For just $14.99 when you sign up for a Humble Choice membership, you can add all of these games to your PC library. On top of that, you get a bonus month for free of IGN Plus. It’s a pretty sweet deal. Head to the link below to sign up, and further down you can see this month’s full lineup. Keep in mind this selection of games only lasts for the month, so be quick to make a move on it if they interest you.
March’s lineup offers up a nice variety of games for your library, too. Tempest Rising is one that writer Dan Stapleton called, “A loving homage to classic Command & Conquer,” noting that its “single-player campaign brings back the fast-paced RTS gameplay but can’t quite recapture the campy vibe” in our review. Hard West 2 is another that caught our attention, with our review from writer Jon Bolding saying it, “has plenty of little annoyances, but it’s a supernatural western tactics game with a lot of style and the substance to back it.”
Those with a Humble Choice membership get to enjoy much more alongside a monthly drop of new games. This membership also allows you to save up to 20% on select games in the Humble Store, and a nice bonus is that 5% of your Humble Choice membership goes to a charity each month. As for March, that portion of your membership will go towards the Malala Fund.
The free month of IGN Plus is a great add-on with everything else, too. Once you’ve signed up, you’ll be able to get rid of ads across the website, enjoy free games, and much more that you can learn about on the IGN Plus page.
Hannah Hoolihan is a freelancer who writes with the guides and commerce teams here at IGN.
RPGs don’t always require compelling stories or innovative trappings to be fun. Sometimes, all you want or want are a few engaging systems, some brought colors, and a delightful loop of grinding, exploration, and reward. Mega Man Star Force Legacy Collection seems to deliver all that in spades based on what I’ve played so far, matching a fairly innocuous, almost infantile narrative with well-tuned mechanics to create something thoroughly enjoyable in the early going.
The three Star Force games included in this collection don’t even try to hide the influence Pokemon clearly had on their design. All three are split into multiple versions clearly inspired by ye olde Blue and Red. A total of seven variants exist across the trilogy, and they’re all represented well here, with some content unique to each.
The Star Force games share a lot of DNA with the earlier Battle Network titles while reflecting the mid-2000s hardware migration from Game Boy Advance to Nintendo DS. Capcom has solved most of the two-screen play issues fairly elegantly, miniaturizing the second screen to an upper corner and allowing the player to instantly bring it full-screen with a trigger hold. This works remarkably well. Environments have been colorfully and crisply translated from the low-resolution DS screen. The designers wisely maintained a close to 4:3 form factor, so graphics don’t display any appreciable stretching or distortion. The Wave World dungeons seamlessly overlap the human world. The vibe and feel of all three optimistic meladramas appears to be lovingly preserved.
Capcom has solved most of the two-screen play issues fairly elegantly, miniaturizing the second screen to an upper corner and allowing the player to instantly bring it full-screen with a trigger hold.
Combat, though, is the gravity that holds Star Force Collection on its winning trajectory. Fundamentally, all these games are combat-centric action-RPGs. Though cards, abilities, and other nuances vary, the 3×5 battle grid where you take on enemies is the most fleshed-out part of the the Star Force trilogy, a formula perfected all the way back on the GBA with the Battle Network games. You can rig clever card combos, juggle timing counters, sprint forward for melee attacks, nimbly dodge attacks, and snipe with your P-shooter. It’s a sprightly, light action-RPG combat system that rewards focus but is also fairly forgiving of miscalculation, and the battles are quick enough you likely won’t mind the random encounters.
Capcom did a good job updating these titles for the modern player, but for my tastes are less successful at contextualizing their place in the Mega Man pantheon. Some effort was put into visual or audio museums, but there’s nothing here comparable to, say Digital Eclipse’s Gold Master series, where the history and legacy of each game is celebrated by curated timelines or original documentaries. The historic features stack up poorly even next to the original Mega Man Legacy Collection, which allowed players to pop directly into certain gameplay moments directly from museum boss art. No such luck here.
As for the plot… well, that’s probably not really why you’re here. Plucky hero, quirky friends, buddy aliens made of electromagnetic energy, and maybe a dark conspiracy or two. You know, the usual stuff. It carries the collection and the combat forward, and for these games, that’s enough.
Mega Man Star Force Legacy Collection doesn’t seem poised to shake up the world, but it doesn’t really have to, nor did it likely set out to. It’s appropriate for anyone who remembers whittling away hours on their GBA playing Battle Network or their DS playing Star Force. It’s also a perfect pastime for eleven-year-olds (or kids at heart) who love deck building, combo breaking, and diving into complementary, overlapping gameplay systems. Mega Man Star Force Legacy Collection is, based on my time with it, shaping up to be a real winner.
Jared Petty does all kinds of things with video games. When he’s not marketing with Other Ocean or writing for IGN, he’s creating new episodes of The Top 100 Games Podcast. Find him on Instagram, Threads, and BlueSky as @pettycommajared.
It’s been a little bit since The Outer Worlds 2 got that November patch aiming to take care of mysterious eyebrow disappearances. I wonder what the latest one, which is fairly beefy, does. Oh, it adds a number of handy features like the option to advance time by waiting, toggle walking via key press, and extra stealth kill animations.
Nice and boring. Oh, wait. “Gary will no longer attack the player from beyond the veil”. “Fixed cases where some NPCs could see the player while they were wearing the bucket hat”. “The pit outside of the entrance to Algid Menagerie will now always kill the player as intended”. “NPCs should no longer moonwalk, despite being in space”.
Though it seems Capcom only recently remembered that they can make a new Mega Man game, there was once a time where the Blue Bomber was so prevalent that many fans were suffering from some series burnout. In the span of about five years, we were getting hosed with new entries in the Classic, X, ZX, and Battle Network series, and the Mega Man Star Force series came into the picture in the middle of this period.
Now that all but that last one have received successful Legacy Collections on modern platforms, it was only a matter of time before Capcom would give Geo Stelar another shot at the spotlight after what many saw as a truncated and early finish to his adventures.
Control Resonant: Getting to Grips With Remedy’s First-Ever Melee Action Game
Summary
Control Resonant evolves the original Control’s 3rd-person shooting combat into an intense melee action-RPG.
Creative Director Mikael Kasurinin and Lead Gameplay Designer Sergey Mohov gave an overview of the sequel’s elaborate combat and customization systems, encouraging build experimentation and multiple playthroughs.
Control Resonant arrives on Xbox Series X|S later this year.
The Oldest House leaking into New York is all I needed to hear to be excited about Control Resonant, Remedy Entertainment’s long-anticipated follow-up to their excellent 2019 paranormal action-adventure, Control. As they recently showed us with Alan Wake 2, the folks at Remedy are not afraid to take big swings with sequels, and Control Resonant looks no less surprising and delightful than its studio and series pedigree would suggest.
Last week, we got to see virtual presentation from Creative Director Mikael Kasurinin (also the Creative Director of the franchise and Co-Creative Director of Remedy Entertainment) and Lead Gameplay Designer Sergey Mohov, giving live commentary over pre-recorded gameplay video segments. They focused on combat and customization, which is clearly a big point of evolution from Control to Control Resonant.
Only in New York
In Control Resonant you play as Dylan Faden, brother of the original Control’s protagonist, Jesse, and a powerful parautilitarian (think “somewhat spooky superhero”) like his sister. In order to curb speculation, Kasurinin and Mohov were clear that Jesse will not be playable in Resonant, though she will be present as a major character.
Seven years after the events of the first game, cosmic horror the Hiss has escaped the Oldest House, base of operations for the Federal Bureau of Control (think “The X-Files” if Mulder had funding), and taken over Manhattan, flooding it with monsters and psychedelically warping space and gravity to create a broken, dreamlike world reminiscent of “Inception.” While not a full, seamless open world, the city is divided into major zones that spoke off from a central area where the FBC’s field office is set up, which will serve as your evolving hub throughout the game.
The cosmic forces terrorizing the city have affected each zone very differently, allowing them to have distinct vibes and challenges. Control’s Oldest House was an impeccably surreal brutalist nightmare, but ultimately it was a lot of gray concrete over the run of the whole game. Kasurinin was clear that one of their goals for Resonant was to have much greater visual variety, of which the discrete zones are an obvious manifestation (although we didn’t really get a look at any yet beyond the particularly Incepted area from the reveal and gameplay trailers).
Devil May Control
The biggest difference between Resonant and the first Control is the move from 3rd-person shooter to melee action-RPG. Where Jesse had the Service Weapon, which could morph between various gun forms, Dylan has attuned to the Aberrant, a shape-shifting close-quarters weapon. It’s unclear how many forms there will be in total, but examples we’ve seen include an enormous hammer, short blades, a scythe, and a whip.
The action is fast and furious, reminiscent of the Devil May Cry franchise, or the work of PlatinumGames, air-juggling, combo meter, and all. Like the first game, it’s a system designed to encourage aggression – but it feels even more geared towards getting you into the thick of combat. Melee attacks give Dylan the resource he needs to use his special abilities, which will frequently stun enemies and allow for executions, in turn giving a temporary percentage buff to melee damage, letting you push to higher and higher levels of destruction with skillful play. Also like the first Control, a lot of your attention has to go towards not just attacking and dodging individual enemies, but managing crowds of different threats. Jesse’s ability to do this all at range with guns and telekinesis made it easier to keep the action squarely in front of you, but Dylan is fighting up close and personal, which means threats come in from all angles.
We also got a more extended look at Dylan’s fight against one of the eponymous Resonants, who serve as major story bosses for the game and reward Dylan with powerful abilities. The deft, masked, dual-mallet-wielding figure shown at the end of recently revealed gameplay footage is tentatively named the Dancer (though the developers noted that name is subject to change). Regardless, it’s in good company with memorable bosses like the Cogwork Dancers (Hollow Knight: Silksong) and Dancer of the Boreal Valley (Dark Souls III), where learning to match their graceful rhythms can be an exhilarating duet to master.
As with any action game, how good it will be is all about moment-to-moment game feel in a way that no video can communicate, but Control Resonant’s combat looks far more intense and mechanically crunchy than anything Remedy has done before, and I’m excited to get hands on it.
Theorycrafter’s Delight
Besides the intensity of the combat, another huge and exciting differentiator between Control Resonant and its predecessor is the build variety available. Remedy showed us the same fight against mobs of enemies both with a standard, up-close melee-focused build, and then with a build that focused on using skills to summon various minions and turrets to do crowd control while Dylan swooped around to make targeted executions. It became immediately clear how malleable this system will be, and how much your choices will make a meaningful difference to how you play.
The skill trees in Control allowed you to buff up various parts of Jesse’s kit to your taste, but it didn’t really feel like you were making creative build choices. I loved my time with it, but I was thorough and haven’t felt compelled to go back, in part because by the end it felt like I had seen pretty much everything the combat had to offer.
Control Resonant aims to encourage replays with far more in-depth combat systems that allow for radical build variety. When defeating Resonants, they can offer up to three choices for what power to take, which is permanent and exclusive, meaning you won’t be able to see everything in a single playthrough. One example we saw offered a choice between a shield that can also be used offensively to ram into enemies, a turret that can also be thrown as a bomb, or a third option we didn’t get a look at. In action, we also saw Dylan do things like force-push and cause remote explosions—standard cool telepath stuff.
In addition to selecting from a variety of offensive, defensive, and tactical supernatural abilities, Dylan can also customize his weapon, the Aberrant. Rather than committing to a single weapon form’s moves, you set one primary form for basic attacks, a secondary form for special and charged attacks, and a combo ender for special finisher moves after attack chains. Within that, each weapon form offers upgrade trees that unlock alternate, specialized forms and modifier effects for the weapons, allowing further customization.
Then on top of that, there are talent trees for Dylan that unlock a variety of passive modifiers, which also involve exclusive choices that again limit what you can see in a single playthrough. These are built around synergies like various status effects that can be applied to enemies.
All of these systems run through The Gap, a diegetic mind palace menu space that Dylan can enter at any time out of combat. Here you find not reasonably priced bootcut jeans and sweatshirts, but ominous plinths on which Dylan can manage his various talent and specialization trees and systems.
It’s all a little overwhelming when breathlessly laid out, but it’s no doubt exciting. It seems like Control Resonant’s customization might really scratch that action-RPG itch for richly expressive and open combat systems in which you can really get your hands dirty exploring all sorts of different builds and playstyles – but decoupled from the Skinner box loot grind associated with the kinds of games we’d usually expect this from.
What’s perhaps most impressive is how much it feels like Remedy is getting right on their first try – the team has never made an all-out melee action game before, but it bears all the hallmarks of the greats in the genre. Given that Control spin-off FBC: Firebreak was also Remedy’s first ever multiplayer game, we asked Kasurinen if there’s something about the Control franchise that lets Remedy stretch their development wings. He agreed, saying that “Control is, first and foremost, a world, where a lot of different protagonists can exist within it, and they each have their own way of dealing with things.”
It’s something to be thankful for – Remedy have been one of the most reliable studios in the action space for a very long time, but seeing them apply all that experience to something new for them is a particular treat. I can’t wait to go back and spend more time in Control’s world with Resonant after this tantalizing little taste. While I wholly expected a Control sequel to paint Remedy’s eerie and imaginative vision across a grander scale, which did not disappoint, I did not expect the action-RPG buildcrafting sicko part of my brain to be activated as well.
After years in confinement at the hands of the Federal Bureau of Control (FBC), Dylan Faden’s former captors are deploying him at the peak of a supernatural crisis.
Charged with combating a mysterious cosmic entity as it alters fundamental aspects of our reality, Dylan must harness his new-found powers to take the fight to the myriad threats overwhelming Manhattan.
Join Dylan in this sequel to the multi-award-winning CONTROL to explore the expansive zones of a city overrun by the corrupting influences of the chaotic Hiss and invasive micro-organism, the Mold, and other twisted paranatural threats.
On the path to unlocking the full potential of his supernatural abilities Dylan will also seek out his sister, FBC Director Jesse Faden, as he bids to comprehend and contain the dangers that have spilled beyond the confines of the Oldest House to tear our world apart.
Crimson Desert seems huge — not just in how much there is to do, but simply how enormous its world is. As an open-world RPG, that’s to be expected, but it’s only when you’re standing on a strange island floating in the sky, seeing the whole world stretch out beneath you, that it’s clear just how expansive the world of Pywel really is.
I recently went hands-on with the beginning portion of Crimson Desert and played about four hours, and while I never made it out to the landmarks I could see in the distance, even the area in and around the city where the game begins felt enormous and full of life.
Helping out in Hernand
You play Kliff, a member of a faction called the Greymanes — warriors renowned for their swordsmanship and their reputation for helping others. The early part of the story takes place in a town called Hernand, where you get your first taste of just how big and bustling Crimson Desert is. Even with four hours of playtime, there was so much to do in and around Hernand that I never made it far from town.
Quests in and around Hernand have you helping out various townspeople with their problems. But there are also plenty of activities and encounters to discover on your own. Often, you’ll find spots and buildings that outlaw factions have taken over, and they’ll attack you if you enter their territory. Defeat enough of them, though, and you’ll liberate the place so the townspeople can reclaim it.
Clearing bandits out from different locations unlocks access to new quests and activities, too. When I drove the bandits out of a fish market, fishermen moved back in, and I was able to observe them and learn to fish myself.
One of the cooler aspects of Crimson Desert is how Kliff can learn new skills not just by unlocking them from his character skill tree, but by observing them from other people. That can even happen in combat.
Fast, fluid combat
Fighting in Crimson Desert is a fast-paced, intense affair, with smart enemies who constantly work to surround and overwhelm you. Luckily, you’re a well-trained swordsman with quite a few abilities. Kliff can chain together fast strikes with R1 and slower, more powerful slashes with R2, but he’s also strong enough to grab enemies and throw them when you press Circle and Triangle buttons together.
Crimson Desert doesn’t really contain character classes or builds — unlocking new skills just adds more and more moves to Kliff’s repertoire, which you can use by pressing different combinations of buttons. Your fighting style is more determined by the weapons you choose to use. Kliff starts with a sword and shield, but you can also find weapons like great swords, spears, axes, and more to change how you approach combat.
You can block with L1, and if you time a block correctly as an attack lands, you can parry an enemy’s blow, knocking them briefly off-balance. Holding L1 also lets you lock onto an enemy, but the fluidity of the combat system means you’ll often quickly drop a lock so you’ll be free to attack in all directions.
Fighting stronger opponents can increase your arsenal of abilities. Midway through one early boss battle, a knight attempted to kick Kliff in the chest — and after seeing the move, Kliff learned it, incorporating it into his fighting style. From then on, I could give enemies the boot to send them flying.
The final battle of my preview was by far the toughest I faced, against Kailock, the Hornsplitter, the leader of a local merchant guild who’d been scouring Hernand for Abyss Artifacts. These are magical items that have fallen from the Abyss, a realm of floating islands above Pywel, and they imbue their wielders with strange powers. Kailock’s artifact makes him very fast and agile, while also allowing him to generate waves of magic from his weapon.
Kailock makes it clear it’ll take understanding your opponents’ abilities and using skills like parrying and powerful attacks to defeat them. And thanks to Abyss Artifacts, it seems like you’ll face enemies throughout Crimson Desert with capabilities that rival your own.
A strange, mystical world
Following the early steps of the main quest quickly leads you to the Abyss, a place seemingly powered by some mix of magic and technology, and home to some mystical folks who’ve taken an interest in Kliff.
It’s here that you start to gain special magical abilities that allow you to complete puzzles, explore the world, and gain an edge in combat. These include turning some objects weightless so you can manipulate them, picking up heavy items that would otherwise block your path, and donning a glider that lets you survive falls and cover distances.
The Abyss gives the first taste of Crimson Desert’s puzzles, which often have you fixing and manipulating Abyss technology. It sounds like you’ll solve quite a few puzzles throughout the game — some in the course of the story, and others that you’ll uncover through exploration.
Abyss Artifacts falling to earth seem to be a major driver for the story, and you can find them throughout the game and use them to unlock character upgrades and new abilities. But you’re not the only person hunting them and their power.
Freedom to explore
Beyond a short trip to the Abyss and the wilderness around Hernand, I didn’t get too far into the world of Crimson Desert, but it does seem like there’s going to be plenty of interesting things to find within the world if you’re willing to look for them.
After leaping off an Abyss island to return to the surface, I floated down near Hernand’s castle and found a man hanging from a cliff. I ran over and pulled him up, and he explained that he was trying to climb down to a chest before slipping. It was a momentary encounter, but provided a clue about what I might find below.
With my glider, I was able to jump down to the chest no problem, uncovering some loot that was part of another trading activity. Kliff could also climb back up the cliff with little difficulty. Your ability to climb, glide, swim, and sprint is dictated by a stamina gauge, and you can scale most cliffs and walls with relative ease, so long as the gauge doesn’t run out.
You also have a horse to help you cross the vast distances of Crimson Desert. You can whistle for the horse by pressing down on the D-Pad, summoning it to wherever you are. Between your mount and your glider, you have some decent options for traversing a lot of distance quickly, but you’ll need to earn upgrades to increase their stamina, and thus, their usefulness.
PS5 and PS5 Pro enhancements
With an enormous, gorgeous open world, Crimson Desert can be pretty graphically demanding, and Pearl Abyss will leverage the PlayStation 5 and PS5 Pro to help deliver some impressive visuals, particularly at long distances. The PS5’s SSD is key for streaming the huge world, for a start, and developers will make heavy use of the PS5 Pro’s High CPU Frequency Mode to make viewing and moving through the world as seamless as possible.
Pearl Abyss also told me it optimized Crimson Desert for the PS5 through a number of features to help maintain all that detail at its large scale, making use of Geometry Shader Oversubscription and NGG Culling to render lots of elements without losing detail. On PS5 Pro, the recent upgrade to PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution (PSSR) makes it possible for Crimson Desert to hit 4K resolutions at higher frame rates, and its raytracing capabilities make lighting effects more realistic and natural.
The DualSense controller adds a lot to the experience, too, especially when it comes to combat. A big part of fighting in Crimson Desert is the feeling of weight, and you can feel haptics especially when weapons clash as you execute a parry or when you land a powerful hit on an enemy. The adaptive triggers also add intensity to actions like drawing back a bowstring. The DualSense additions work to bring you closer to Kliff and help deliver a lot of information, especially in tense combat situations where enemies can be all around you.
Even after playing for four hours, I only scratched the surface of what’s waiting in Pywel. From vast lands to explore and secrets to discover, to formidable foes to face down and powerful skills to master, Crimson Desert looks to offer a lot for RPG fans who want to lose themselves in a fantastical world.
You can see for yourself just what’s hidden in Crimson Desert when it releases on March 19 on PS5.
Resident Evil: Requiem is the first in the horror franchise to be released solely for current-generation consoles, but what really makes it special is the engine that runs it. The RE Engine was built initially for Resident Evil 7, and Capcom has since used it to power everything from Monster Hunter: Wilds to Exoprimal – remember that one?
But while the engine has had issues in open-world games, it’s still incredible for the franchise it was created for. As a result, Resident Evil Requiem looks exquisite on the PS5, and runs smoothly no matter which version of the platform you’re using.
I was particularly interested to see how the first Resident Evil game designed first and foremost for the current generation of consoles would perform across all its platforms, but I only got pre-release code for PS5 and PC. So while I’ll be looking at the Xbox Series X and Nintendo Switch 2 after launch, I went ahead and dove into the PS5 and PC versions to see how they compare.
The Display Modes
While it’s become the norm for console games to have multiple display modes that prioritize quality or frame rate, the base PS5 only has one mode. That will get you a 4K image upscaled from roughly 1080p, but running at an incredibly stable 60 fps. Capcom probably could have scaled the game down a bit more to add a high frame rate mode to the basic PS5, but it really does strike a nice balance between resolution and performance.
The PS5 Pro is a little more flexible. There are two display modes here, revolving entirely around ray tracing, or the lack thereof. Without ray tracing, the PS5 Pro looks very similar to the base PS5 version of the game, but it does appear to be upscaling from a higher resolution – 1300p from my count.
Instead of changing too much about the visual quality, the ‘RT off’ mode instead focuses on delivering a high frame rate, targeting up to 120 fps – though it didn’t quite reach that mark in my testing.
The ray tracing preset takes the place of a “prefer quality” type of preset in Resident Evil Requiem on the PS5 Pro. The underlying quality settings and resolution don’t seem to change too much here, but ray tracing is turned on, which enhances the lighting, reflections and shadows. And while early ray tracing modes on the PS5 dropped performance down to 30 fps, Resident Evil Requiem still targets 60 fps with the fancy lighting enabled.
What’s particularly impressive about this mode, though, is how close it looks to the PC version with ray tracing set to “high”. While a gaming PC with a high-end GPU will get better performance with these quality settings, it’s still awesome that a console can deliver this level of visual fidelity while still hitting a solid 60 fps.
Performance
More than anything, it looks like Resident Evil Requiem is continuing the trend of 60 fps gaming being the floor. Even on the base PS5, the game doesn’t drop below 60, and the PS5 Pro takes those quality settings and pushes for even higher performance.
With the non-ray tracing preset on PS5 Pro, Capcom is targeting high-refresh displays, with performance hovering between 99 and 110 fps during the opening scene here. There are some quality differences between this version and what’s running on the base PS5, but they’re extremely minor, and mostly come down to the slightly lower resolution.
The minor differences in presentation here make it even more impressive that Capcom was able to raise the frame rate by so much. In the worst case scenario, where the PS5 Pro drops under 100 fps, it’s still getting around a 40% boost to frame rate.
Even on the base PS5, the game doesn’t drop below 60 fps.
The ray tracing preset drops the frame rate back down to 60, but it looks much better, especially in darker scenes. You can debate all day long whether or not 60 fps is enough, but with how important lighting is in Requiem, having that extra fidelity is totally worth the tradeoff – especially if you don’t have a display that can actually output a higher frame rate.
On PC I tested the game with an Nvidia GeForce RTX 5080, with ray tracing set to high, along with graphics quality and lighting quality also set to the high preset. This isn’t fully maxed out, but with DLSS set to ‘Performance’ it looks remarkably similar to the PS5 Pro’s ray tracing preset.
With the RTX 5080, which is admittedly more expensive than the PS5 Pro by itself, Requiem runs at around 110-120 fps at 4K, without frame generation. However, there are some scenes with a lot of NPCs, like this street scene that we’re using for testing, where performance can drop down to around 95-100 fps, but that’s still more than enough.
Requiem also supports path tracing on PC, which looks incredible, but will absolutely gut your performance. In the same scene, the frame rate dropped down to 55 fps. That’s not great, but that tends to happen when you take ray tracing and turn it up to 11. I was also able to turn on frame generation, which saw the frame rate shoot all the way up to around 200 fps – more than my capture card can actually capture. Frame generation does add extra latency, but it wasn’t enough to actually be noticeable when playing the game.
Image Quality
No matter how you’re playing Resident Evil Requiem, it looks incredible, even when it’s showing you pretty gnarly scenes.
Right at the beginning of the game, after you get out of some cinematics, you’ll find yourself on a city street. What’s surprising is that, at least on PC, this was one of the most demanding sections of the game that I’ve played through so far, likely due to the NPCs walking along the street, on top of the rain creating a ton of reflective surfaces.
However, due to the somewhat random assortment of NPCs that appear here, it’s easiest to look at this cinematic that triggers once Grace gets to a crime scene. Just pausing at the beginning of the scene and zooming in on her jacket, you can tell the difference in resolution between the base PS5 and PS5 Pro – it’s subtle, but it’s there.
What’s less subtle, though, is the differences ray tracing makes to the same scene. Swapping to this mode on the PS5 Pro, and the button is a little reflective, which gives it much more depth. Then, zooming out a bit, you can see a lot more depth and shadow in Grace’s hair. Then, if you zoom in behind her, you can see that on the ray tracing mode, the cop car in the scene projects its emergency light on the subway’s support beam – where it just looks like flat metal on the base PS5.
This scene also illustrates how close the PS5 Pro is to the PC version when it comes to image quality. The shadows are a bit more pronounced on the PC version, which gives some more depth to Grace’s character model, but the differences are minor.
Fast forward a little bit, though, and you can see one of the biggest differences between ray tracing and path tracing. Once the cop lifts the tarp to let Grace into the crime scene, most versions of the game show the alley behind it as dark, losing a lot of detail. Turn on path tracing, though, and the light naturally illuminates what’s on the other side of the tarp. Again, a pretty minor detail in the grand scheme of things, but these things add up over time.
Ray tracing really shines in Requiem’s darker scenes with a lot of reflective surfaces. Luckily, you also spend much of the first hour of the game in a dark, rainy city. A little later on, you gain control of Leon, where there’s a zombie outbreak of sorts in the city.
In this scene there’s virtually no difference between the PS5 and the PS5 Pro beyond frame rate, so I’m just going to focus on the two performance modes on the PS5 Pro. Without ray tracing, the scene looks alright, but a lot of the reflections in the various puddles are a bit muddy, with vague shapes of light showing up. That’s a side-effect of using screen space reflections, which are a lot less precise than ray tracing.
With RT enabled, though, you can make out the shapes of the street lights in the puddles, and Leon’s leather jacket also reflects light, which makes it look like, well, a leather jacket.
The PC version, of course, takes it to another level. You can zoom in on the hotel sign here, and the details on the hotel wall are much more clear, thanks to improved global illumination. That’s something that you’d have to zoom in a bunch to actually see, but it’s a nice detail regardless.
Then, if you enable path tracing, the reflections are especially enhanced here. Just look at this van, with regular old ray tracing, you can make out some small reflections of lights. But with path tracing, you can see the full reflection of the street signal behind it, while also making the rear view window actually look like a transparent glass panel. It looks incredible.
The care center also shows huge gaps between the ray traced and the non-ray traced versions of the game. When you get to this spooky looking hallway, with its flickering lights, look at how the lighting behaves. With the non-RT mode, the light cuts off almost like it hits a hard boundary. However, with ray tracing, the ray traced global illumination takes the light from the lamp at the end of the corridor and makes it extend much more naturally down the hallway, tapering off the further away it gets from the source.
You can also see along the edges, where the pictures on the wall are in complete darkness just a few feet into the hallway, where the light bounces more naturally when ray tracing is enabled. It’s a small touch, but it really does do a lot to make the game a bit more atmospheric.
Though, to be fair, even without ray tracing, I was much more worried about what was lurking around the next corner than I was about slightly unrealistic lighting.
At the end of the day, the same age-old advice applies to Resident Evil Requiem. If you have a high refresh display and you like the extra visual smoothness that comes from a high frame rate, turn ray tracing off if you have a PS5 Pro. The game looks great regardless, and going up to 100-ish fps will make a huge difference when you’re panicking.
But if you don’t have a high-refresh display, or if you just like having your games look as good as possible, go ahead and turn ray tracing on. Yeah, you’ll take a hit to performance, but it still gets a solid 60 fps on PS5 Pro and it looks incredible.
Jackie Thomas is the Hardware and Buying Guides Editor at IGN and the PC components queen. You can follow her @Jackiecobra
Counter-Strike: Global Offensive — known to most as CS:GO — is back on Steam in its own right… but only if you know where to look.
Counter-Strike 2 regularly tops Steam’s Most Played games list (for example, it hit a peak of 1.3 million players just in the last 24 hours alone). Its predecessor, however, was well-loved, too, yet it was effectively nuked when its home on Steam was replaced as Counter-Strike 2 dropped in 2023. That meant that if you’d wanted to play CS:GO before this update, you would’ve had to dig into the game’s legacy branch via Steam and access it from there.
A stinging caveat is that the servers have not been resurrected, nor is there any matchmaking, which means you can only play against the bots available to you via Counter-Strike 2’s beta branch. But the fact it’s been given its own store page could — maybe? — be a sign that those kinds of things may eventually come back to life. (I wouldn’t hold your breath, though. Just in case!)
That hasn’t stopped thousands of players from jumping into the free-to-play shooter, though. At the time of this article’s publication, it had 44,058 concurrent players on Steam — pretty impressive stuff for a 14-year-old game.
Interestingly, though, CS:GO won’t pop up in a search for you — as the store page cautions, “at the request of the publisher, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive is unlisted on the Steam store and will not appear in search.” This means you’ll need the direct link to access and download it.
Meanwhile, the attorney general of New York, Letitia James, is suing Valve, alleging the platform illegally promotes gambling to children. The AG’s office announced last week that an investigation “found that Valve’s video games, including Counter-Strike 2, Team Fortress 2, and Dota 2, enable gambling by enticing users to pay for the chance to win a rare virtual item of significant monetary value.”
Vikki Blake is a reporter for IGN, as well as a critic, columnist, and consultant with 15+ years experience working with some of the world’s biggest gaming sites and publications. She’s also a Guardian, Spartan, Silent Hillian, Legend, and perpetually High Chaos. Find her at BlueSky.
Earlier this week, the operator of ROM distribution site and self-described “video game preservation service” Myrient announced plans to shut it down as of the end of this month. They advised folks to download any files from the collection that said folks were keen to hold onto ahead of the closure. A group of volunteers have decided to take that to another level, working together to archive all of Myrient’s files so they can be preserved for posterity.
President Trump’s administration is currently debating whether to allow Chinese megacorp Tencent’s stakes in major U.S. companies such as Fortnite maker Epic Games and League of Legends developer Riot Games to continue.
The FT reports that “top officials” have met to assess the security risk of Tencent’s investments in numerous U.S. and Finnish gaming firms ahead of President Trump’s meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping next month.
Tencent has been acquiring western game companies for well over a decade now, but its most high-profile investments include a 28% stake in Epic Games, which is based in North Calorina, and the wholly owned Riot Games, which is based in Los Angeles. It also wholly owns Finnish company Supercell, which runs mobile mega hit Clash of Clans, and recently invested in a new Ubisoft business following the Assassin’s Creed maker’s financial troubles.
Sources said that Tencent was negotiating with the U.S. administration’s Committee on Foreign Investment (Cfius) last summer to help ease these security concerns, and, as far back as President Trump’s first term, was assessing whether Tencent’s investments could jeopardize the data of millions of American players. Cifus is similarly concerned about the company’s acquisition of Finnish firm Supercell, which has a huge player base in the U.S.
In January last year, the U.S. Department of Defense classified Tencent as a Chinese military company. At the time, Tencent insisted it was all a mistake. The upshot of this latest development is that the Trump administration may force Tencent to divest the gaming companies, or force it to create data protections it’s satisfied with. Neither the White House nor Tencent or Epic responded to requests for comment.
Photo by Ying Tang/NurPhoto via Getty Images.
Vikki Blake is a reporter for IGN, as well as a critic, columnist, and consultant with 15+ years experience working with some of the world’s biggest gaming sites and publications. She’s also a Guardian, Spartan, Silent Hillian, Legend, and perpetually High Chaos. Find her at BlueSky.
