendo Switch. Adding that much weight shifts the balance back and makes the Switch 2 a lot less comfortable to hold. I didn’t mind the heft when I was curled up on the couch with my hands braced on my knees, but it made it a lot harder to hold it in a way that didn’t make me look like a bent-over gremlin when I was trying to sit upright. Maybe this is an old guy thing, but longer play sessions stress the crap out of my neck, so I try not to look down at harsh angles when I’m playing on a handheld.

Battery Performance

Belkin’s claim that the Charging Grip’s battery can get your Switch 2 an extra charge and a half is about right. When I drained my Switch 2 to five percent charge and plugged in the Belkin power bank, the power bank was left with a little over 30 percent once the Switch 2 was full again. A second charge from there got me up to roughly 45 percent.

It took just over three hours of playing Nintendo’s Star Fox demo, Mario Kart World, and Final Fantasy VII Remake Intergrade before I had fully exhausted Belkin’s battery and was back on the console’s internal power. That’s not as good as the battery that Belkin includes in the Belkin Charging Case, which gave me almost two full charges and let me play for more than three and a half hours before I was on internal power, but it’s certainly more convenient to be able to play in handheld mode, ergonomic issues aside.

I love the modularity of the magnetic back cover and power bank combo, and although the Belkin Charging Grip’s, well, grips aren’t my favorite, they do feel good, and fit my Joy-Con 2 controllers. I like that it docks fine without an adapter, and that my Joy-Con 2 controllers didn’t seem any more prone to accidentally detaching from the console with the grips and backplate on than without them.

The trouble is that the power bank adds so much weight when attached that, in most cases, I’d probably rather just plug my Switch 2 into one of the many power banks I already own. I could see it being handy on a plane, where I usually stick it on the tray table to play anyway, but anywhere else that’s not me half-horizontal on a couch just seems like a recipe for wrist and neck pain. And it’s an extra $60 to add the battery, which isn’t cheap. Ultimately, there’s just a lot more value in Belkin’s grips and dock-compatible back cover on their own than there is in the battery-included kit.

Wes is a freelance writer (Freelance Wes, they call him) who has covered technology, gaming, and entertainment steadily since 2020 at Gizmodo, Tom's Hardware, Hardcore Gamer, and most recently, The Verge. Inside of him there are two wolves: one that thinks it wouldn't be so bad to start collecting game consoles again, and the other who also thinks this, but more strongly.

Sometimes, a game comes along that makes you think “man, this is so up my alley it’s like it was made just for me.” Denshattack is one of those games. It’s the kind of joint we used to get all the time in the PS2 era and is now only found in the indie space. Video games are serious business, you know, and we don’t have time for nonsense. Denshattack is definitely nonsense, but I mean that as the highest possible compliment. Here’s the pitch: What if Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater did the Dragon Ball fusion dance with Jet Set Radio, but instead of skating you pilot a train around a dystopian Japan in order to do sick tricks and take down an evil corporation? Sounds rad as hell, right? Turns out, it is. Two thoughts ran on a loop while I was playing Denshattack: “this rules,” and “this really has no business being this good. How are they doing this?”

Denshattack’s charming story is straight out of an anime, which is fitting since its stunning art style looks like one. It follows Emi, who lives in a future Japan ravaged by climate change and delivers ramen by train. Most of the country’s population (or at least those that can afford it) now lives in protective domed cities built by a shady megacorp (is there any other kind?) called Miraido, which also happens to operate the high speed VACTRAIN between the domes. We love a monopoly, and those who don’t live in the cities have a harder life, but at least they’re not under Miraido’s thumb. Emi’s one of them, and it’s not long before she meets a fellow misfit named Fernando and gets swept up into the world of Denshattack: an underground sport of sorts where the most skilled train jockeys in Japan compete against each other by doing tricks and races. Soon, she’s on a quest to be the best Denshattacker there ever was, and Fernando, who runs a Denshattack zine covering the scene, is tagging along for the ride.

Emi is basically Goku: an incredibly positive and generally likeable natural talent who seeks constant self-improvement. Inevitably, her quest to be the best leads her into contact with the various gangs scattered across Japan, as well as their leaders. After she’s earned the right to face the leader of a gang, Emi inevitably defeats them and, impressed by her skill, they join up with her. You’ve seen these characters before: the bubbly, supportive rich girl obsessed with fashion; the rival who joins because she wants to be a part of what happens next, not because she respects you or anything; the older rockabilly engineers who come out of semi-retirement because they finally meet someone worthy of their creations,and so on. None of this is new, but that’s not always a bad thing. Denshattack is playing the hits, but they sound good, and its punk rock mentality is infectious.

Really, the whole point of the plot is just to get you inside a train that can do ollies and kickflips. Denshattack’s Japan is broken down into tracks you ride, and your train is more than up to the task. You can jump, flip to new tracks, boost off ramps for big air, and a ton more. All the while, you should be doing tricks, which Denshattack smartly maps to the right analog stick. Flicking it to the left will get you an ollie, but if you want something like a 540 heelflip, you’ll have to do a half circle. More complex tricks require more complex motions, and if you want the really sick stuff (and there are a lot of tricks to learn) you’ll basically have to do fighting game inputs.

Chaining tricks together is Denshattack’s bread and butter, but the goal is not to use the same tricks too many times in a row, or they’ll grow stale. Style is everything, and racking up big scores means learning lots of tricks. It will take you a while to learn everything well enough to be able to pull off specific tricks on the fly, but Denshattack comes equipped with the excellently named and super helpful Tricktionary that you can access at any time if you need to remember how to do something. When I first started, I wasn’t hitting the cool stuff. Now I’m doing Impossible Cancels like they’re old hat. There’s a ton of depth to this trick system, and it’s a lot of fun to add new options to your repertoire as you play.

The real secret sauce on Denshattack’s burger, though, are the levels themselves. The roughly 10- to 15-hour campaign takes you all over Japan, and you’ll see some absolutely wild stuff. You’ll trick over some stone heads, ride a Ferris Wheel through an abandoned city, and knock down Miraido’s cell towers as you go. And those are the tame parts. I’ve ridden rails through a volcano, been eaten by a shark, and tricked through kabuki plays. The best part of Denshattack is how much variety there is. Some courses you just roll through. Others have you race against other characters (who you can often knock off the track), post a high score, or complete objectives scattered across the various splits that track takes. One had me clear a bridge, restore a Miraido-censored work of “rebellious” art, and deliver soba. I could control what part of the track I went to, and it was up to me to complete the objectives once I got there.

Every level has multiple paths depending on what routes you take, which can lead to new exits. If you’ve got style, you can chain together tricks to fill your energy bar, which unlocks the Yaoyorozuo, or 8 Million Roads, alternate, high-flying, elaborate rainbow-colored tracks that lead to new areas. Imagine if you could make Rainbow Road part of every other track in Mario Kart, and you’ve kinda got the idea.

It’s a lot, and the joy of Denshattack is combining everything – drifting, jumping, pulling off tricks, grinding on rails, wall riding, looping through tunnels, hitting manuals, honking your horn to interact with parts of the environment, and a lot more – without messing up or going off track. It’s not always easy to do, but the checkpoints are generous and your friends are always there to give you words of encouragement if you make a mistake. You’ll fail a lot, but it will never end your run, just cost you time. What’s truly impressive is that Denshattack keeps upping the ante throughout. You’ll think you’ve seen everything, and then it will be like, “by the way, you can attach your train to monorail tracks now,” or “hey, wanna ride these air currents?” It’s rad. That all of these levels are set to some of the slickest, catchiest tunes I’ve heard in a hot second certainly doesn’t hurt, either.

Individual missions are usually short, but there’s a ton of room for replayability and mastery here, and lots of extra stuff to collect – like parts you can use to unlock new trains or spray paint cans and stickers to doll them up to suit your style. My favorites are the picture opportunities you can nail for Fernando, which you then place into an issue of his zine. The zines themselves are surprisingly detailed, offering background on a region, its characters, their trains, the story so far, and even Emi’s ramen reviews. It’s awesome.

Every level also has dares, optional objectives that may challenge you to complete it without crashing, derail a certain number of rivals, find an optional exit, perform specific tricks at a specific time, and so on. These are also rad, and I always wanted to go back and see what I had missed. Additionally, you’re scored on both time and tricks, so if score-chasing’s your bag (and it is mine), that’s there for you, too. I was mostly charting bronze and silver medals on my first runs, but I am excited to go back and try for better times and higher scores.

Between missions, you can spend the collectibles you acquire to get new trains, each with unique advantages and disadvantages – I really liked one that upped my trick speed at the cost of my manual distance and another that amped up my energy bar fill rate in exchange for reducing my trick score, which overall meant I could get to the 8 Million Roads faster. This stuff rules. Certain levels incentivize you to use specific trains if you’re score chasing, but the choice is always yours, and the customization provides more reasons to replay older levels and get any collectibles you missed.

Denshattack’s real highlights, though, are the boss fights that come at the end of each area. You wanna square off with a group of trains that can combine, Megazord-style? You got it. What about a brawl against a train that doubles as a sand snake you can grind on? It’s there. Or is a moving castle sporting an enormous cannon more your speed? Good news, kid. Denshattack is absolutely at its most anime (complimentary) during these sequences, but each one feels different and they still work seamlessly with what you’ve learned in the regular stages. Boss fights in games like this often end up as disappointments, but Denshattack’s are as smooth as a high-speed train hitting big air and pulling off sick tricks before landing perfectly on another track. You don’t expect to see it, but you do love to see it.

The essence of The Mound: Omen of Cthulhu as a co-op survival horror game is best captured by a moment where I was yelling at my friend repeatedly asking what the hell he was laughing about before being brutally murdered. You see, this was not my friend at all, but a Faceless One using his character model and repeatedly playing back his recorded laughter from earlier in the match. But when it comes to making me feel like I've lost my mind, The Mound’s clever madness effects sometimes take a backseat to ruthless difficulty that doesn't always respect my time or make it easy to bring in new allies.

It took more than 50 expeditions and around 50 hours of scouring the beautiful Chilean wilderness to unbury all the secrets of The Mound's rich, mid-1600s setting. You and your friends take on the role of conquistadors ignoring every possible warning of danger to enrich themselves and the Spanish crown while avoiding the restless dead and trespassing on strange tombs to alien gods. As far as capturing the vibes of the Cthulhu mythos, developer ACE Team has done a fantastic job.

Of course, when I hear "Lovecraft" and "Conquistadors" in the same sentence, I immediately see the potential for a twisted kind of synergy between them we could maybe call "Advanced Racism." And for the most part, Omen of Cthulhu threads this needle pretty well, as many of the more recent adaptations of Lovecraft's work have also sought to do. The Mapuche indigenous to this region in real life are mentioned multiple times in the story, and very clearly aren't conflated with the strange cultists of the Elder Gods who live deeper in the jungle.

I would have liked to see a bit more of the Mapuche, and there's still the implication that the New World is an untamed wilderness of nightmares and dark magic, which plays into some colonial tropes. But it's certainly better than the original Lovecraft version of the story. The tale of The Mound and the secrets that lie beneath it are told in effective journal entries with great voice acting, too. I very much enjoyed discovering what was going on little-by-little, and the late game reveals are dramatic and satisfying.

Mortal Peril

Across 18 detailed maps that interconnect into a single large world (though you can only access one section at a time), you go forth on contracts that come with a goal, a potential reward, and a set amount of gear based on how many players are coming along, up to a max of four. I think this way of handling equipment is quite clever. Often there aren't enough weapons for everyone, for example, so you have to decide who in the party is going to be responsible for combat, who's going to hold the lantern in dark areas, and who might simply leave their inventory slots empty to carry more loot. It also makes you try out different equipment and not fall into the rut of bringing the same gear every time.

I ran into an issue with the way contracts work after about 20 hours, though, in that the random assortment offered seems to scale with the character level of the server host. That meant that if I wanted to bring a new friend in who hadn't played before, I might be totally out of Basic and even Medium-difficulty contracts to ease them into things. I appreciate that, in similar co-op horror games like Phasmophobia, I can farm the newbie missions over and over for resources and pick difficulty settings friendly to the allies I've invited along. Especially considering The Mound can be incredibly punishing even on Basic expeditions.

The group I've been playing with is an experienced co-op crew too, with hundreds of hours together in games like Phasmophobia, Lethal Company, Abiotic Factor, and Valheim. We're no greenhorns. And we all came to the conclusion pretty quickly that, to put it bluntly, The Mound is really freaking hard. Some of this can be mitigated by learning how specific mechanics work. For example, there's a timer on most expeditions that we found doesn't really matter at all, and it's much more important to move quietly so as not to upset the deadlier creatures of the forest.
But even when we felt we were doing everything right, sometimes the number and deadliness of enemies simply scales way too quickly to provide a satisfying challenge without feeling overwhelming. When it's four of us against a dozen zombies and there's no room to sneak past or go around, even on the lowest difficulty, what exactly are we supposed to do? And that's assuming you even have Basic contracts left in the ledger to attempt.

The absolute worst are portal missions, which leave you without the usual ox cart to carry your stuff and require you to navigate a modified version of the map covered in purple goo that will kill you instantly if you stand in it for what feels like about three seconds, which then also prevents your friends from getting close enough to revive you. I can't recall ever having a good time on one of these missions, and eventually tried to avoid them whenever possible. We often found ourselves asking after seven or eight failed expeditions if this was really the intended experience or if we were missing some key mechanic that would make it feel fair, and it seems like the answer is the former.

The problem is not so much that Advanced and Legendary missions are really difficult. They should be! I want to have something to strive for. But more that there aren't enough options to tailor the difficulty to your group or mood. The floor is too high. That said, I should mention that there was a fairly big patch about a day before this review went live that tweaked the difficulty, among other things, but it arrived so late that I haven't been able to put that through extensive testing yet. However, it doesn’t seem to be wildly different after a couple expeditions.

Army of Darkness

There is some meta progression between contracts to ease the pressure, but most character levels simply unlock new knife skins that are purely cosmetic. Buying or upgrading gear ahead of a tough map is a nice option, but since you lose all those extras and upgrades on death, it's very easy to fail an Advanced or Legendary contract a few times, wind up broke, and not really have any way to go scrounge up some quick cash in calmer waters before trying again.

It's a shame, because when The Mound isn't being overly oppressive, the tense combat and horror elements work really well together. The variety of enemies is impressive, drawing from the deep corners of the Cthulhu mythos and going all the way from the simplest creepy possessed humans up to some very weird, reality-bending horrors that might not even be possible to kill, making your party navigate around them in specific and clever ways. Resource management is key, and the variable value of treasure leads to thrilling decisions in cases where you're not sure if you've picked up enough to meet your quota yet, but the jungle is getting angry.

It's also difficult to recommend The Mound if you want to play solo. It will spawn an NPC companion to help you out somewhat, but they're not as competent as a human ally, and trying to complete contracts on your own can be a serious trial even though the number of enemies is scaled down a bit. “The co-op game is better in co-op” isn’t exactly a shock, but since they give you the option to fly solo, it’s worth noting all the same.

Warning: This review contains full spoilers for X-Men '97 Season 2, Episode 5!

It says a lot about the priorities of the X-Men '97 writers' room that we're halfway through Season 2 and only just now getting our first Wolverine-centric episode of the series. That's a far cry from the approach taken by the classic X-Men: The Animated Series, and one I'd argue has largely benefited the new show. But eventually, Cal Dodd's Logan needed to enter the spotlight, particularly in light of his adamantium loss from Season 1. That's why it's a bit surprising that X-Men '97 does so little with Wolverine's post-adamantium status quo in the end.

As the title suggests, "Weapon X, Lies, and DVDs" is basically a sequel to the original series' "Weapon X, Lies, and Videotape," again turning the focus to Wolverine's sordid history with the Weapon X program. This time around, Logan assembles a team to infiltrate a new Weapon X facility, only for his allies to discover he has ulterior motives for going back to the belly of the beast.

First, the good. Episode 5 is a clear throwback to classic '80s action movies like Predator and Aliens, with direct homages to both films. Who doesn't love a good story about a bunch of musclebound grunts charging into a mission, only to realize they're in way over their heads? It's not necessarily the way I would have expected characters like Sabretooth (Darin De Paul), Lady Deathstrike (Erika Ishii), and Maverick (Crispin Freeman) to be reintroduced for X-Men '97, but it's an approach that works. And there's something fitting about Wolverine and Yuriko's reunion again devolving into a conflict over alien invaders.

It also helps that Episode 5 is as much a Morph-driven story as it is anything else. This is a character who has never received the attention they deserve in the new series, and this installment goes a long way toward making up for lost time. It digs deep into the oddball bond between these two, further calling into question whether what Morph (J. P. Karliak) feels for Logan is pure friendship or something more akin to unrequited love. This episode only proves that Morph needs to be in the spotlight more often.

But again, not all is well in Episode 5, and a lot of it has to do with what I would consider to be X-Men '97's one real flaw. This series has a tendency to move too quickly for its own good, blazing through classic Marvel Comics source material with reckless abandon. That problem rears its head on more than one front here. As fun as it is to see the Brood introduced to this universe (complete with an homage to Marc Silvestri's Uncanny X-Men #234 cover), it's a little weird to see them treated as such an afterthought. They're a means to an end to force Logan back into that adamantium bonding tank, when they should be a threat worthy of the X-Men as a whole. I suppose nothing is stopping the series from revisiting the Brood well down the road, but will it?

Worse is how abruptly X-Men '97 wraps up Logan's adamantium subplot. I feared this was coming when the trailer spoiled the fact that he was already getting his metal back, but that doesn't lessen the frustration now that it's happened. In the comics, Logan losing his adamantium was the catalyst for literally years worth of storylines as he grappled with the psychological and physical fallout. Not all of those stories were great, but you can't accuse writers like Larry Hama of not exploiting that particular plot twist to its fullest.

The post-Season 1 time jump hasn't helped matters on this front, but the point remains that the series doesn't do much to dig into Logan's mindset as he deals with being defanged. The downside to the Morph-centrc approach to Episode 5 is that it doesn't actually end up focusing on Wolverine much, particularly the pre-infected version. The ultimate reveal that he feels he's nothing without his signature claws rings true, to be sure, and I hope the series continues to pull on that thread however and whenever it can. But why couldn't X-Men '97 have dug deeper into Logan's plight before bringing the adamantium back? Why couldn't we have gotten a spiritual successor to Season 1's "Lifedeath" episodes? There's so much storytelling potential being left on the table here. Episode 5 is an entertaining romp, but it could have been something more.

I’ve been conflicted about the latest Intel Core Ultra 200S processors ever since I first reviewed them for TechRadar last year, and I have the exact same problems with the new Intel Core Ultra 5 250K Plus and Core Ultra 7 270K Plus as I did with Intel’s first stab at a Core Ultra desktop chip.

On paper, these are genuinely fantastic processors that offer some of the best multi-core performance you’re going to find outside of an AMD Ryzen Threadripper, especially for the price. Even on the gaming front, they aren’t terrible processors and can offer better value for the performance than AMD in a few games. But the gaming performance isn't quite good enough to recommend when better gaming processors exist elsewhere.

Specs and Features

The Intel Core Ultra 5 250K Plus and Intel Core Ultra 7 270K Plus are steps up from the Intel Core Ultra 5 245K and Intel Core Ultra 7 265K, respectively. The 250K Plus and 270K Plus feature some enhanced Arrow Lake architecture over the base Series 200S chips, including 4 additional E-cores and slightly faster boost clock speeds.

In the case of the Intel Core Ultra 7 270K Plus, this puts the chip on par with the Intel Core Ultra 9 285K with 24 total cores (8 performance + 16 efficient) at a slightly slower boost speed (5.5GHz, compared to the 285K’s 5.7GHz boost), though at roughly half the price. For the 250K Plus, the additional cores brings its total count to 18 (6p+12e), compared to the 6p+8e core configuration of the 245K.

Both chips also have some expanded L3 cache, though nothing on the order of AMD Ryzen 3D V-Cache. They are also able to support up to 7200MT/s DDR5 RAM, an increase of about 800MT/s over the baseline Arrow Lake-S chips.

All of this sounds amazing considering the lower price of these two chips, with the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus coming in at $299.99 and the Core Ultra 5 250K Plus settling in at $219.99. For non-gamers, this is absolutely the case; but for anyone who only wants to play games, the value proposition falls off.

Performance

Both the Intel Core Ultra 5 250K Plus and Ultra 7 270K Plus punch well above their weight when it comes to multi-core and creative performance, so for productivity or workstation use, I actually recommend considering them if you don’t plan on upgrading past this for a few years.

However, in games, these processors occasionally fall short of their respective Core Ultra 200S non-Plus counterparts. That makes these very difficult processors to recommend if gaming is even remotely important to you.

Synthetic single-core and multi-core performance on these refreshed Arrow Lake CPUs is outstanding, with the 270K Plus managing to fight the Core Ultra 9 285K to an effective tie in Cinebench R23 in multi-core performance and coming within 4% of the 285K’s single-core performance.

Against the best AMD processors, the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus scores a roughly 83% better multi-core performance and a roughly 9% better single-core performance over the AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D in Cinebench R23, and even manages to slightly edge out the multicore performance of the Ryzen 9 9950X3D. Against its direct AMD competition, the Ryzen 7 9700X, the 270K Plus gets 117% better multi-core performance, though it is only 2.5% faster in single-core, in Cinebench R23.

For the 250K Plus, I found a full 25% better multi-core performance and a roughly 6% better single core performance in Cinebench R23 over the Core Ultra 245K, and a 35-40% better multi-core performance over its two Ryzen 7 3D V-Cache competitors. Against the AMD Ryzen 5 9600X, the 250K Plus pulls down a 107% better multi-core performance in Cinebench R23, and 112% faster multi-core performance in 3DMark’s CPU Profile.

On the creative side of things, the Core Ultra 5 250K Plus and Core Ultra 7 270K Plus are phenomenal for creative work on the cheap, especially the 250K Plus, which beats out even the Core Ultra 9 285K by just over 8% in my Photoshop results.

When it comes to gaming, though, the Core Ultra 200S Plus chips just can’t compete with AMD’s offerings, or even their non-Plus counterparts.

In Cyberpunk 2077’s benchmark (no RT, no DLSS, Ultra preset at 1080p), the Core Ultra 250K Plus falls about 2% behind the Ryzen 5 9600X in average fps, which is more or less within the margin of testing variance, so I’d call it a tie here. Unfortunately for the 250K Plus, it is noticeably slower than the 9600X in Total War: Warhammer 3’s battle benchmark (1080p ultra preset), with a roughly 16% lower average fps. Against the Intel Core Ultra 245K, the 250K Plus posts mixed results with a roughly 7% higher average fps in Cyberpunk 2077 but a 14% lower average fps in Total War: Warhammer 3; taken together, scoring about 6% slower in gaming performance overall against the chip it is refreshing.

The Core Ultra 7 270K Plus, meanwhile, has its best result against the Ryzen 7 9700X in Cyberpunk 2077, scoring a roughly 7% better average fps. It’s downhill from there, though, as the 270K Plus underperforms the Ryzen 7 9800X3D in Cyberpunk 2077 average fps by about 25%, and even falls about 4% behind the Ryzen 5 9600X and about 2% behind the 250K Plus.

In Total War: Warhammer 3’s battle benchmark, the 270K Plus does manage to get about 12% better average fps than the 250K Plus, but gets roughly 5% lower average fps than the 9700X and about 8% lower versus the 9800X3D. Possibly worst of all for the 270K Plus, it gets 6.5% lower average fps than the Ryzen 5 9600X.

The one thing that the 250K Plus and 270K Plus do bring to the table is phenomenal value for their overall performance, but this just doesn’t translate to gaming.

Whereas the 270K Plus offers about 11% better overall performance for the price versus the Ryzen 7 9700X, it gets about 14.5% lower gaming performance-per-dollar, and is currently about 16% more expensive than its direct AMD competition. Against the more elite 9800X3D chip, the 270K Plus sells for about 19% cheaper and offers a fantastic 43% better performance-per-dollar overall, but it’s only about a 4.5% better gaming value than the more expensive 9800X3D. It looks even worse when compared to the Ryzen 5 9600X, a chip that costs about half the price of the 270K Plus, but gets about 6% better gaming performance on average.

The 250K Plus similarly fails to keep up with the Ryzen 5 9600X in terms of value, managing a 4% better overall performance-per-dollar than the 9600X, but the 9600X offers nearly 35% better gaming performance for the price than the 250K Plus. That said, the 250K Plus does offer the third best gaming performance-per-dollar of the current generation of processors, behind the 9600X and the second-place Core Ultra 5 245K, so it might be a good choice depending on your budget.

It’s also worth noting that AMD’s competing chips are much more power efficient than Intel’s latest, with the 9600X and 9700X topping out at 88W, compared to 163.5W for the 250K Plus and nearly 268W for the 270K Plus. Even the 9800X3D scores better than the 250K Plus, with a max power draw of 161.2W. As for thermals, the 270K Plus runs the hottest with a max temp of 90C, followed by the 9600X’s 88C max, the 9800X3D maxing out at 86C, the 9700X hitting a 75.5C max, and the 250K Plus running coolest at a maximum temp of 69C.

It’s rare for a game to directly acknowledge you as a player – normally, we exist in a mutually agreed upon suspension of disbelief with its characters. We are asked to inhabit them, and put ourselves aside. Moss: The Forgotten Relic, a remake of the previously VR-exclusive Moss and Moss: Book 2, discards that notion. You may control its heroine Quill, but you do not become her; you are the Reader, and the distance between you is intentional. It is also what makes Moss remarkable.

The Forgotten Relic’s story starts simply – you are in an old library and pick up a book titled Moss. Inside, you meet Quill, a young mouse who dreams of adventure and finds it thanks to a piece of Glass, an artifact of great power and long history. Holding it means she can interact with you, the Reader, and you can change the story. From that moment, her fate and yours intertwine, but when she shows the Glass to her uncle – and he realizes what your bond means – he warns Quill that she is in danger and leaves to take care of something else. When he doesn’t return, Quill follows at the behest of a Starthing – mischievous beings who meddle in the lives of mortal animals – who claims to know where he is. She knows her uncle needs her help. And you go with her.

Moss’s story is a fairy tale, and like all fairy tales, it grows with the telling. What starts simple rarely remains that way, and Quill’s quest strays far from its initial objectives. It is not a deep story; it will not make you re-evaluate your life or question your beliefs. But Moss commits so thoroughly to its premise and is so charming in its execution that it won me over completely. When you transition to a new screen, you can hear a page turning. A narrator reads prose and provides different voices for each character. Many dramatic moments are beautifully rendered on the book's pages, and you flip them yourself to advance the story. Plenty of stories proclaim to be inspired by fairy tales; Moss is one. You can almost hear the narrator wanting to tell you that nothing bad happens to Quill during scary moments.

There are plenty of memorable characters in Moss (I love the grumpy toad you often encounter), but Quill is this tale's beating heart; without her, there is no story, nothing to care for. She is brave, but not fearless; resolved, but aware that she cannot do what needs to be done alone; strong, but not stoic. I felt for her when she was sad or afraid, but she was not simply someone in need of my protection. We were a team. If I was stuck, Quill would point the way and show me what to do. If I accidentally piloted her off a cliff or into a pond, she'd re-enter the area and shake herself off, ready to try again. And when we triumphed, she would high five me or sometimes break into elaborate dance. Her joy is infectious, and I wanted her to succeed not because I wanted to keep playing, but because I liked her. It’s hard for a game to make you feel truly connected to a character, but Moss succeeds.

The game side of Moss is also simple enough, especially the first half of this two-part compilation. While you can see its VR origins in the small environments and your ability to interact directly with parts of the world, developer PolyArc has done an admirable job of turning this duology into traditional games. Had I not known that they started life as VR exclusives, I probably wouldn't have been able to tell. Occasionally, it can be hard to see whether you can interact with something, or you might deal with the odd awkward camera angle, but these are pretty minor qualms and I never met anything I couldn’t handle. I did have a weird softlock once when I opened a door before I was supposed to, but a quick restart fixed that, and Moss is generous with its checkpoints.

The action itself is smooth and straightforward. You can make Quill run, jump, climb, and dodge, and she is armed with a single sword to defend herself. As the Reader, you can hold the mechanical beetles she fights in place so they can't attack her or move objects to create paths and platforms for her to jump to. These are simple actions individually, but it’s when Moss combines combat and platforming, and requires you to control Quill and the Reader in harmony, that it triumphs. The best puzzles require you to pilot Quill while manipulating the environment and enemies to get where you need to go, and figuring out what you need to do (and finding collectible scrolls and dust along the way) is a joy. Maybe that will require you (the Reader) to use a bug to flip a switch so Quill can get to a new area, or simply activate a series of switches in the right order so you can use the environmental changes they cause to make a new path. Simple stuff, yes, but compelling.

Book 2 takes everything Moss did right and expands upon it. In addition to introducing more characters (one of which is playable) and a larger scope, this sequel adds additional weapons: a chakram (the key to understanding modern media is that everything is, in some way, indebted to Xena: Warrior Princess) and a hammer. The sword now has a dash that allows Quill to fly across gaps, the chakram can be embedded into walls and then called back to smite enemies or solve puzzles, and the hammer is, well… a hammer. There are even new enemies, like little metal pill bugs that you can send flying to open new pathways and smash other evil insects.

But probably the biggest change is Quill’s ability to climb vines. With that, the broken stone and overgrown ruins of Moss become more challenging and interesting to move across, which adds to the idea that this is a living world. As the Reader, you augment this with a power that can grow vines and verdant pathways, opening up new ways for Quill to travel and increasing the complexity of the world and its puzzles.

Don’t get me wrong: I think the original game is worth playing, though you don’t have to. There’s a nice little summary when you start Book 2. It’s a simpler game, but it’s incredibly charming and has some great moments that a recap just doesn’t do justice.

None of what either Moss asks of you is particularly difficult, but when everything is thrown together, it is compelling. I enjoyed solving its puzzles (especially when it took multiple steps and I had to combine all my skills), hunting for secrets, and generally just spending time with Quill and exploring Moss’s world. The Forgotten Relic invites you to live in this book, both a part of its story and separate from it, and I liked that. Moss doesn’t just throw lore at you; it tells its story and expects you to follow along. You won’t know, exactly, what a Reader is or why Glass is powerful or what the Cinder Night was from the jump, but if you pay attention, Moss will teach you, and things are more nuanced than they originally appear. There’s no codex to check and while exposition does happen, it’s generally because both you and Quill are ignorant of something and need to learn.

Warning: This review contains full spoilers for Rick and Morty Season 9, Episodes 6-8!

I've fallen a bit behind on my weekly Rick and Morty reviews due to being on vacation, so I figured it would be easiest to knock out the most recent three episodes in one fell swoop. The gist here is that Episodes 6, 7, and 8 are all enjoyable in their own way, offering a fun array of high-concept tomfoolery and some much-needed focus on Spencer Grammer's Summer for a change. One of them definitely rises above the others, however. So let's take a closer look at each episode.

Episode 6: "Erickerhead"

Episode 6 is reminiscent of Episode 2 in that it's another installment geared toward Rick (Ian Cardoni) being in conflict with himself in a very direct and literal way. This time, however, it's a real mind/body problem as his head is severed from his body and the two wind up devolving into all-out war rather than be reunited.

This episode does suffer a bit from following so closely on the heels of its superior predecessor, but in a vacuum, it's an entertaining romp that makes the most of its concept. I enjoyed how quickly Rick's body evovles into its own character, and the whole conflict wraps up nicely, with Rick finding a little newfound unity and using that mindset to punish his grandchildren with some good, old-fashioned exercise.

The main benefit of "Erickerhead" is that it draws Summer into the conflict. So even as Morty (Harry Belden) and Rick's head are wreaking havoc on one side of the planet, Summer and Rick's body are cooking up their own brand of chaos on the other. Grammer gets ample room to shine here thanks to all of her Summer-isms (especially when accusing Rick of fellating himself), and on the whole, the episode is a good reminder that she can be just as effective a foil for Rick as Morty is.

Episode 7: "Mortgully: The Last Rickforest"

Conceptually, this is one of the more memorable Rick and Morty episodes in quite a while. A seemingly routine mission to harvest some psychedelic sap goes awry, leading to Rick and Morty being dragged to a Hollow Earth prison where they're forced to live out the evolutionary cycle again and again. What's not to like about that?

It's a premise strong enough that the episode really doesn't need a B-plot, so it's just as well we don't get one. Instead, "Mortgully: The Last Rickforest" splits the duo apart so we can see how each handles life in this eternal prison alone. Rick, naturally spends the entire time trying to orchestrate a jailbreak, while Morty does his best to embrace his new existence and go with the biological flow. I especially enjoyed the recurring musical montages here.

These twin storylines end up reconnecting nicely in the end, as both characters get fed up with the neverending grind and find a way to instead starve their jailer into submission. It's a clever way to end an overall clever episode. The final scene is also a hoot, as we learn Rick and Morty endured all these lives and deaths and were seemingly only gone for one day on Earth. How does that work, exactly?

Episode 8: “Rickuiem Mort a Dream”

Apparently, another of Season 9's recurring subplots is Rick's obession with establishing a bottomless vodka supply. In keeping with the general theme of empathy, this episode opens by giving us a little window into one of those rare moments of personal happiness and contentment for Rick, only to see Morty torpedo the whole thing for the sake of a pack of Pokemon cards. Suddenly, it becomes more clear why Rick can barely tolerate the kid some days.

The plot in Episode 8 starts out decently enough, with Morty experiencing the joys of an empathy-boosting alien parasite. However, it really kicks into gear when things inevitably go astray. There's a fun role reversal at work here, with Morty becoming the blackhearted crank and Rick the bungling pacifist. Cardoni and Belden deliver some of their best work of the entire season here. Cardoni's line “Morty, we gotta put his juice back in!” now lives rent-free in my head.

The Summer/Jerry subplot is also pretty entertaining, if not the best we've seen from either character this season. Summer's ruthlessness is never not amusing, and the idea of Jerry befriending a serial killer is a hoot. It just feels like they could have done more on that latter front before Jerry's deception was exposed. Still, an all-around solid episode.

Full spoilers follow for House of the Dragon Season 3, Episode 4.

Poor Rhaenyra. Emma D’Arcy’s queen has barely been on the throne for five minutes, and already she’s been bamboozled by a supposedly defeated enemy, abandoned by her oldest ally and lied to by her husband. Armies are moving, and they are not her own. After congratulating herself – briefly – on a war well-won, the Iron Throne has once again proved that it is more of a poisoned chalice, resistant to those who want it most fervently. This episode spent much of its (considerable!) energy examining the forces still aligned against her.

One major problem is the new guy, Lord Ormund Hightower (James Norton). After supposedly surrendering, he marched to Tumbleton – a town loyal to Rhaenyra – and billeted his soldiers with the locals. Rhaenyra therefore can’t just fly over and flame the town without charring her supporters, creating a neat catch-22 that Ormund hopes to worsen when Aemond (Ewan Mitchell) arrives on Vhagar to provide extra firepower.

After nakedly – in more than one sense – threatening the town’s ruling lord and lady, who he has displaced from their quarters (don’t they get that he needs his sleep?), he helpfully explains this plan to the flunkies we’ve seen with him before, “Bold” Ser Jon Roxton (Joplin Sibtain, aka Brassos from Andor) and the page who turns out to be the real Prince Daeron (Benjamin Evan Ainsworth, also Link in the upcoming Legend Of Zelda film). The latter shows his good nature by subtly warning a serving boy to clear the blast zone when Ormund loses his temper.

Alas, Aemond and his dragon are completely MIA after his stabbing – as Criston Cole (Fabien Frankel) also learns when he arrives at Harrenhal this episode to find only Alys Rivers (Gayle Rankin) haunting the place. To say Ormund is displeased to receive the same news would be a delicious understatement; he unleashes a cacophony of C-bombs and does his level best to, well, level the furniture. The combination of such unpredictable violence with his prissy aversion to dirt and fastidious dress sense suggests two things to the seasoned Westeros watcher. One, this guy is going to be fun. Two, he’s probably going to endure the smelliest smells that ever stank during his campaign.

More importantly, Ormund establishes that he’s not just an opponent but a villain by making a big show of forgiving Kat’s (Ellora Torchia) brother Leo (Ahbin Galeya) for defending her virtue against a rapist among his troops, only to later abduct the brother and insist that Daeron – who Ormund thinks should be the next king – execute him. Daeron is traumatised, but the habit of obedience to his mercurial uncle is ingrained; there’s a twisted echo here of the very first episode of Thrones, where Ned Stark taught his children the duty of execution. Like High Septon Eustace last episode, Ormund considers dragons an abomination and a blasphemy (Tessarion leans into this by flaming and presumably eating the corpse), but he’s clearly hypocritical enough to use their power.

Back in King’s Landing, Rhaenyra is trying to fill out her council. She still leans heavily on Mysaria (Sonoya Mizuno) but has a new Master of Coin in Ser Torrhen Manderly (Dan Fogler) and, after Corlys (Steve Toussaint) flounces off pirate-hunting, has a nice scene with Alyn (Abubakar Salim) that suggests he can fill his father’s big shoes. He makes the radical suggestion that cats might be useful against the rat plague; not saying that Rhaenyra sometimes overlooks the obvious but, c’mon.

She also learns interesting facts about the Hightowers – notably that there is not one record of any message from Ormund in all the years Otto lived in King’s Landing, suggesting that they have been carefully pruned – and faces requests of money and favours from Ulf (Tom Bennett) that she thoughtlessly answers by attempting to lock him up in the Keep, because he’s far too valuable to go out carousing. Almost in revenge he tells her about the “Queen of Bastards” graffiti in the streets, and she orders the Gold Cloaks to find the culprits but does not, crucially, set limits on their response. They go brutally overboard. That’s going to win over the masses; another own goal, Rhaenyra.

Meanwhile the scarred Aegon (Tom Glynn-Carney) and his right-hand schemer Larys (Matthew Needham) have reached Rook’s Rest and established a humiliating but safe place there, particularly for Aegon. The former king is convinced, incidentally, that his dragon Sunfyre is only mostly dead, and therefore slightly alive, despite appearances. He may have lost his mind as well as his face – or perhaps the two have a resurrection still in them.

Daemon (Matt Smith) goes to the Vale to demand money from the very spiky Lady Jeyne (Amanda Collin). While there his dragon Caraxes acts all weird, and ignores his commands and flies to a small, rocky ledge. There, he learns that the despairing, half-demented Rhaena (Phoebe Campbell) was the mystery dragonrider on Sheepstealer when Jace died. He’s awed, and horrified, that she bonded with a wild dragon, but she rejects any help or hope of redemption and flies off. He looks thoughtfully at a shepherd down below and – yup – brings the poor man’s head to Rhaenyra, claiming that this was Sheepstealer’s rider. No way that could backfire.

So in the end, it’s mostly about people protecting the ones they love, or the ones they need. Kat’s brother paid for his protective efforts with his life, while her husband has requested Tumbleton duty to try to save her. Larys is keeping Aegon alive, despite the dethroned king having the survival instincts of a particularly daredevil lemming. Alicent has just figured out that her daughter Helaena is pregnant again, and needs to escape the Red Keep with her, and fast. Daemon is lying to his wife.

Practically the only person who’s cheery this episode is Criston Cole, who seems positively elated to learn that Rhaenyra has taken the throne. He finally stops moping and decides to launch a desperate guerilla war because there’s nothing left to lose. He too is going to head to Tumbleton, to harass the River Lords as they march south. “Let us become wraiths…Our fight will not be clean, but it will be pure,” he claims. “And it will be free from dragons.” Well, you have to admire his optimism.

If your main problems with Doom: The Dark Ages were that you wished it was faster, harder, and took more cues from Doom Eternal’s mobility options, then oh boy do I have great news for you. The Revelations DLC ramps the intensity up to 11 by introducing a brand new sub-weapon that totally changes the flow of combat, doubling the amount of options you have to dispatch demons, and most importantly, giving the Slayer his dash back. All of this builds off the already enormous arsenal of weapons, techniques, and mods from the end of the base game which, admittedly, does make juggling all of these new options a little bit overwhelming. That said, if you can overcome the steep learning curve, this is quite simply the most exhilarating Doom’s combat has been since Doom Eternal’s The Ancient Gods DLC, and the clearest evidence yet that Id is the best in the business when it comes to single-player first-person shooters.

Revelations’ story picks up right where the main campaign left off, and while you can technically jump straight into it first, you’ll be missing out on some pretty important context. Of course, you don’t need much context to enjoy blasting an imp to pieces with the Super Shotgun or jamming a spear through a Mancubus’ skull. The bigger reason why you’ll want to make sure you play through the campaign first is to familiarize yourself with the Slayer’s arsenal of weapons and techniques so you know what tool is right for which job, because this DLC throws you into the deep end right from the start and demands that you know what you’re doing. Even as someone who did play through Doom: the Dark Ages on Nightmare difficulty more than a year ago, Revelations started kicking my ass right from the start.

And then, just when I started to find my footing again, Revelations did something truly bold and took away the defining element of The Dark Ages’ combat: the Shield Saw. In its place, I gained the Chain Spear, which has a lot of the same functions as the Shield, but all handled in very different ways that end up totally changing the flow of combat. For example, the Spear can still parry green enemy attacks, but now you have to time a strike so that you essentially clash with theirs. It’s uniquely satisfying to bat back projectiles and smack away swipes and slashes, but you do lose the safety net of having a shield to negate damage if you mistime the parry.

The biggest difference between the Spear and the Shield is how you get around. With the Shield, you were able to use a shield bash that let you zip towards and slam into any target at high speed, but you didn’t have much mobility outside of that. With the spear, you can no longer instantly close the distance between you and an enemy. Instead, you throw it into a foe and slowly pull yourself towards them, maintaining full directional control as you launch either above, around, or right in front of your target. It works almost exactly like the grappling hook on the Super Shotgun in Doom Eternal, which is appropriate, as the entirety of the Spear’s kit feels designed to inject Eternal’s focus on mobility back into the grounded and heavy feel of The Dark Ages’ combat.

Perhaps the best addition, though, is also the simplest one: the Slayer can dash again! I knew I missed the dash throughout my playthrough of the base game, but I didn’t realize just how much until Revelations gave it back to me. It completely changes how The Dark Ages plays. Instead of basically being required to stand my ground and parry a sequence of attacks, now I can slip past foes, use my grapple to leap over them, dash behind cover, and just stay more mobile overall much like I would in Doom Eternal. It’s an added layer of creative combat expression that was missing here, and while it still isn’t quite at the same level as Eternal, it gets pretty dang close.

These combat options only expand the deeper you get into the DLC, as not only do you get your shield back – with the ability to hot swap between the two sub-weapons at any time – but you can also collect hidden bundles of Platinum to purchase new abilities for the spear. These include a damaging stab, an aerial slam, or a damaging javelin toss, and each of those abilities come with their own upgrades that add either additional utility or a direct counter against specific types of enemies. For example, the stab will deal extra damage to heavy melee enemies; the throw will deal extra damage to flying baddies, and can be upgraded to pierce through the fence-like projectiles that Mancubi toss out; and the slam can be upgraded to make health pickups pour out of foes that get hit by the resulting explosion. It again calls back to Doom Eternal’s style of making different weapons counters against specific enemy types, except here you don’t have to worry about constantly swapping between them. Everything is tied to the many abilities of the Spear.

It’s so much that it can honestly be a little hard to keep all of your different combat tools straight, and I often found myself getting tripped up by the fact that the button to throw the shield is different than the button to throw the spear – the buttons to parry are different between the two sub-weapons as well. This leads to lots of moments where my brain says “parry!” while using the spear, only to press the right mouse button (which is parry on the shield) to do a throw instead and launch myself into a terrible spot. Remapping the controls is something I can do, of course, but because so many abilities have overlapping functions, it's hard to find a control scheme that feels universally good. Ultimately, it’s a learning curve that I was able to overcome, but the road to retrain my brain was a rocky one, to say the least.

Instead of just dropping you into a series of levels one after another, Revelations introduces Purgatory, which is a new hub area that you can explore with minimal enemies, puzzles to solve, and plenty of secrets that those puzzles help to uncover. It’s a very welcome reprieve from the relentless action of the main levels. I always enjoyed coming back with a new ability so I could venture into a part that I hadn’t explored yet, or discovering a new code for the teleporter that would bring me behind one of the many gates that are locked from the other side.

The main levels themselves also do a good job of meeting in the middle between the acrobatics-heavy level design of Eternal and the wide open arenas where you face down a literal army of demons that were so heavily utilized in the base game of The Dark Ages. No longer are collectibles shown on the map when you get close to them, either. Now they only show up as a checkmark once you collect them. Yes, that’s right, even collectible gathering has been made harder in this DLC. The one bummer about this is the fact that there is no returning to previously completed levels, nor is there fast travel between checkpoints, until you beat the campaign. So if you miss a collectible and pass a point of no return, there is no way to go back for it until the very end. That’s pretty brutal in a game as tough as this, especially when it comes to the artifacts you must find all of the pieces of in order to reap a large platinum reward.

As far as new enemies go, Revelations brings back the notorious Archvile, who stays true to his name as a straight up vile nightmare. Like in previous iterations, he will summon enemies into the fight unless you’re able to stop his ritual. To do that, though, you need to first break through his cage of shields, then deal enough damage to him to interrupt the summoning. Sounds simple, only you need to do all of this while also avoiding getting mobbed by the surrounding enemies. Then there’s the Cosmic Elemental, who flies around and summons a bunch of smaller elementals that he sends one at a time to home in on you and deal big damage. As difficult as these big bads are, as mentioned before, they all have weaknesses, and identifying and attacking those weaknesses while still focusing on survival is a huge part of what makes Revelations’ combat so much fun.

Like my original playthrough of The Dark Ages, I made it through Revelations on Nightmare difficulty, and did it in about eight or so hours. Granted, I imagine most people will not attempt this DLC on the hardest non-permadeath difficulty setting their first time out, so your mileage may vary when it comes to length. Whatever the case may be, there’s a ton of game left to play after defeating the final boss and piecing together the Master Key.

The Master Key can be used to unlock purple doors strewn all across the four main levels, and even Purgatory. These doors open the way to more puzzles, more combat challenges, new challenge rooms, new currencies to unlock the capstone abilities for your spear and armor, and even classic Doom levels that reward you with a piece of the ‘93 Shotgun, a super powered version of the OG shotgun from the original Doom. Needless to say, there’s more than enough incentive to play through these levels again to try and complete all of the optional challenges, especially since it all culminates in one last battle against the true final boss of this expansion.

Gaming monitors have been getting more popular for all types of gaming, but ultrawide gaming monitors are still something that’s unique to PC gaming. There’s just something about the ability to stretch out the games you’re playing to a wide 21:9 aspect ratio that really sucks you into the game.

Now, premium ultrawide monitors traditionally came at a high premium, costing more than a thousand bucks. That’s where I expected the Alienware AW3426DW to fall, especially considering its gorgeous QD-OLED display and Dolby Vision compatibility. But unlike the gaming PCs that power this kind of display, gaming monitors are pretty much the only thing in PC gaming that isn’t going way up in price, with the AW3426DW coming in at $799.

That’s still a lot to spend on a display, but this is the kind of monitor that you’ll keep on your desk for years, likely through multiple GPU upgrades.

Design and Features

Right out the gate, the AW3426DW has the distinct look of an Alienware gaming monitor. It’s got the same galaxy purple colorway as some of the company’s recent laptops around the back, and it does look stunning, albeit a little plasticky. There are ventilation holes drilled in an oval pattern around the center of the monitor, with an RGB alien head punctuating it on the right.

However, just like any other gaming monitor with a fancy design, the back of the monitor will be facing the wall for most people most of the time. The front of the monitor, on the other hand, is surprisingly no-frills. There’s an Alienware logo emblazoned across the center of the bottom bezel and a lit-up power button on the bottom right corner. But even for a large ultrawide monitor like the AW3426DW, the bezels are surprisingly narrow.

But no matter how narrow the bezels are, that doesn’t stop the AW3426DW from being an absolute behemoth of a display. This thing measures roughly 32 inches wide and 14 inches tall without the stand, and weighs in at about 17 lb. That’s not terrible by any means, especially for an ultrawide display, but you will need to make sure you have the space for it. I, for one, don’t really have the space at home for the AW3426DW to make sense as a daily driver, even if the picture is beautiful enough to make me miss it when I send it back.

I already mentioned the lit-up power button, but there’s another button on the bottom of the AW3426DW, at the center, which will bring up the OSD. There’s nothing particularly special here – you can change picture settings, activate PIP (Picture-in-Picture), and swap between inputs. There is a USB-B port around the back that’ll let you connect the monitor via USB to your PC, and then you can use the Alienware Control Center to change settings like RGB lighting.

And, just like a lot of modern gaming displays, the OSD will let you turn on ‘Alienvision’. Rather than letting you see out into space or anything, this just turns on one of several aiming reticles that stay at the center of your screen. This is especially handy in first-person shooters, as it lets you center your aim, even when your in-game reticle is expanded. Some might call it cheating, but hey, it’s a feature that’s there – take it or leave it.

You can also enable ‘Esports Mode,’ which will essentially turn the AW3426DW from a 34-inch ultrawide into a 25-inch 16:9 display. The benefit here is that it becomes much easier to see the entire screen without having to move your head. For pro gamers that’s simply more important than having a ton of visual real estate that you can’t see at all times.

However, keep in mind that Esports mode drops the resolution to 2368x1332. Instead, I’d recommend manually setting the resolution down to 1920x1080, so that you can maximise your frame rate. Because, really, what’s the point of enabling an esports mode if you’re not going to take maximum advantage of the 280Hz refresh rate while you’re at it.

Even if you can’t fully saturate that high refresh rate, the AW3426DW supports Freesync, and is G-Sync compatible, so you won’t have to worry about screen tearing at lower frame rates. Granted, VRR, in whichever flavor, is expected in a gaming monitor of this caliber. I’m just glad that it supports both of the major solutions for PC gaming.

For everyone who isn’t an esports athlete, you’re going to want to take full advantage of this beautiful display. This is a 34-inch 21:9 panel with a 3440x1440 resolution at 280Hz. And, because it’s a QD-OLED display, it’s absolutely gorgeous, with deep blacks and one of the best HDR implementations I’ve ever seen in a gaming monitor, especially under $1000.

Gaming and Performance

I’ve spent the last three days obsessively playing games on the Alienware AW3426DW, and it is frankly stunning. Even dealing with the headache that is HDR on Windows, I’ve been blown away by how beautiful games look on this display.

Alienware claims that the AW3426DW hits 99% of the DCI-P3 color gamut, and in my colorimeter tests, the monitor absolutely hits that level. It also hits 100% sRGB and 97% Adobe. This isn’t exactly the type of monitor that photographers and video editors are going to go in for, but you can absolutely do that kind of work with this level of color accuracy. And for games, it’s more than enough. Just sailing through the high seas in Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced this week, the bright blue water just pops off of the screen.

Even in Diablo 4, which isn’t exactly known for being a visual showcase, the AW3426DW has incredible contrast, especially in dungeons with a lot of dark scenery punctuated by little light sources. Pretty much every game I’ve played on this display has looked stunning, even games like World of Warcraft, which don’t support HDR for some reason.

But it’s more than just a pretty picture. I paired the AW3426DW with a gaming PC running an RTX 5080, and was able to keep the display fully saturated, even if I had to lean on frame gen a couple times to get me there. Games look smooth and feel extremely responsive running on this display, and it doesn’t hurt that Alienware rates the display with a 0.03ms response time.

It’s worth remembering that, while $799 makes the Alienware AW3426DW seem like an expensive piece of kit, it’s quite a bit cheaper than competing monitors like the LG Ultragear UWQHD or the Asus ROG Swift PG34WCDN, both of which come in over $1000. But even with Alienware’s lower price tag, it doesn’t falter in the ways that more affordable gaming monitors typically do.

I put the AW3426DW through Blur Busters, and got nary a trace of ghosting or motion blur when running at the full 280Hz. I also didn’t really experience any light bleeding, even in games with a lot of contrast, or when I ran games at a 16:9 resolution. My only real criticism of the monitor is the plastic back panel, and that’s really not much of an issue once it’s set up on the desk.

That latter point actually comes with the benefit of being easier to move, because it doesn’t weigh 50 pounds like some of the more premium displays do. All told, the Alienware AW3426DW reminded me how much I miss playing games on an Ultrawide display, even though I had to make some questionable organizational decisions to fit it into my apartment.

If you have the space, though, this is an absolutely stunning gaming monitor. The wide aspect ratio really helps keep you immersed in your games, and the OLED display keeps you locked with a beautiful image, especially in games that support HDR. Just make sure you have a beefy gaming PC to power this thing.

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

Spoilers below for Episode 7 of Cape Fear. New episodes stream every Friday on Apple TV.

After seven episodes, Cape Fear has finally decided what type of show it wants to be and I’m 100% on board. After weeks of mystery, suspense, and (at times) agonizingly plodding plot developments, the Apple TV series has fully embraced its identity as a bonkers, operatic, and often madcap melodrama.

Midseason, I was afraid that the show was going to become perpetually stuck in neutral while it tried to slowly untangle countless story and relationship threads. But as the series barrels toward its conclusion, the writers, showrunners, actors, and production team behind Cape Fear seem to have collectively said, “Screw it. We’re going to entertain the hell out of you, realism be damned.”

This week’s episode, titled “Mongrel” in an overt ode to Max’s childhood struggles (more on that later), picks up immediately where Episode 6 left off. After Neveah is discovered to be living in the Bowden family’s walls, Anna grabs a gun from the family safe and holds her at gunpoint while Tom runs across the street to find Zack. Once there, Zack acts strangely affectionate towards Max, with Max reciprocating and telling Tom that Zack is no longer Tom’s son but is “my son now.” As you can imagine, Tom does not take the situation well and proceeds to beat the ever-loving crap out of Max in the middle of the street before Zack stabs his real father in the shoulder as the police arrive.

The next morning, Neveah is taken into custody and Zack is conveniently placed in a psychiatric facility. Although Max declines to press charges against Tom (insert the “Sure, Jan” meme from The Brady Bunch Movie here), Anna’s boss Noa finally admits that Max is bad news and must be stopped. She agrees to help the Bowdens while Anna’s coworker Ray is traces the plates on Max’s stalker’s car to a woman in North Carolina named Val. Ray — who is not a private investigator, a police detective, or law enforcement officer of any sort — volunteers to drive all the way to North Carolina to follow up on the lead.

Meanwhile, Tom and Anna visit Zack’s psychiatric facility where they’re informed by a doctor that Zack has been drugged with a megadose of a motion sickness medicine (conveniently found in Neveah’s secret lair a the Bowdens’ house) that can have a brainwashing effect and lead to “permanent psychosis.” Well, at least now we (theoretically) know why Zack thinks Max is his dad.

Meanwhile, Natalie goes to stay with her biological dad to get away from the danger, but immediately returns home when her father reveals that he’s not sure whether or not Natalie is actually his daughter. Natalie confronts Anna with the revelation, who gives a less-than-convincing denial.

Later, Max shows up at the Bowden house to return Peanut Butter, the cat that he claimed in the previous episode wanted to live with him. He tells Natalie that he has no relationship with Neveah and has had nothing to do with her psychotic actions. (Sure, Max.) After he walks away, Natalie runs upstairs and grabs a gun out of what now we must refer to as Chekov’s safe. As she exits the house we see Max inject a peach with a mysterious liquid that might be (definitely is) the same medicine Zack was drugged with. Natalie then walks across the street to Max’s house and insists on going with him to wherever he’s driving just for the hell of it.

As they embark on a seemingly random road trip, Max tells Natalie that Paul, her biological father, was unfaithful to her mother around the time of Max’s trial and that Max and Anna became “quite close.” We’ll leave that hanging for now, because you know that juicy bit of exposition isn’t going away. Later, Max reveals that they are going to visit his childhood home in North Carolina where his father used to put him in a cage for not speaking English. After Max has a seizure while driving, Natalie drives the rest of the way.

Meanwhile Ray, on his own road trip to the backwoods of North Carolina, finds Val, who reveals that she sold her car to a woman named — wait for it! — Crystal Cady. Val says that Crystal is Max’s sister and that she lives nearby. And thus, a huge piece of the Max Cady mystery falls into place. Max’s stalker is in fact his sister, and it seems they have some unfinished business. Given the revelation that his father used to put him in a cage, the dog collar Crystal gave Max in Episode 3 makes a lot more sense. It sure looks like most, if not all, of Max’s many, many issues are familial.

Back in Savannah, Tom and Anna plot to frame Neveah (and prove a conspiracy between her and Max) by planting bottles of the motion sickness drug with her fingerprints in Max’s house. They just need a willing patsy. Enter: Anna’s estranged father Brandon. Brandon reluctantly agrees to help with the caveat that they let him see his grandchildren.

In North Carolina, Natalie and Max arrive at Max’s childhood home. Natalie stumbles across a bunch of caged dogs and a creepy boy straight out of Deliverance who wants to kiss her. Meanwhile, Max finds his father and demands to know where Crystal is. His father, played by Ron Perlman in a turn that is perhaps even more menacing than Javier Bardem’s Max Cady, proceeds to belittle Max and threateningly treat him like a dog.

Next we catch up with Ray, who’s located Crystal’s residence. In a revelation that ties the series back to its literary and cinematic roots, Crystal is shown to live in a houseboat on the Cape Fear River. Given that Robert De Niro’s Max Cady drowned while shackled to a sinking houseboat in the climax of Martin Scorsese’s 1991 film adaptation, something tells me we’ll eventually find ourselves back here before the series ends.

After Ray searches the boat and finds no sign of Crystal, Max shows up with a drugged Natalie — to whom he fed the aforementioned poisoned peach — in the passenger seat. As soon as Max sees Ray he pulls him close and pumps three bullets directly into Ray’s stomach before dumping his body in the trunk. After Natalie comes to, she and Max have a serious heart-to-heart before Natalie deduces that Max is maybe (probably) her real father.

Afterward, Natalie submerges herself in the river before Max lifts her out, basically baptizing her into a new life. Later, Max drives Natalie — who’s completely oblivious to the fact that he just committed a murder with the gun she stole from her parents — back to Savannah. He gives her a hair from his beard so she can prove her paternity theory and ensures that the literal smoking gun returns to her possession. As the episode ends, Tom and Anna carry out their plan to frame Max by calling an anonymous tip line in the hopes that authorities will find the planted drugs in his house.

“Mongrel” is a taut, brooding, hour of television where many burning questions are answered and plenty more are raised. Although it’s still filled with plenty of head-scratching, off-the-wall moments (sure, Natalie, let’s take a road trip to God-knows-where with the man who’s been terrorizing your family), Cape Fear continues to shift into high gear. It seems to have settled into its identity as a campy, over-the-top thriller and sinks its teeth into high drama in scene after scene.

As the series races toward its conclusion, Bardem’s Max Cady begins shedding layer after layer of carefully constructed pretense and seems determined to take everything the Bowdens hold dear, their children included.

Episode 7 proves that Cape Fear is at its best when it’s not trying to be overly intricate or highbrow, but unnerving, melodramatic, and a bit deranged. The show has firmly carved out space in a streaming landscape filled with densely plotted, airtight mysteries that verge on maudlin and dull. Instead, Cape Fear is proving to be something else entirely: a rip-roaring and vivid soap opera that I hope doesn’t let up until the credits roll on the final episode.

Before Palworld’s Early Access debut in 2024, I remember eagerly wanting to review the completely unhinged-looking “Pokemon with guns” game, mostly as a joke. Hilariously, the joke was on me when it not only became one of the biggest games of the year, but also one of my all-time favorite survival games. With its 1.0 update now finally at-hand over two years later, I was quite excited to jump back into this strange, sometimes-oddly-dark creature collector. Though I’m only a dozen hours into a fresh playthrough of the 1.0 version, so far it has improved in all the ways I hoped it would after sinking so much time into its earliest incarnation. Most of the technical rough edges have been smoothed over, progression has been smartly streamlined, and loads of missing bits and baubles have been added, like a fully realized story with NPCs to chat with and quest lines to complete – not to mention a proper ending to that story, which I am hungry to reach before I put a final score on this review.

If you’ve never played Palworld before, then there’s very little I can say to prepare you for this completely bizarre adventure. You’ll recruit a roster of colorful critters who make Nintendo’s legal team furious to perform unpaid labor in your work camps as you explore an increasingly dangerous world filled with gun-toting maniacs. This mix of creature collecting, open-world exploration, RPG-adjacent leveling and questing, and survival mechanics that have you building up a base to store your pals and conquer the wilds probably shouldn’t work. But it really does. And with 1.0 expanding on the fundamentals to flesh out the world and the kinds of activities you tackle within it, that over-the-top adventure is more compelling than it’s ever been.

For starters, there are now comprehensible reasons for your character to be doing the things they are doing – an actual storyline to accompany the climb from “naked barbarian with a stick” to “industrial sweatshop proprietor with godlike power.” NPCs will send you on missions and direct you toward the next set of meaningful activities to pursue. Most of those activities ask you to travel deeper into a dangerous island world dominated by wild creatures and psychotic human factions, and it’s been fun to get to know some of the friendly and unfriendly faces along the way (especially compared to Early Access, where you were just fighting them with no explanation). That said, I haven’t seen enough of the story to know if it’s all that good yet, and would describe the first hours as being passable. It’s nice context for what I’m doing at least, but time will tell if it becomes something I’m genuinely excited to see more of or just stay as decent set dressing for the overall goofiness.

The biggest difference since the last time I played is, without question, all of the various performance improvements and bug fixes as the issues used to be rampant – to the point where the Xbox version was initially almost unplayable at times. I’m still early on, and the most egregious stuff didn’t rear its ugly head until late in the journey, but at least so far it's been much more stable. Framerates are still a bit jittery at times, but nowhere near the extent they once were, and those hiccups haven’t come anywhere close to mucking up the experience, whereas they used to be a fairly regular annoyance.

Another big improvement is the progression system, which previously felt quite uneven and grindy at times. The pace in these early hours has been much cleaner, pushing me into the action faster and pointing me toward clear objectives that got me out of my bases to explore, fight bosses, and capture pals more quickly. Of course, this is also now my third time playing through this stretch of Palworld, so it’s possible that my familiarity with these opening hours has more to do with it than anything else. I’ll have a better sense of how much progression has actually improved once I get into the huge stretches of new territory I haven’t seen yet and need to figure things out for the first time.

I’m still quite early in my 1.0 Palworld adventure, but I’ve instantly remembered why I was so captivated by this hodgepodge of ideas. I’ve got plenty more to work my way through, a whole bunch of new Pals to collect (that I’ve only just started to see pop up here and there), and who knows what else in store. This is a big update with a lot of game to get through, so I’ll update this review as I get deeper in, and then have a final score in the coming weeks.

The HyperMegaTech Super Pocket Rare Edition is the seventh Super Pocket device to date from Blaze Entertainment. Part of the Evercade ecosystem, it's the same hardware as previous Super Pockets, but with 14 built-in classic Rare-developed games, with a matching color scheme to boot. Although Rare is now part of Microsoft, this collection highlights some of the best games from the developer's earliest 1983 British computer releases up to the headlining 1998 Nintendo 64 classic, Banjo-Kazooie, which has been rebuilt to run natively. Thanks to its eclectic built-in games and ability to play any Evercade cartridge, this Super Pocket easily sustains the high relative value of its predecessors.

HyperMegaTech Super Pocket Rare Edition – Design and Features

The Rare Edition maintains the same design and features as its predecessors. It's a plug-and-play handheld that comes with a USB-C to USB-A charging cable, quickstart guide, and instructions for Banjo-Kazooie. The other 13 games have control summaries in-game, accessible when pressing the Game Menu button.

The Super Pocket is a compact Game Boy-adjacent size at 3.07 x 4.92 x 0.98 inches and 0.36lbs. Its 2.8-inch IPS display has a resolution 320 x 240, which is a 4:3 aspect ratio. Display options include Original, Pixel Perfect, or Full Screen aspect ratios, as well as Shaders/Scanlines. While you can't adjust the brightness, the screen is easily visible in bright sunlight, although the glossy screen cover is susceptible to glare.

Since many of the games on the Evercade platform are originally of a relatively low resolution with limited detail, the small screen size is generally fine. However, if you're in the 40+ demographic, you may not find it as comfortable as today's larger screens, particular with smaller text. Still, it works well for what it is, especially at the $69.99 retail price.

Below the display is a Game Menu button, direction pad, front speaker, Select/Insert Credit button, Start Game button, and the A, B, X, and Y face buttons. On the rear is a cartridge slot, which includes a blank dummy cartridge, volume control, and R1, L1, R2, and L2 buttons, the latter two of which are used to fast scroll in menus. All buttons are membrane-based, but there's still a good tactile response with a soft click when pressed.

Below the R and L buttons is a rear speaker, which together with the front speaker provides decent sound, even at high volumes. Naturally, for the best sound you'll want to make use of the 3.5mm headphone jack to the left of the power switch at the bottom of the unit. Unfortunately, Blaze hasn't chosen to support Bluetooth audio until the release of its Nexus handheld.

Between the power switch and charging port is a charging indicator light, which shows red when charging or green when fully charged. The 3000mAh battery gets up to four hours or so of run time.

HyperMegaTech Super Pocket Rare Edition – Built-in Games

The 14 built-in games are Atic Atac, Banjo-Kazooie, Battletoads, Battletoads in Battlemaniacs, Cobra Triangle, Conker's Pocket Tales, Gunfright, Jetpac, Knight Lore, Lunar Jetman, R.C. Pro-Am II, Slalom, Snake Rattle 'n' Roll, and Solar Jetman. These games originally appeared on the ZX Spectrum, Nintendo 64, NES, SNES, and Game Boy Color, respectively.

ZX Spectrum

Thanks in part to its low price, the Sinclair ZX Spectrum proved to be one of the most popular personal computers in the UK from its release in 1982 to its discontinuation in 1992. Although its base model featured limited memory, sound, and graphics, with the latter's color suffering from attribute clash that caused "bleeding" or flickering when a foreground character interacted with a background, there nevertheless proved a certain charm to the platform. Rare was among the best ZX Spectrum developers, taking good advantage of the bold color palette and crisp 8-bit visuals, and there's a good representation of its best output from this era here. Unlike the rest of the 14 built-in games, it's fair to say that most of these five will be an acquired taste, although arguably worth the effort for those with a more open mind.

Atic Atac (1983) and Knight Lore (1984) are two notoriously difficult isometric 3D action-adventure games, and considered among the best in their class. The former is a fast-paced, gothic-themed maze game focusing on survival and item collection, while the latter is an atmospheric puzzle-platformer that relies more on precision movements. Although the sound can be grating, the high-contrast visuals against the black background really pop on the Super Pocket's display. I also found the controls to be spot-on.

Jetpac (1983) and Lunar Jetman (1983) are two very different games in the same series. The former is a stand-out single-screen arcade-like experience where you build a rocket while defending against waves of aliens. The latter is the vehicle-based sequel that adds gravity and terrain exploration, greatly enhancing the scope. I found both games a bit more difficult to control on the handheld than I'd like, with awkward use of the L1 or R1 buttons to hold a hover.

Gunfright (1985) is a western-themed shooter that has isometric 3D exploration and pseudo-first-person quick-draw sequences. It's a unique and ambitious game, although again, the sound is incredibly grating.

Nintendo 64

Banjo-Kazooie (1998) is the one Nintendo 64 game included, the obvious marquee title, and one of the most acclaimed highlights from Rare's 3D era. Strictly speaking, this is not standard emulation, nor a remake, but the original game logic running natively on the Evercade hardware. This is a good thing because of the obvious lack of the Nintendo 64's analog stick and button layout on the Super Pocket.

The game is a 3D platformer brimming with personality where a bear and his bird companion journey through diverse, puzzle-filled worlds to defeat a wicked witch and rescue a kidnapped sister. While many Nintendo 64 games can look a bit rough, especially on modern displays, this port has a sharper, more refined appearance without changing the original look and feel.

In terms of controls, there's a Replay Mode and Retro Mode. Replay Mode attempts to modernize the controls within the Super Pocket's limitations, while Retro Mode tries to more closely mimic the original control scheme. Whichever mode you choose, there's going to be a learning curve, as there's just no good way to duplicate analog or camera controls with just button combinations. Fortunately, in-game button prompts map to the updated control scheme.

While I can't say this is the best way to play Banjo-Kazooie, it's still a solid portable experience if you put in the effort to learn the controls and don't mind the lack of controller rumble. One thing to note is that, as with other "native" Evercade games, it works a bit different from most other titles in the library. Instead of the usual save states, Banjo-Kazooie uses the original "Witchywarp" pads and save pedestals. You also have to power cycle the handheld to exit the game rather than being able to exit from the Game Menu button.

NES

Although perhaps not as technically well-regarded as the company's ZX Spectrum era, Rare nevertheless made some genuinely fun, and legendary, games for the NES. Many of the releases feature a refined isometric 3D perspective seen in the earlier ZX Spectrum titles.

Slalom (1986) is Rare's first NES release and a simple, fast-paced third-person skiing title. Cobra Triangle (1989) is an ambitious, multi-genre isometric 3D boat combat game. Snake Rattle 'n' Roll (1990) features the popular "eat-to-grow" gameplay mechanic and uses its isometric 3D perspective for exploration. Solar Jetman (1990) is the third game in the Jetman series after Lunar Jetman, and is like an evolved, if overly difficult conclusion to the original series with RPG-like elements. Battletoads (1991), which looked at the difficulty of other Rare games and said "hold my beer," is an iconic, genre-blending beat-em-up. R.C. Pro-Am II (1992) is an elevated sequel to what was already one of the best isometric 3D racing games ever made.

Difficulty aside, I had a great time with these NES games on the Super Pocket. The display and controls are well-suited to the platform's requirements.

SNES

Battletoads in Battlemaniacs (1993) is the one SNES game included and the direct sequel to the original NES Battletoads. It's the same type of game on the SNES, just more refined.

For obvious reasons, you won't be able to enjoy the co-op modes on the Super Pocket, but everything else is spot on.

Game Boy Color

Conker's Pocket Tales (1999) is the lone Game Boy Color representative. It's a top-down, action-adventure game that serves as a family-friendly spin-off to the Conker series.

Since it's originally a handheld game, Conker's Pocket Tales plays perfectly on the Super Pocket and is a refreshing change-of-pace from the usual punishing difficulty of most Rare games.

HyperMegaTech Super Pocket Rare Edition – Cartridge Games

The Super Pocket's cartridge slot opens up access to the 87, and counting, Evercade collections, which carry anywhere from one to 20 additional games. It's an impressive list that totals around 750 total games to date, although not every game is the best match for the Super Pocket's built-in controls. This is especially true as Blaze opens up more support for games that benefit from analog controls.

As stated in my previous Super Pocket review, besides certain missing features, like TATE mode, and awkward placement of its shoulder buttons, the other missing functionality is online connectivity. As such, the Super Pockets don't get access to firmware updates or free games of the month, and are also unable to apply any updates to cartridges. On the rare chance a cartridge needs an update to run properly on the Super Pocket, it needs to be done on a mainline Evercade console, handheld, or bartop.

With all of that in mind, the Evercade cartridge collection is generally friendly to the Super Pocket's display and controls. Along with the Super Pocket, Blaze sent over the cartridge for NeoGeo Arcade 4, which features eight NeoGeo arcade games, and Activision Collection 3, which features 13 Atari 2600 games. Both of those recent cartridges are near perfect examples of games that work great on the Super Pocket, thanks to matching controls for the former, and low resolution games for the latter (in fact, the eighth Super Pocket is confirmed to be an Activision Edition). Of course, Activision Collection 3 features Kaboom! (1981), which would normally be a good thing, but not without a paddle controller. Otherwise, no complaints.

If you find you’d prefer to experience the marquee titles on a TV or with native analog sticks, it’s worth noting that Blaze is releasing a standalone Banjo-Kazooie Double Pack (which includes the sequel Banjo-Tooie) soon, highlighting the versatility of this wider ecosystem. That cartridge is also included as a pack-in with the upcoming Evercade Nexus.

Bill Loguidice is a contributing freelancer for IGN specializing in video game and computer hardware and accessories. He has several decades of experience and has written for a wide variety of publications. Bill has authored a dozen mass market books and was a writer and producer on a major feature film documentary on the history of video games.

Junior year of college was when I finally had to start making decisions about my major, internships, all that jazz. A lot changed. I had to manage my time better, carefully consider the classes I would take, and try to plan for the future. For College Football’s junior year, all I have to do is step back onto the field, but there is still a lot of planning involved. This season’s team is playing better thanks to new offensive and defensive adjustments, giving you more freedom than ever to make a gameplan and bring it onto the field – but a lot of what’s new in College Football 27 comes down to menus and numbers and graphs, or what I call the Evil God of Numbers. It brings good, welcome additions. But man does it feel like I’m spending a lot of my season inside a spreadsheet instead of running a program or being a college athlete.

Before we get to all that stuff, let’s talk about practice. Good ol’ practice. Can’t have a game without practice, so the first place I went was the Skills Trainer. If you’ve played Madden, the Skills Trainer is old hat, but for the last couple years, College Football has sequestered this tutorial away inside of Ultimate Team. No longer. Here it is, standing alone in all its glory. Good teaching tools are essential in any game, and EA has figured out a consistently great version of them with the Skills Trainer, so I was stoked to finally see it right there on the main menu where it belongs. Props to the College Football team for listening to that feedback.

“But Will,” you might say, “you play this and Madden every year. Why are you going to the Skills Trainer? Shouldn’t you, like… know all this stuff already, chief?” I’m glad you asked, imaginary-person-I-made-up-so-I-can-structure-this-review-how-I-want. There are a lot of changes to pre-play adjustments this year, especially on defense, and they make for a bit of a learning curve when coming from College Football 26. If you’re already familiar with the Konami Code of inputs you have to learn to get your defensive adjustments just so, well, a lot of those are different now. D-line adjustments, for instance, used to be on the left D-pad. Now they’re left on the right stick. That’s one example of many. The benefit of this new system is it’s more intuitive and allows you to get what you want more quickly with fewer button presses, but that many years of muscle memory is hard to undo. I’m glad the Skills Trainer is here when I need a reminder, as well as to mention teach me new things like jumping the snap (awesome), wide receiver jostle (fantastic), and the new quarterback sneak meter (thank you, College Football team).

Another thing to learn is timing-based catching, which I’m of two minds about. See, when you throw a pass in College Football 27, and you can press down the button for the type of catch you want (Possession, RAC, Aggressive). That’s not new. What is new is that holding the button for the kind of catch you want now gives you a little meter with yellow, green, and red sections. Yellow means you’re attempting the catch early and the outcome will be based on your pass catcher’s catching stats and all the regular dice rolls these games use to determine what happens. Red means you ain’t catching that ball. Green, though, means you’re basically guaranteed a catch… unless you aren’t because the ball is overthrown or knocked away or your guy doesn’t survive the collision, which is incredibly annoying. Similar problems occur when you’re trying to use this system to make an interception, land that sucker in the middle of the green section and then… the ball sails over your head, right into the arms of the receiver.

Now, listen, I get it. A little minigame shouldn’t give you a guaranteed success/failure rate, but it doesn’t seem like you can turn the damn thing off. And, frankly, if I can hit the green and drop a pass, why can’t I hit the red and catch one if I’ve got a receiver with a high catch stat? Why would a defensive back who knows he can’t make a play on the ball (and would have a much better idea than I, who is looking down at the play) even get the meter? Don’t get me wrong, it’s great when it works. But when it doesn’t, you’re like “why is this even here?” Worse, it makes yet another part of College Football About Meters™, which is what you spend most of your time off the field staring at anyway.

Before we get into that, though, I do want to shower praise on a couple more on-field things. The presentation, which was already best in class, is somehow better. EA has added new traditions, trophies, stadiums – the whole nine yards. And Dynamic Weather, which can now change from play to play, is pretty remarkable (and can have a major influence on a game). All that of this is great, and it’s a testament to the team at EA Orlando that they have mostly solved the on-field gameplay and presentation while managing to add meaningful improvements each and every year. I just wish I was as jazzed about the other stuff.

All Hail John Block

Let’s start with Road to Glory. The big additions this year are three new positions: tight end, edge rusher, and free safety. Since I’d just spent a while learning the new defensive adjustments, I decided to throw all that in the trash and play tight end because EA has spent a lot of time talking up how fun blocking is. Sorry, Joe Throw. You’ll have to wait your turn this year. Instead, John Block takes the stage. I gave John a mohawk and Lemmy Kilmeister beard, then spent the points I had to establish his future maximum stats to make him both an incredible blocker (I mean, it’s in the name) and a solid receiver with some speed. If you don’t want to allocate all of these points, though (and there are a lot), you can choose from a preset build based on an NFL legend like Rob Gronkowski. From there, it was off to my high school career, and you know what? Playing a tight end is fun! Blocking a run and pancaking some poor DB is fun! Catching a game-winning pass is fun! But the old problems still raise their ugly head.

I started John Block as a three-star recruit – not bad, but not amazing, either – and worked him up to a five-star prospect who could have gone to basically any school he wanted. Alabama, LSU, and Michigan were my top picks, but I ended up going to Nebraska because they made a great offer and I’d be higher on the depth chart. High school is still my favorite part of Road to Glory, because each week gives you new challenges to complete and new things to do.

Then you get to college, and it’s mostly a spreadsheet. At a higher end school, I didn’t see the field much early, and my weeks quickly became about managing my limited energy on things like studying, conditioning, going to practice, and dealing with events, like getting invited to a party by a girl I went to high school with and blowing things so badly that she walked home alone… when we were in the same dorm. (Apparently, John Block’s high school highlights aren’t a big hit with the ladies. Some people just don’t appreciate greatness when they see it.) It’s a cool moment, but one that’s undercut by being delivered entirely through text and still images.

Admittedly, some of this is fun. I like the new practice drills, like the position-specific ones about blocking, and the team ones that put the offense down a score and task you with taking the lead within one minute while also leaving as little time on the clock as possible so the other team can’t score themselves. They’re a good time, and there’s a certain satisfaction in improving your player and moving up the depth chart. I really like that you can watch games on the sideline while you wait to play, too. It’s just a shame that everything else is a menu or a text conversation between JPEGs of characters you never share a physical space with.

It’s jarring to go from College Football’s incredible on-field presentation to Road to Glory’s barebones campaign. Yes, it’s great that you can track your player’s legacy and see where you’re likely to be drafted in real-time, but Road to Glory is supposed to be an RPG, and you spend most of it filling meters. Coach Happiness, Coach trust, where you stand on the depth chart, and so on. Off the field, it feels like you barely exist. Your player doesn’t really have a personality or friends or a life. He doesn’t inhabit a real world that isn’t a football field or football adjacent, and there’s more to being a college athlete (and college student) than text conversations and meter management. Until EA gives me something more, Road to Glory is something I typically play for these reviews and then move on from. I wish the rest of it was as fun as the high school experience is. John Block and Joe Throw remain almighty, but man living their lives is boring.

The core appeal of these games is and will always be Dynasty. There’s a lot of new stuff to manage this year, and at first it’s overwhelming. It’s not just about doing your recruiting, playing your games, and moving onto the next week anymore. The big changes here are Athletic Director Expectations, Dynasty Points, and how much you're offering that player for NIL (name, image, likeness) rights. AD Expectations are what you’re expected to do, and how patient (or not) your school will be while you do those things. Each school is different: some want national championships, while another may just want to cream their rival. You get Dynasty Points based on things like your conference prestige, stadium atmosphere, and so on, and then you have to spend them to hire staff, upgrade your facilities, offer the players you’re trying to recruit NIL deals, keep the ones on your team happy, and so on.

It’s… a lot, and I’m not sure I spent all my Dynasty Points wisely. Sometimes I’d try to buy some facility upgrades and College Football 27 would be like, “Are you sure? This is expensive and you only get so many points. Are you super duper sure?” On one hand, props to the dev team for realizing This Is A Lot. On the other… I had no idea if I wanted to spend my points here, man. I just kinda went off vibes and watched what happened. Thankfully, I was LSU and I was winning, so I had room to make mistakes. My complaint about Dynasty for the last couple years is that it’s mostly recruiting (which is just a bunch of menus that I find really boring) and playing games. This changes that by offering more stuff to manage (and a better coaching carousel at the end of each season, if you want to move on), and there is a strange joy to following your Dynasty blueprint, offering players scholarships, and landing the right recruits. I also love that I can manage my players’ individual practice status now.

One particular change I am fond of here is that offering a scholarship doesn’t just take a chunk of your limited recruitment hours per week. Now, you gotta spend Dynasty Points to offer them an NIL deal, too. Offering more than they expect may get their attention, but if you renege on it later, they’ll be unhappy. It’s an interesting system.

The problem is that it’s all just more menus to sit through while I look at some JPEGs. I’m sure being a college football coach is a lot of spreadsheet management, but College Football 27’s major off-field adds are all spreadsheets, and my reward for sifting through them is to actually play the fun football part. And… I get it. The Venn Diagram between highly invested sports fans and nerds is a circle, and a lot of them can spend hours just Listing Guys and Comparing Their Numbers and have a great time. But there’s more to this than filling meters and min-maxxing, which is essentially what most of Dynasty is. The Evil God of Numbers has laid claim to basically all of College Football’s off-the-field stuff, and it kinda makes me sad.

Now, I suppose, we have to talk about Ultimate Team. And… it’s Ultimate Team, man. You still do challenges and earn card packs and build your team and all that jazz. There’s a lot of new stuff around player upgrades this year that allow you more freedom when shaping your guys. An even bigger change called EVOs is supposed to be coming down the line, but it isn’t available quite yet. That said, none of this changes how I feel about Ultimate Team as a mode, so I’m going to let Past Will take this away with a direct quote from my College Football 26 review:

“I functionally believe, deep in my soul, that these modes are predatory, more than a little evil, and designed to trigger the dopamine-producing parts of our brain that gambling stimulates in the hopes that you will continue to spend money for a chance at a good outcome, which is what gambling is, and I cannot endorse anything about them. Yes, you can build a team without spending money, but it is designed to take much longer than just opening your wallet, and given that doing so can literally make your team better, it is pay to win. These are unremarkable and verifiable truths. Do with them what you will.”

Speaking of which, we should also talk about a little bugaboo that has hit Road to Glory and Dynasty: the removal of XP Sliders. It used to be that you could juice your coach and player progression to get levels faster. That has been removed, but you can buy coach and player levels for real money now. The nicest thing I can say is that this is a scumbag move that degrades what is otherwise a pretty good game, but hey, the Evil God of Numbers says the line’s gotta go up. Whether or not the sliders will be re-added at some point after release is anyone’s guess, but my money is on “lolno.”

[Update, July 9: EA has already responded to the negative feedback about the removal of XP Sliders and says it plans to at least add three XP Speed Settings in an upcoming update.]

On paper, Echoes of Aincrad is the Sword Art Online game you've been waiting for if you loved the anime. It takes place during the Aincrad arc, the very first one in the series, which is easily the most memorable and iconic. As your own created character, you get to experience Aincrad without having to retread the path of series protagonist Kirito. He also doesn’t have a huge role in the story, allowing Echoes of Aincrad to carve out its own identity with a brand new cast of characters in a single-player action-RPG.

But even when being mostly free from the confines of Kirito’s presence, it still feels constrained by the anime’s established lore. And unfortunately, the semi-open world structure is too bare and slows down the story’s pacing to an unbearable crawl, although its saving grace is the frenetic combat that's a great mix of fun and methodical. In the Aincrad arc, players are unable to log out, and if they die in Sword Art Online, they die in real life – at certain points, I wanted to log out, and luckily for me, I could still put it down without sending myself to an early grave.

Echoes of Aincrad’s story starts off with a warming welcome. As a new player, you meet up with a few other newbies including the friendly and dependable Iori, as well as the bubbly Saayu and quickly party up. The prologue is cleverly disguised as Sword Art Online’s beta, providing you tutorials on how to play, like a real video game would. It makes for imaginative immersion, and by the end of the prologue, you and your friends make a promise to meet up again once Sword Art Online officially launches.

From that point on, the story runs parallel to the first arc of the anime where game master Kayaba has forced all of Sword Art Online’s 10,000 participants into a death game. In order to escape, they must fight their way through all 100 floors of the floating castle, Aincrad. However, Echoes of Aincrad mostly sidelines this to tell its own story. Your MC and a few of the other key characters find themselves equipped with mysterious brooches that periodically show them visions of an apocalyptic future, subsequently giving them a special quest in their log to prevent it, all whilst trying to reach floor 100 and escaping. It’s like a subplot to the anime, but it’s well implemented. The permadeath threat is still ever present, but it’s given new context because if this doomsday event occurs, then everyone is dead anyway. It doesn’t take away anything from the anime and actually supplements it.

The story, however, is stalled by the barebones open regions. It’s not exactly an open world as you instead load into large zones that are only accessible via story or side missions, and even then you’re only allowed to explore portions of it at any given time. Each mission has a designated in-bounds area, and you can’t just go off and see what you like. If you go out of bounds, you’re simply turned around. This railroaded approach kills any sense of wonder and encourages you to just go straight for the critical path objective.

You activate Safe Zones along the way, uncovering more of the map, and there’s usually only one or two correct ways to reach new safe zones. You simply run along the path laid out, no climbing or gliding, and there's not much in the way of secrets or spectacle outside of treasure chests and landmarks to liven up the limited exploration. I’m not asking for every game to be completely open-ended like The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild or Tears of the Kingdom, but with so few options, it highlights how one-dimensional and limited Aincrad feels. Granted, you can find magical arks around the area and fight a miniboss to break nearby seals to unlock shortcuts, but that’s hardly a remedy given how drawn out everything is. Minibosses are also mostly bigger and reskinned versions of normal enemies too, and on top of that, many are recycled in different areas.

Since you only really explore two floors of Aincrad, there’s not much environmental variety. The first floor is entirely woodlands and forest, with some swamplands scattered in between, while all of the second floor is a barren desert, but there's also a complete lack of liveliness outside of towns. This would make sense lore wise – if players die in real life when they die in Sword Art Online, why would they take the unnecessary risk of potentially getting mauled by a monster outside? I’d stay home too. The issue is that it doesn’t translate well into an actual playable game world, resulting in empty open zones with indistinguishable vistas as far as the eye can see. There are some dungeons that mix things up visually, like the one between the two floors of Aincrad where stars and crystallized stalagmite fill the foreground. The story-related dungeons that are covered in glyphs are mainly there for story exposition and help break the repetitiveness, but those are few and far between.

Now, I don’t mind long stretches of open segments if done well, as you may see in a Xenoblade Chronicles, as an excellent example. Unfortunately, Echoes of Aincrad doesn’t have the sense of discovery or rich diversity of monsters to support an expansive world. Bosses and monsters are often palette swaps of the same wolves, bears, and trolls, and I grew tired of literally fighting the same kind of boar over and over again. Monsters can also somehow see you from light years away, forcing you to engage in battle when all I wanted to do was find the next Safe Zone.

Thankfully, Echoes of Aincrad’s combat is one of its better parts. It’s an action-RPG with your typical light and heavy attacks, but there’s an extra layer of depth with its specific approach to parrying and dodging. By timing your evasive maneuvers perfectly, you can launch stylized counterattacks with your battle partner to deal huge damage. Enemies can sometimes be resistant to stagger, so these counterattacks ensure that you can break their stances and gain the upper hand. It also encourages you to avoid mashing the attack button all the time and pay closer attention to incoming attacks.

Similar to Bandai Namco’s action-RPG from earlier this year, Code Vein 2, you can pick one character to accompany you on missions (some main story ones allow for multiple). It’s a bit all over the place, and a bit of a let down considering past Sword Art Online games were more consistent with allowing three or four to fight alongside you. It’s kind of odd considering Echoes of Aincrad gives the impression of a party-based RPG in-lore due to its emphasis on an original cast banding together to save the world. Depending on who you choose, the proper partner can make some fights easier depending on your own personal approach to combat. A more defensive player, for example, could pick Iori’s healing field over Zash’s more offensive capabilities like granting an attack buffing barrier which gets stronger the lower the target’s HP.

Each of the six weapon types (including swords, daggers, and axes) have different speed and damage properties, and heavy weapons like maces and two-handed axes can perform crushing attacks normally without needing to charge up like swords, which can be helpful in downing enemies, leaving them vulnerable to a further onslaught. It’s hardly revolutionary, but I like how you’re able to experiment to find your preferred playstyle, and switch it up without penalty.

You can also learn Sword Skills, which are flashy attacks that consume SP. These skills add the kind of visual flair you’d expect from an action-RPG, and have special properties that tack on unique status effects. For example, the rapier’s Oblique Lunge sends you downward and emits a shockwave for extra damage, while the two-handed sword’s Cascade skill inflicts severing damage that can potentially dismember enemies and change their attack behavior, giving the combat a Monster Hunter-lite edge. Since you can only equip three Sword Skills per weapon, you’ll have to be wise about which ones you pick, adding another layer of strategy to the combat.

I also like how straightforward other systems are in Echoes of Aincrad. Every time you level up, you’re given a certain number of growth points to allocate to your attributes and the menu makes it clear how each attribute impacts your capabilities. There are certain buffs like faster attack speed and bonus EXP gains earned by reaching certain attribute levels, providing more incentives to invest in some stats over others depending on what you want to emphasize.

The customization and weapon modification systems are highlights as well. You’ll get a ton of weapons and items through enemy drops, which gets overwhelming, but a town's blacksmith can turn any unwanted weapons into materials to level up your favorite ones and declutter your inventory. You can also transfer weapons’ passive abilities by sacrificing the weapon that has the ability you want to extract, making it so easy to create your ideal weapon. For example, I added the +24% sprint speed modifier to any new weapon I wanted to use, becoming noticeably faster running out in the open field to make it a bit more tolerable.

What’s an RPG without a bit of post-game grind? After you’re done with the main story, you get access to Warped Dungeons; randomly generated roguelite-style dungeons where you earn Key Stones. These give you buffs that can increase your base stats that should prepare you for the most challenging content that Echoes of Aincrad has to offer. Warped Dungeons are no joke either, as I quickly discovered. Come underleveled or unprepared without the proper equipment, and you’ll soon find yourself getting decimated against bosses from even the first level. Clearing harder levels (which goes up to 10) will subsequently power up your Key Stones too, making Warped Dungeons worth doing since you’ll also earn EXP for killing the monsters anyway, and becoming strong enough to face the true final threat.

Each Sword Art Online game feels grindier than the last, and you'd wish they were more substantive or just drew lessons from other RPGs. Having more interesting ways of earning XP instead of side missions mostly consisting of fetch quests and “kill this monster here” objectives for little XP, that’d be a start. The bulk of the EXP is earned from the monsters you’re expected to slay along the way, and at the very least, monster levels scale with you, so you’re earning enough to stay afloat. But it gets repetitive when that’s its main crux, and I guess that’s what we’ve come to expect from an RPG that’s modeled after an anime about being in an MMO.