Let me level with you folks right up top: Code Violet is a bad game. No judgement (some judgement) if you saw tasteful (and sometimes not) screenshots and trailers featuring its beautiful brunette protagonist mixing it up with dinosaurs and felt compelled to pick this up just to ogle. But if you want anything else from Code Violet, like a compelling story with interesting characters or an engrossing crucible of tense and savvy action horror to conquer, then you’ve come to the wrong raptor-infested space station. The best it can give you is terrible third-person shooting, boring level design, and technical blunders that make stalking through this futuristic bloodbath feel prehistoric.

Code Violet’s story is unapologetically tropey science fiction, mixing far future space colonization, genetic modification, and more to make this final girl survival story as impenetrable as possible. Bits and pieces of the tale are interesting, though that’s mostly limited to side stories and lore found in the journal entries of victims scattered among the wreckage. But almost everything you play through and watch in cutscene form is derivative, awkwardly animated and acted, and forgettable. Avoiding spoilers, even when things get truly bonkers towards the end (in a similar fashion to developer TeamKill Media’s Quantum Error from 2023), all the new and drastic revelations that should be monumental to the story at hand instead feel rushed and full of twists and turns that are either undercooked or entirely too convoluted. The very few other characters you meet are barely more than one-note exposition dispensers who you’ll watch your hero, Violet, worry and cry over and never really understand why.

Violet herself is a hollow shell with no motivations outside of doing what others tell her to do, as well as being incredulous and weepy when weird and sometimes difficult events arise. She’s meant to fill a sort of Jill Valentine or Lara Croft archetype of tough gals that can think their way through most challenges, and shoot their way through the rest. But while those two video game legends have agency and capability developed through their laundry lists of heroic feats, snappy dialogue, and sometimes dense inner monologues, Violet’s own thoughts about the happenings around her seem absent from most interactions. She only feels particularly good at anything when I’m in the driver’s seat, tip toeing down hallways and filling dinosaurs full of lead.

This is doubly damning. Outside of being a missed opportunity to introduce a good new character into the greater video game lexicon, it also makes Code Violet’s leering, pervy camera work and extensive dress up options feel like it’s crossing the line from fun into creepy. There are tons of characters in games who successfully make being sexy or flirty a major part of their schtick, and the best ones are those that come across as completely in control of their own image while they do so. So its an unfortunate irony that in a post-Baldur’s Gate 3/Stellar Blade world, one where people have never been more ready to accept hunky himbos and skimpy seductresses, Code Violet found one of the few ways to do it wrong.

I played on a regular PlayStation 5 rather than a Pro, and at mid-to-far distances, a few parts of Code Violet really do look good. That’s especially true in the more creatively designed areas, like when you’re outside looking up as islands float in the purplish void of the sky. When you get up close, however, textures can get muddied and metallic surfaces reflect light in gaudy ways that seem off putting for the grunge and grime that sometimes smears them. And most of the heavy metal halls you’ll skulk down are uninspired sci-fi staples that don’t feel any different than any other game that asks players to escape from a locked down hellhole of a science facility. Doom 3 pulled this aesthetic off far more effectively over 20 years ago.

There’s occasional flair, some statues that would look more at home in a medieval castle than a space base, for instance. There’s no real explanation for them, though you can make inferences based on some late-game happenings, but at the moment they come off largely as “it’s here just because.” One curious thing I did always stop to look at were the soda machines and various oil paintings that stick out like a sore thumb in this setting. Not because I found them to be particularly riveting (some were admittedly cool-looking), but mostly because I couldn’t stop trying to determine if they were AI generated or not – I’m no expert, so the jury is still out on that, but they certainly give off that vibe.

Those cool outdoor skyscapes hang over the rote and bland grasslands you’ll have to trudge through to get from one building to another almost mockingly. The limited time you spend in these zones is transitory. They basically serve as long hallways with bundles of tall grass to crouch behind when enemies are on patrol. You don’t even get a map to use, and you won’t need one as it will be very obvious where you need to go next, with very little opportunity to diverge from this critical path. Maybe these sections were meant to serve as some reprieve from the dark, claustrophobic halls of the various facilities on this planet, but other than having a brighter color palette, they feel exactly the same to navigate through.

Back indoors, rooms that might have something to investigate or shoot are separated by long hallways with nothing to spice up the transition from one action zone to another. This almost never changes across the handful of maps you’ll explore, creating a predictable, slogging pace between rooms. Part of what makes games like Dead Space so tense is that any and every room feels like one you could be maimed in. In Code Violet, you can be reasonably sure that most of its rooms exist just to be walked through by you and nothing else. Scoping out extra upgrade materials to strengthen your weapons or finding hidden keys or combinations to open certain lockers are the only good reasons to stray off the path, and even then I learned to go without these things pretty early on because the effort often wasn’t worth the prize – they usually meant enduring the crumbling fossil of Code Violet’s combat system for longer than necessary.

Violet herself is agile and swift in line with most third person games of this ilk, and even has a Resident Evil-style back stepping dodge, which you will use a lot to create space between yourself and incoming dinosaurs. In a straight up skirmish with these scaly foes, a well-timed dash back can really befuddle the raptors, shattering their simple gameplan of running at you, taking a big swing, pausing, and doing it again. There’s limited space before you hit a wall or a door that might have automatically closed behind you, though, so you can only backdash so much before making yourself a much easier snack to catch. The camera will collide with these barriers far sooner than Violet will, rendering any encounter that doesn’t take place in the dead center of the room a completely unintelligible mess for as long as it takes you to get the camera refocused. Indoors, this was a frequent headache, and lingered like a second, scarier jump scare waiting to pounce after a raptor bursts out of the wall.

The variety of these jurassic jerks is a let down, with large or small velociraptors and poison-spitting dilophosauruses making up the bulk of the non-boss foes. Each type has its own behaviors, but they are shallow and predictable. Big raptors just run and swipe at you until either you or it are dead. Small raptors are usually in packs and make a conga line toward you, taking a swipe before running away, only to immediately turn around and do it all over again. The spitters just stand in one place and shoot, opting to close the distance only when you do so first. You’ll encounter some gator-like creatures in the last third of the approximately six hour campaign, but they barely bother to deal with you so long as you don’t enter their waters, making them extremely easy targets.

Any challenge I got from these mouthy menaces came from how erratic and stupid they could be, often getting caught in the environment while attempting to reach me or disengaging once I simply walked the other direction. Their bullet spongy, stun resistant nature also means that they can just run up and take a bite out of you before they die, not quite becoming a danger, but definitely becoming an annoyance since any hit from them could potentially cause you to bleed, which can kill you if you don’t treat it in time. This is all true for the remarkably few boss fights as well – you may be facing a scaly man-dino hybrid now, but almost nothing about the strategy of walking backwards, dodging on time, and then countering with a face full of lead has to change.

At the same time, all these lazy lizards have a sort of supernatural omniscience. Even when you make your best attempts to sneak into or around a room, there’s a great chance that they already know where you are and are on their way to kill you. On top of that, so many encounters involve you opening a door to see dinosaurs staring directly at you or are scripted events where they have the drop on you, so there aren’t many attempts to stay quiet to begin with. Unless you’re using the GlassVeil function of Violet’s suit, which can render you sometimes comically invisible for a short period, stealth is a large waste of time in most areas. I say comically because you can use it mid-fight with a dinosaur, and there’s a good chance they will simply give up any attempt to find you and return to milling around aimlessly when you do. Hilariously, this strategy even works on bosses, who will completely stop and wait for you to reveal yourself, usually with gunfire, and then make a half-assed attempt to follow up until you reappear.

The real enemy are the myriad bugs that can’t wait to bite and peck at your progress. Sometimes the sound mix will run off the rails or a very important skybox, one that might hold valuable information about a puzzle, simply won’t load. Weapons sometimes display the wrong ammo counts, or just disappear from your inventory all together – which I guess is a fair trade for the fact that every item I used directly out of my storage box didn’t actually expend it in the review build we were provided, meaning I could always heal to full at any safe room I made it to. (TeamKill Media tells us it’s already aware and working on fixes for some of these bugs, such as the infinite storage item issue, but didn’t say when those might arrive.)

Avowed is the latest Xbox Game Studios creation to head to PlayStation, developer Obsidian announced today.

This news came as part of an interview on the New Game+ Showcase, where Obsidian developers shared that the February 17 launch on PS5 would coincide with the game’s promised anniversary update on all platforms.

The anniversary update contains a number of long-requested features, including a New Game Plus mode, a Photo Mode, the ability to play three new races (Aumaua, Orlan, and Dwarves), a new weapon type, the ability to change appearance in the overworld, and a number of other asked-for upgrades.

Pre-orders for the PS5 version will go live today, and the update will be available for free for those who already own it on other platforms.

Avowed came out almost a year ago (hence the anniversary update), and we gave it a 7/10 at the time. While we said it has “awesome worldbuilding and stellar character writing”, it also “plays it quite safe with a by-the-numbers fantasy adventure.”

Avowed’s move to PlayStation is part of a larger trend of Xbox releasing its first-party games on its competitor platform, including recently Forza Horizon 5, Doom: The Dark Ages, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, and even Halo.. It’s a strategy that seems to be working for them okay in some respects – in one quarter of last year, six of the ten best-selling games on PlayStation were Xbox-published. And its leadership has publicly embraced the idea that consumers find platform exclusivity to be “antiquated.”

Will this strategy serve them well as hardware prices skyrocket and players gravitate more toward forever games? We took a stab at guessing how Xbox’s 2026 will go, and you can read those predictions here.

Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. Got a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.

Hey, fellow Undertale and Deltarune fan. Did you know there was a Deltarune ARG going on? Did you know it’s technically been going on for three years now? Yeah, neither did I!

I first learned about the Deltarune ARG (Alternate Reality Game) earlier this week, when a video about it surfaced in my YouTube recommendations. I started out just mildly curious, but I quickly fell down a rabbit hole that had me digging through massive spreadsheets, scouring Reddit threads, and pouring over weird corners of the official Deltarune website. And now, I’m going to infect you with it too.

In order to fully unpack the entire ARG in a way that covers every little bit of what’s happened and what it could mean, I would have to spoil all four chapters of Deltarune, probably some bits of Undertale, and dive into a deep, deep, deep pit of Deltarune fan theories. So I’m going to try to keep the explanation as high level as is possible while still making sense. But as a warning ahead of time: this will contain spoilers for Chapters 1 and 2 of Deltarune, especially the “Weird Route”, and some very light allusions to characters and events in Chapters 3 and 4. Read on at your own risk:

The Deltarune ARG actually began in September 2022, during an event called the Spamton Sweepstakes celebrating Undertale’s seventh anniversary, which raised money for the charity Child’s Play. Most of the event was fun, silly, and non-ARG-related, themed around the eccentric Chapter 2 character Spamton and including a lot of fun new merchandise courtesy of Fangamer.

However, at the time, the ever-vigilant Deltarune community stumbled upon some unusual hidden content within the pages on the Deltarune website dedicated to the sweepstakes. At the time, most of it consisted of fun Easter Eggs, and I don’t want to get into it all, but it was the first major sign that something was up. It wasn’t until May of 2025 (two and a half years later) that things really kicked off. Fans suddenly noticed that there were even more secrets on the Deltarune website dedicated to the sweepstakes. There were a number of new hidden pages, all of which made reference to the game’s deeply eerie and hidden “Weird Route”, but the one that matters most to the ARG was deltarune.com/chapter4/thankyou. At the time, the website consisted of two very small blanks where users could input text, and a blank button that allowed them to submit it. There were no clues as to what needed to go into the blanks, save for a single question:

“How long did it take her to smile?”

Deltarune fans very quickly guessed that the “her” being referenced was Noelle, a beloved character and the childhood best friend of Deltarune protagonist Kris. She’s also the focal point of the aforementioned Weird Route, in which the player (a separate character from Kris) manipulates Noelle into doing something terrible in the interest of becoming stronger. Fans also figured out that the first blank was looking for an email address, with the second blank being for the actual “answer” to the question. Unfortunately, the form was only open for a day, before being replaced with text that just said “Thank You.” Those who had submitted their email in the form began receiving effectively a confirmation email that just contained “You answered [THEIR ANSWER].” No further explanation. Nothing. For three years.

Notably, when all this happened, Chapters 3 and 4 weren’t out yet. Those released earlier this year, and with them, more Weird Route content and a couple of horrifying, hidden scenes focused on Noelle in particular. Then two weeks ago, those who had received the confirmation email the first time received a new email that just said, “Second chance,” and found that the form had been reopened. The community efforts were more coordinated this time, with people experimenting with different combinations of time amounts in days, seconds, years, as well as other textual responses they felt made sense. A number of community members tried to document submissions to avoid duplications, though given the short notice and short time period the form was open, this was once again difficult to do.

The form closed again, and once again, participants received emails. But this time, they were different. Individuals were getting one of a collection of different responses that seemed to be based on what they submitted. For instance, those who said “1 Day” received back “Then, ‘The next day you’ll see her smile.'” People who inputted very small numbers, such as 4 seconds, got back, “So, ‘she never stopped smiling'”. There are a bunch of other creepy answers, like “Do you think that means she still can?” and “Then, ‘It was the first time she ever smiled in her life.'”

Many emails ended with another sentence: “Move forward with this answer,” seemingly indicating the submission was on the right track.

Embark Studios has outlined its plan to deal with Arc Raiders cheaters after they became a hot topic in the community earlier this week.

Cheaters are a concern for nearly all multiplayer games, but they’ve become an especially controversial subject amongst players recently. Reports of cheaters seem to be increasing in recent weeks, as players share clips and stories of others shooting them through walls and from unreachable areas. The conversation then reached a boiling point when popular streamers like Ninja, Nadeshot, and Shroud began publicly voicing their concerns.

“This might be my last day playing for a very long time… Embark has zero control over their game right now”

Shroud says he might quit ARC Raiders due to how bad cheaters have gotten pic.twitter.com/zJfXO4xAg0

— Jake Lucky (@JakeSucky) January 7, 2026

Embark confirmed it is taking action against the cheating problem in a message posted in its official Discord server. The note comes with an acknowledgement of the discussion surrounding cheaters in the community, promising that the studio is “taking this issue very seriously” as it awaits further feedback.

“Over the next few weeks, we are implementing significant changes to our rulesets and deploying new detection mechanisms to identify and remove cheaters,” Embark said. “This includes updating our Anti-Cheat systems for improved detection and bans, as well as applying client-side fixes specifically addressing the ‘out of map’ glitch.”

It’s unclear if Embark’s efforts will be enough to deter the most problematic Arc Raiders offenders, but it’s at least a sign the studio will take action through January. The message also comes with a promise specifically for streamers, saying the team is “introducing tools for streamers to help mitigate stream sniping.”

“Thank you for your valuable feedback and for helping us make ARC Raiders a fair and fun experience for everyone,” the message concludes.

Arc Raiders launched for PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X | S October 30, 2025. While we wait to see how Embark’s anti-cheat effort play out, you can read up on some of the other updates the studio has planned for the future. You can also learn about why some of the more aggressive players may find themselves in lobbies with others who favor PvP.

Michael Cripe is a freelance writer with IGN. He’s best known for his work at sites like The Pitch, The Escapist, and OnlySP. Be sure to give him a follow on Bluesky (@mikecripe.bsky.social) and Twitter (@MikeCripe).

2013’s Batman: Arkham Origins may not be the most critically beloved entry in the series, but many fans would argue it’s the game with the best Batman costume design. Now Hot Toys is finally giving that costume its due with a truly stunning 1/6 scale figure.

Check out the slideshow gallery below for an early look at Hot Toys’ Batman: Arkham Origins figure:

This figure stands an impressive 12.7 inches tall and features a detailed recreation of the character model from the game. The head boasts individually rotating eyeballs and interchangeable faceplates that allow for different expressions.

The figure also includes various other accessories you’d expect, including Batman’s various gadgets and weapons, electric gauntlets, and interchangeable hands.

This is hardly Hot Toys’ first time exploring the Arkham universe. In the past, they’ve released figures based on Batman’s Arkham City and Arkham Knight designs, along with several of the alternate suits from those games and villains like Joker and Harley Quinn. As for Arkham Origins specifically, Hot Toys previously tackled Deathstroke (who makes a cameo appearance in the photos above) and Batman’s armored XE Suit.

The Batman: Arkham Origins figure is priced at $300 and is available to preorder on Sideshow Collectibles. The figure is expected to release between January and June of 2027.

For more Hot Toys fun, check out their Killing Joke-inspired Joker figure and their massive The Fantastic Four: First Steps Galactus figure.

Jesse is a mild-mannered staff writer for IGN. Allow him to lend a machete to your intellectual thicket by following @jschedeen on BlueSky.