Author: Game Infliction

You never quite know what you’re going to find on the other side when you step through the stargate, and when it came to Stargate: Timekeepers, I certainly wasn’t expecting a very competent stealth tactics game. All the same, slinking across varied alien worlds and setting up well-timed tactical ambushes ended up feeling like a natural fit for the types of budget-constrained capers SG-1 got up to in earlier seasons of the show. The story isn’t anything to report back to command about, but the vibes and presentation hit the spot.

Timekeepers definitely takes its cues from the Stargate: SG-1 television show – though it focuses on a completely new team of quippy characters. The slightly campy tone is pleasantly reminiscent of an era before prestige TV, when things were a bit less grim and serious and you might see United States Air Force officers knocking out alien soldiers and tying them up with ropes. At the same time, it doesn’t come off as overly goofy or comedic, striking what I found to be a good balance.

The fast-paced plot is set in the same universe as SG-1 and Atlantis, picking up during the seventh season’s climactic Battle of Antarctica, before following a parallel adventure completely new to Timekeepers. Therein lies a bit of a problem, though. If you don’t know anything about Stargate lore, the writers are basically hurling you off a cliff. There’s no effort made to explain what Stargate Command does, who the Jaffa or the Goa’uld are, or why Earth is currently at war with someone named Anubis. I had to go wiki diving to remember what was going on at this point, and I’ve seen the whole series multiple times – granted, it’s been more than 10 years since my last rewatch. It seems intended for existing SG-1 fans only.

The team I assembled across Timekeepers’ seven initial missions – the first half of what is planned to be a 14-episode “season,” with the second half coming later this year – is made up of soldiers and misfits who are a bit two-dimensional in their portrayal, but endearing enough. Each deployment can take anywhere from 45 minutes to a couple hours, depending heavily on how careful or aggressive I wanted to be. Our intrepid leader is Store Brand Samantha Carter: Colonel Eva McCain. No, I mean really – from appearance to personality, it seems almost like this character originally was intended to be Amanda Tapping’s Colonel Carter from the TV show. At least, they’re definitely cut from the same cloth. Not that I mind that too much.

We also have the too-cool-for-school sniper Max Bolton, a rebel Jaffa named A’ta who comes with her very own “Indeed,” and the nervous, quirky scientist Derrick Harper. The way they play off each other in dialogue isn’t especially impactful, but how their skills mesh together certainly can be. Timekeepers reminds me, more than anything, of now-defunct studio Mimimi’s excellent Shadow Tactics and Shadow Gambit games. Each area is a delicate knot of enemy vision cones and well-placed obstacles that I loved picking apart from the edges using each character’s abilities in combination.

Most areas can be approached with a range of playstyles. Eva is particularly good at a run-and-gun doctrine, clearing out whole squads with an exciting barrage of grenades and rifle fire. Limited ammo and the risk of alerting other nearby enemies meant I had to carefully consider when to go full commando, though. Alien expert Sam Watson, on the opposite end of the spectrum, can disguise himself as a Jaffa and even speak their language, keeping guards distracted with small talk while the others slip by. This mechanic is especially interesting as only enemies of lower rank will be fooled, so missions with Sam often revolve around looking for more senior warriors you can isolate and knock out to upgrade your disguise.

The handy Tactical Mode makes it easier to coordinate multiple characters. I found the ability to issue multiple orders and automatically sync them to happen at the same time especially useful, for instance, when you need to knock out two guards without either of them noticing. I was a bit disappointed there’s no action queue, however – though you can tell a character to move to a specific spot before using an ability. Selecting multiple characters can also be a bit of a pain, especially if they’re not standing close together. I would have killed for a Ctrl + A command to select all my units like in an RTS, or the ability to hold Shift when hitting the F1 – F5 keys to add a squadmate to my existing selection, instead of cycling through them one by one.

Also, for all the freedom of playstyle it offers, Timekeepers doesn’t really reward stealth or nonviolence in any particularly impactful ways. There are lethal and nonlethal attacks, and for the first few missions I tried to only use nonlethal ones. The Jaffa are just brainwashed humans, after all. But I was never even verbally commended for doing so, much less given any kind of mechanical reward. Decisions in one episode don’t seem to carry over to the next.

And while you will be told how many alarms you triggered at the end of a mission, there isn’t even any kind of medal or S-rank for going undetected. The only reasons to use stealth and nonlethal options at all, it seems, are to keep from alerting certain enemies who can call reinforcements – which will make the whole level harder – and the fact that ammo and grenades are a limited resource.

Timekeepers doesn’t look half bad, all things considered. The portraits, character models, and particle effects aren’t especially modern or detailed. But each level features rich and interesting alien environments, from a starlit forest settlement to an ancient jungle temple, with plenty of character to keep things from feeling repetitive. The level design also provided a satisfying difficulty curve, adding in new elements, like patrolling drones, at a steady pace and always making me think on my feet to adapt to the scenario.

I also really liked the mission intros, which are formatted like the “Previously on…” recaps from the TV show. A couple of them cut off awkwardly and seem like they may be missing some animations that were meant to transition seamlessly into a level. But it’s a nice touch. I feel like I’m playing through an episode of SG-1, and that’s a welcome experience for me. I also have to give a nod to the clean, readable UI and dialogue subtitles. The loading screens even show coordinates being dialed in on the stargate, which is pretty neat.

Things can go a bit sideways sometimes, though. In one mission, a patrolling enemy randomly found a body I had hidden something like 30 minutes ago and alerted all of his friends to come look for me. But we’d already left the area completely, so they were just running around randomly in a panic, bunching up on ladders, and completely breaking each-other’s AI and animations. What makes this worse is that you can’t save your game if there are any enemies alerted anywhere on the map. So I just had to hit fast-forward – a great feature for speeding up patrol cycles, and dealing with nonsense like this – and wait for them to calm down and go back to their posts.

Netflix Games is doing better than ever, says Netflix. But that may not be saying much, given past data on the streaming service’s gaming offering.

Today, Netflix reported its full-year earnings for fiscal 2023, during which it reported that gaming engagement “tripled” last year. This was in part due to the release of the Grand Theft Auto trilogy on the service near the end of the year. Netflix calls the GTA Trilogy its “most successful launch to date in terms of installs and engagement, with some consumers clearly signing up simply to play these games.”

But while that’s all well and good for Netflix, don’t expect to see the streaming service competing with Sony and Xbox anytime soon. CNBC reported data from Apptopia back in October that indicated less than 1% of all Netflix’s then roughly-250 million subscribers were playing a Netflix game on a daily basis.

Netflix seems aware of its own position as a grain of video game sand here, too. The company acknowledged itself that its games division was “small” and “certainly not yet material relative to our film and series business.” It’s intent on further growth, too, stating that it’s interested in “broadening” its offerings in the space and continuing to invest. For now, it hasn’t said anything further on rumors that it may introduce in-app purchases or ads to its games platform down the line – those ideas seem to just be discussions internally for now.

Elsewhere in Netflix’s earnings, we learned that the company saw a 13 million subscriber surge in the final quarter of the year, and that it’s planning to release Squid Game season 2 sometime in 2024.

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

Note: This review is specifically of the PC version of Palworld available through Steam. Because the Xbox version and the PC version available via the Microsoft Store (both on Game Pass) has significantly more issues and different features, which the developer says is due to the certification process, we will post a separate review of that version later this week.

Nothing about what Palworld does seems like it should work in the slightest. A thinly veiled Pokémon clone where you and your collectible monsters shoot people in the face with literal guns? A base building survival game where you use your kidnapped creatures as laborers, and may even resort to cooking and eating those unpaid employees when times get tough? An open-world co-op adventure where you and your friends thwack helpless sheep over the head with baseball bats to harvest their wool? Defying the odds, this wholly irreverent, gun-toting take on the creature collection genre has been unrelentingly fun across the 100-plus hours I’ve spent shooting cartoon kittens in the face. As an early access game, it’s got plenty of bugs and performance issues to go around, and sure, it shamelessly cribs the design for many of its collectible creatures. But its survival mechanics are intuitive and deep, its action-packed combat is silly and satisfying, and exploring its world in search of new Pals to kick the snot out of hasn’t come close to getting old. I am baffled to report, dear reader, that Palworld is very good.

Despite the clear, eyebrow-raising inspiration it takes from a certain creature collecting powerhouse, Palworld more closely resembles a formulaic survival game like Grounded, with a roster of lovable monsters to capture as a clever twist on that formula. You find yourself inexplicably dropped into the wilderness of a strange land filled with oversized, dangerous beasts called Pals. From there you’ll need to build a base, hilariously force the local fauna into your servitude, and upgrade your gear to wage war against the rotten human factions who try to murder you with assault weapons every chance they get. You won’t find yourself hanging out in idyllic towns or challenging gym leaders to friendly contests – this isn’t that kind of adventure. Instead, your goal is to survive the harsh land and face off against evil and/or psychotic Pal trainers who raze villages, attack your base, and command foreboding towers and dungeons filled with goons who shoot to kill.

And yeah, tonally, that’s an utterly unhinged combination. One moment I was taking in pastoral views as I explored for new Pals, gliding, climbing, crafting, and cooking like this was an off-brand Tears of the Kingdom. The next moment I was firing guns at armed thugs and considering the possibility of butchering a Pal who had been mentally broken by the poor working conditions of my sweatshop so I could consume his meat to avoid starvation. Rather than not addressing the questionable aspects of the creature collecting genre, Palworld amusingly leans into them and lets you do absurd things like pick up your fiery fox Pal and use it as a flamethrower to burn your enemies to a crisp, or equip your monkey Pal with a machine gun (which sure beats using Tail Whip). Once you get over how incredibly weird that all feels, it’s a complete blast.

It’s hard to overstate just how effortlessly funny Palworld is, often feeling like a satire of the creature collection genre rather than another straight-faced iteration of it. For example, later in my playthrough I accidentally discovered you can capture humans in your Palspheres, binding them to your will and allowing you to put them to work at your camp or take them with you on adventures like regular Pals – an insane inclusion that’s never advertised to the player and has no purpose aside from being ridiculous. Or how you can just give an rocket launcher to your panda Pal, then sit back and watch him blow some poor woodland creatures into oblivion. Palworld is steeped in utter irreverence every step of the way, and that works to its benefit since creature collecting is already silly as heck to begin with.

Catching Pals out in the open world is a ton of fun, though it’s definitely a bit weird to hack a small penguin unconscious with an ax before you can stuff it into a Palsphere – or, even more alarmingly, to take out a gun and riddle it with lead. It feels extremely wrong at first, to be sure, but I found myself disturbingly used to the ritual after just a few hours. I mean, is doing the dirty work myself really all that different from battling them with another captured creature instead?

The Pals themselves, on the other hand, aren’t quite as original as the process of catching them, as I’d describe the majority of them as “almost copyright infringement.” Seriously, there’s a mouselike lightning Pal, a sassy two-legged cat Pal, a dinosaur with a flower on its head, and many more that reminded me an awful lot of some collectible monsters from the days of my youth. That said, uninspired and derivative as they are, the designs are still mostly pretty neat and have a lot of personality, which makes each one a ton of fun to hunt and do battle against. I’m especially fond of the ditzy and nigh-helpless Dumud, a complete blob of a creature who thrives bouncing around the desert in delighted defiance of Darwinism.

Though capturing, leveling up, and fighting alongside Pals is a major and awesome part of the adventure, you’ll likely spend much more time hanging out at the various bases you’ll build. It’s there you can craft useful items and facilities, cook meals, and arm yourself for war in the epic battles ahead. Just like most other survival games, you’ll need to keep a steady stream of crafting materials flowing in, like wood, stone, and food, and the key to automating that process so you don’t spend endless hours mind-numbingly chopping down trees and swatting rocks with a pickaxe is by making clever use of the Pals themselves. For example, farming could soak up lots of your time as you plant seeds, water your plots, and then harvest the crops, but once you’ve captured some Pals and put them to work at your base, you can have a plant Pal spit seeds out of its mouth, then have a water Pal blast them with water, before another Pal comes along to harvest the crop and move it to your storage container.

This Pal-based cooperation is not only ridiculously adorable to watch, but gives you even more reasons to catch every creature you find. You might not have much use for the fox-like Pal Foxparks in battle, but if you keep one at your base, whenever you fire up the grill to cook or use the furnace to smelt some ingots, your charming fire friend will come running to shoot fire at the appliance and make the task go by faster. Even the weakest creatures give you a whole new reason to catch not just one of them, but a whole bunch to be put to work at whatever it is they do well. As you level up your character and capture Pals with different abilities, you’ll be able to transform your bases from shabby camps to industrialized fortresses, complete with conveyor belts for your Pals to go to work assembling weapons and ammo for you to use against your enemies – a hilarious transformation that made me question how much better I was than the villainous rival trainers I faced out in the wilds.

That said, there are areas where the work of maintaining your bases requires far too much grinding to keep up with. For example, the near-constant need for ore, which is used in dozens of vital recipes, becomes increasingly cumbersome the longer you play as you start consuming massive amounts of the material. Instead of being able to fully automate the process of harvesting and refining this resource like you can do with wood and stone, you have to stop what you’re doing regularly to farm some ore and turn it into ingots just to fuel your basic needs. One of the most constant uses for ore is to craft Palspheres, which are used at a rapid pace as you try to catch increasingly powerful Pals with very low capture rates – and since some sphere recipes require five ingots to create a single one, I found myself halting my adventures for 20 minutes to grab a ton of ore to build spheres, then running out again an hour later, forcing me to start the process all over again. Here’s hoping they’ll add more advanced options to automate some of this stuff later on, because for the time being there’s far too much manual work required just to get back out in the field putting your Pals to good use.

Thankfully, once you get away from the base to explore the absolutely enormous map, it’s consistently fun to run around looking for hidden chests and eggs, battle dangerous boss Pals, raid dungeons stuffed with loot, and chat with the handful of NPC and vendors scattered throughout the wilderness. In one area I get chased by wild packs of snow cats and their giant papa cat, in another I found a creepy blackmarket trader who sold rare, probably illicitly obtained Pals, and in another I watched a squad of suicidal tucan Pals rush into a camp of poachers and self-detonate, sending the whole place up in smoke. Sometimes the action even finds you, like when various enemy groups or wild Pals organize raids against your bases, including a personal favorite moment when seven high-powered “Bushi” Pals attacked my camp with samurai swords (this is the nature of war, after all).

Once you unlock the ability to ride Pals, especially flying ones, the world really opens up, and you’ll find miles and miles to explore, from bamboo forests filled with goofy panda Pals to murky swamps overrun with goblin Pals. There’s even an active volcano to be scaled where all the Pals are, predictably, made of fire. Crafting gear and leveling your Pal squad to survive increasingly unwelcoming parts of the world is rewarding, not just because of all the interesting new Pals to find a capture, but because certain biomes will give you access to materials you’ll need to bring your base and equipment to the next level. Even cooler, you’ll be able to see at least a few massive spires rising in the distance from anywhere on the world map, serving as a reference for your ultimate goal – to reach them all and challenge the lethal bosses lurking within.

Like most survival games, everything Palworld offers immediately becomes more fun when joined by friends in multiplayer – up to 32 people can be in a single server on the Steam version, though that number is currently capped to a paltry four on Xbox and the PC Game Pass version. Running wild throughout the open world, taking down powerful bosses together, and managing a collective base all work without hassle (aside from some short-lived server issues right around launch). Seriously, this thing just demands to be played with friends, especially since it also alleviates some of the stress of having to grind for resources all the time… if those friends are willing to chip in and not steal all your stuff, that is.

It probably goes without saying for an Early Access game, but be warned that you are bound to encounter technical issues and bugs on occasion, though the issues I’ve seen are fortunately mostly minor so far (at least on Steam). I’ve been hit with rough framerates and stuttering, hard crashes, and multiplayer disconnects, but none of that was so commonplace or game-breaking that it ever significantly got in the way of good times. There’s a lot more that Palworld could benefit from, like a fleshed out story and more NPCs or evolutions for the Pals, to avoid so many of them becoming irrelevant at higher levels, but I’m surprised by how polished the whole package already feels at this early stage.

The world of Dragon’s Dogma 2 might seem strangely familiar, even if you never played the original. A lush, forested terrain speckled with hidden caves and cobblestone ruins; inhabited by beasts and creatures you could probably name on sight. That’s because director Hideaki Isuno intended to create a high-fantasy world that looks and feels like one that everyone would imagine a real-life fantasy world to look like.

This intention has carried over from the original Dragon’s Dogma, and is why they focused on creating a European and northern English feel, down to the vegetation and structures. The creature design has also remained grounded – as grounded as a fantasy creature can be.

“Our approach to design is to think about what a monster would look like if it existed in real life. It’s hard to remember what these monsters are named when they show up, so we’re careful to create characters that look just like their names,” Itsuno explained. “We wanted anyone in the world to be able to see its design and say, that’s a Sphynx. We interviewed lots of people from around the world after creating the first game, and there were a lot of monsters that appear in Dragon’s Dogma that people said looked exactly like their mental image of them, such as the Griffin. That’s something we’re proud of, and we’re glad we put so much attention into it. It’s great to hear people say, ‘Yes, this!’”

The Cyclops, Harpy, and Minotaur are just a few more of the creatures found in Dragon’s Dogma 2 anyone familiar with high-fantasy could probably name on sight. If you played the first, don’t expect to recognize any particular locations from Granys, though.

Itsuno said: “Dragon’s Dogma is the story of many parallel worlds, and the world we see in Dragon’s Dogma 2 is just one of these worlds. In each parallel world, Pawns interact with Arisen and other Pawns.hat’s why the story of constant rebirth that’s focused around dragons, as well as the various elements of the world shown in the previous game have all carried over to this one as well. That said, it does take place in a different parallel world, which is why I think there will be parts that are similar yet different. That’s reflected in a lot of different places, and I hope players enjoy it.”

The art director Daigo Ikeno commented that creating a parallel world actually made Dragon Dogma’s 2 design a bit more difficult. “We decided to carry on elements from [the previous Dragon’s Dogma]. Not being able to make any massive changes actually made it a little difficult, because this meant having to closely examine each little part of the game,” Ikeno said.

Rather than look at fantasy films and other more modern works as reference material for the art design of Dragon’s Dogma and Dragon’s Dogma 2, Ikeno gave the team classical paintings and medieval art that depicted ancient scenery.

“That meant we were quite restricted in a way, but I think it turned into one of Dogma’s distinguishing features,” said Keitaro Kato, the concept lead. “It was incredibly difficult to analyze what made this art good, then take that and incorporate it into our game’s maps, or into the overall atmosphere of its world.”

The team wasn’t only inspired by drawn art, but by the perspectives of real-world terrain as well. Itsuno explained: “We scouted for locations so that the team members would know what kinds of terrain I wanted and feel excited about it for themselves. This is something I’ve done ever since the first game in the series, as well as during Devil May Cry 5… We went to all kinds of places so that planning members could understand what it means to be in a place where your destination is within sight and not too far away, yet you feel excited about the path there. This mostly involved climbing mountains. I also liked ria coasts, with their clear elevation changes and blocked sightlines.”

This emphasis on blocked sightlines ties into Itsuno’s desire to make travel fun and meaningful within the world of Dragon’s Dogma 2. There’s a huge difference between traveling down a long road and being able to see your destination with nothing interesting on the way and forested paths with captivating distractions popping up around every corner. The latter is how wandering in Dragon’s Dogma 2 feels.

Itsuno said: “Travel is boring? That’s not true. It’s only an issue if your game is boring. All you have to do is make travel fun. That’s why you place things in the right location for players to discover, or come up with enemy appearance methods that create different experiences each time, or force players into blind situations where they don’t know whether it’s safe or not ten meters in front of them. We’ve put a lot of work into designing a game where you can stumble across someone and something will happen, so while it’s fine if it does have fast travel, we decided to design the kind of map where players will make the decision for themselves to travel on foot in order to enjoy the journey.”

The real-life visits and modern graphics helped the team create environments that clearly communicated its inherent danger or safety, too.

Itsuno continued: “Instead of using symbols to say ‘you’ll die if you fall here,’ we could start making everyone understand visually that they’d probably die if they fell in a certain place. It let us bring our real-life sense of danger, safety, and security into games as-is. Now that we were in an age where we could do that, I was conscious of creating those kinds of experiences whenever possible. That’s why we all went to this scary attraction where you can walk alongside the edge of the top of the Abeno Harukas skyscraper, because I wanted everyone to experience what was scary about it. I paid special attention at the start to teaching everyone and having them experience the kinds of terrain and views that move people emotionally.”

Though the level design and world of Dragon’s Dogma 2 are still very much based on the first, there are some unique differences. The clear new inclusion is the new race, beastren, and their neighboring country of Battahl.

This race was always intended to have existed in the world of Dragon’s Dogma, but due to the limitations in the PlayStation 3 era, the team was unable to implement them. Primarily, this was due to the beastren’s fur.

Curiously, the beastren’s origin stems from Capcom’s Red Earth (also referred to as War-Zard in Japan.) The fantasy fighting game included half-beast characters that ended up as inspiration for the beastren.