Author: Game Infliction

You ever wonder who the first person to put peanut butter and chocolate together was? Part of me feels like whoever it was must be loaded; I mean, you’ve combined two already great flavors into something that Reese’s would more or less build a whole brand on. And then part of me thinks it plays out like the hypothetical guy who invented the Chicken McNugget in The Wire. A pat on the back from a big shot, and then it’s back to the basement to figure out a way to make the fries taste better. I don’t know the answer; I hope it’s the former. But every now and then, you come across an idea, a combination of things, that’s so good that you wonder how nobody’s ever done it before. And every time my squad and I sprinted back to our time-traveling dropship, stopping only to deal with the Time Reapers that stood in our way, I wondered how the hell nobody had ever said “Hey, what if we combined Overcooked and Gears of War?” pre-Pizza Bandit.

Pizza Bandit’s setup is pretty simple. You’re Malik, a former bounty hunter with dreams of being a chef who is pulled back into the bounty game when he’s scammed out of his pizza shop and his former crew needs his help to get out of a jam. Pizza Bandit’s writing is pretty silly, but that’s part of the charm. I can’t get mad when Albert, the android that upgrades your weapons, tells me he doesn’t know how to apologize for what happened to my pizza shop because he’s just an android, or when my pilot waxes nostalgic about how he misses the fog, or when someone utters the odd nonsensical line. It’s too silly, and the whole setup is just there to, well… set up Pizza Bandit’s wackiness.

See, you’re not just any bounty-hunting crew. You’re a time-traveling bounty hunting crew, and that means you’ll be going all over space and time to get the job done. Don’t ask me how any of this works. All I know is that pizza heals and bullets kill, and that the Time Reapers — nasty little buggers that seem to be invading every timeline — don’t want this pizza shop owner to make any dough. And that’s not gonna fly.

What makes Pizza Bandit unique is that you’re not just shooting stuff. You’re also, well, kinda playing Overcooked. After squading up, my first mission saw my crew (you can play with up to three friends) heading to the Restaurant from N owhere, a hidden outpost run by another bandit crew. Our job: fulfill the pizza orders for other bounty hunting teams, and send them off in time-traveling rocket pods. That meant putting together the right type of pizza, getting it to the oven, making sure we were getting their drink orders right, and adding some extra bullets for when things got spicy, cramming it all into a pod, and doing it on time while fighting off the Time Reapers, who really, really don’t like supporting small businesses.

And that’s where the other part of the Overcooked/Gears of War marriage comes into play. See, the Time Reapers mean business, and you’re not going to talk them out of some time reaping. That’s their whole bag. The only solution, fellow bandit, is incredible violence. I’ve played several builds of Pizza Bandit at this point, and let me tell you, your arsenal is up to the task. You start with your choice of assau lt rifle, minigun, and sniper rifle, but the fun really begins when you start unlocking your secondary weapons by completing jobs. They start simple: landmines, grenades, that sort of thing, but once you unlock the disco ball that attracts enemies and gets them dancing before it explodes? Whew, buddy. And the sentry turret? Perfection. You could slice and dice them Time Reapers with a katana, but have you ever considered using a pizza slicer as big as a man? It’ll change your life.

And the Time Reapers will force you to use everything in your arsenal. You got your standard guys who will just run at you, but there are also Time Reapers that’ll crawl around on all fours, Terminator-looking ones that will leap at you, giant ones with hammers, guys who throw fireballs (these can really ruin your day), the works. You gotta prioritize.

Pizza Bandit is at its best when you’re with a good team, calling out orders. A good match should be shouts of “We need a pepperoni pie!” and “I’m on the Coke!” and “I’m down!” interspersed with lots and lots of gunfire. Simple choices, like when to call down your own, once-a-mission rocket pod full of pizza and supplies, and more complex ones, like where to put it (you can block off a stairway, for instance), spice things up, too.

And here’s the thing: so far, I’ve just talked about Restaurant from Nowhere, which is only the first level. Pizza Bandit isn’t a one-trick pony. One of my favorite levels has you taking over a sushi joint and making sure you have the right stuff on the delivery turntable for your customers. Sometimes that means running downstairs and grabbing a big ol’ tuna, taking that bad boy upstairs, and chopping him up before the Time Reapers whack you and you drop him. Other times that means frying an egg, or making a cucumber roll. You gotta stay ahead of the curve, because new customers are prioritized over old ones, and the Time Reapers aren’t gonna sit there and wait for you to plate your masterpiece.

Sometimes, you’re not even cooking food at all. Another favorite level, Wizard’s Tomb, has you exploring a magically booby-trapped tomb in search of a sarcophagus. You’ll have to navigate the tomb’s traps, solve basic puzzles to reveal the way forward, and take out the arcane heart powering the whole enterprise before getting to the sarcophagus itself, which you’ll naturally transport with jetpacks before booking it back to your ship. It isn’t enough to get any given job done; you gotta get home, too. Just another day in the life of a pizza bandit.

There are more, of course: in one, you’ll defend a cabin with Dr. Emmert Browne (Great Scott, Jofsoft, I see what you’re doing here, and I like it!) while he invents the time travel device that makes your whole business profitable. Winning it all means keeping him warm, satiating his hunger with rabbit or venison, and stopping all those nasty Time Reapers (and Wendigos?) who are trying to stop time travel from happening. You’d think that the Time Reapers would understand time paradoxes, but I guess not. Can’t reap time if there’s no time to reap, y’all.

Or maybe you’ll break into an enormous safe with a laser drill, like you’re roleplaying the opening scene of Michael Mann’s Thief with a drill that’s constantly exploding. That seems safe, right? But hey, apparently there’s a magical cookbook in that vault whose recipes can alter reality, and we’re being paid to get it, exploding drill or not. A Pizza Bandit always gets the job done.

And there’s always time to do your best Breaking Bad impersonation and help a couple of guys cook some “magic powder” and hide it inside some chicken. Oh, and you have to kill and cook the chickens. Only fresh, never frozen, baby. Pizza Bandit is always ludicrous, and its inspirations are obvious, but it’s never less than fun.

Between missions, it’s back to Pizza Bandit (your restaurant), where you can acquire and upgrade your weapons, decorate Pizza Bandit itself, use the ingredients you find during missions to bake and share a pie for some stat boosts on your next run, or get some spiffy new duds for your bounty hunter. The milk carton backpack is a classic choice, if I do say so myself, but I’m still saving up for one of the cat ones. The things we do for fashion, am I right? Then it’s right back to it. A bandit’s work is never done.

Sometimes, you don’t know you want something until you get it. I didn’t know I wanted Pizza Bandit until the first time I played it at PAX two years ago. It was one of those games that generated a lot of word of mouth, but it’s one of those concepts that doesn’t seem like it’ll work until you get a controller in your hands and everything makes sense. I don’t know why we’ve never gotten something like Pizza Bandit before, but once I played it, I knew I wanted more. Pizza heals, bullets kill, and Pizza Bandit rocks. If Jofsoft can stick the landing, we’re in for a tasty slice of New York pie.

Dragon Age star Alix Wilton Regan has given her personal response to the backlash faced by last year’s Dragon Age: The Veilguard, and blamed the “mixed reactions” on people who “wanted to see the game fail, or wanted to see [BioWare] fail.”

The actor, who plays the Female Inquisitor in both Dragon Age: Inquisition and Dragon Age: The Veilguard, told IGN that she was “absolutely devastated” to see BioWare’s latest game fail to find a larger audience, despite mostly positive review scores from critics.

Speaking during a new interview discussing her many iconic video game characters to date — as well as her role in Microsoft’s upcoming Perfect Dark reboot — Wilton Regan said she had loved her time as BioWare’s Inquisitor, though did not believe the character would now return.

“I feel absolutely devastated for BioWare as a studio that they got such mixed reactions to the game,” Wilton Regan said of the response to The Veilguard. “I personally thought it was a really strong game. I thought it was just BioWare being more BioWare.

“I also think a lot of people kind of wanted to see it fail, or wanted to see [BioWare] fail, either because they’re just really bad people on the internet — of which there are unfortunately many, as we have discovered.”

At launch, The Veilguard was review-bombed online. Criticism of the game being “woke” centred on its inclusion of a non-binary companion character, and the ability for the player to choose to be transgender. On Steam, Dragon Age: The Veilguard now sits with a ‘Mixed’ player respose, with user-defined tags for the game describing it under “LGBTQ+” and “politics” labels.

“People were attacking the game before it was released,” Wilton Regan continued. “It’s ridiculous. How can you judge a game, a book, a film, a TV show before it’s actually released? You can’t. It’s an idiotic stance to take.”

In January, publisher EA said Dragon Age: The Veilguard had “underperformed” versus its expectations by around 50%, just days after the game’s director Corrine Busche confirmed she was leaving the company. Meanwhile, other BioWare staff who worked on the game were laid off.

In the same month, BioWare signalled it had released its final update for Dragon Age: The Veilguard, with no further content announced or expected.

“I only ever want to see the folks from BioWare thrive, because I adore them,” Wilton Regan concluded. “And whatever they go on to do next I have no doubt their talents will be richly rewarded. We’re really lucky we’ll get more gold from them in the future.”

A slimmed-down BioWare is now working on Mass Effect 5, which currently does not have a release date.

Tom Phillips is IGN’s News Editor. You can reach Tom at tom_phillips@ign.com or find him on Bluesky @tomphillipseg.bsky.social

Warner Bros. has confirmed what Mortal Kombat 1 fans feared after the recent launch of the Definitive Edition: no new DLC characters or story chapters will be released for the game.

Mortal Kombat 1 has sold 5 million copies, with the franchise now up to 100 million. Mortal Kombat 11 became the best-selling game in the franchise by passing Mortal Kombat X’s nearly 11 million units sold worldwide soon after launch. By 2022, Mortal Kombat 11 had sold more than 15 million copies worldwide. Clearly, Mortal Kombat 1 has underperformed compared to previous games in the series.

In a tweet on the official Mortal Kombat social media account, Warner Bros. acknowledged the disappointment the news will cause players, “but our team at NetherRealm needs to shift focus to the next project in order to make it as great as we possibly can.”

Warner Bros. failed to say what this new project is, but current speculation points to Injustice 3, a continuation of NetherRealm’s DC fighting game series.

Here’s the statement in full:

We are hearing players’ requests for continued game support of Mortal Kombat 1, and, while we will continue to support Mortal Kombat 1 through balance adjustments and fixes, there will not be additional DLC characters or story chapters released from this point on.

We understand this will be disappointing for fans, but our team at NetherRealm needs to shift focus to the next project in order to make it as great as we possibly can.

March 2025’s release of the T-1000 guest character, which came a year-and-a-half after the release of Mortal Kombat 1 itself, now goes down as the game’s final major content drop. For context, in July 2021, NetherRealm announced it had started work on its next project (Mortal Kombat 1) and, as a result, there would be no further DLC for Mortal Kombat 11. That announcement came two years and three months after the release of the game. Today’s announcement comes one year and eight months after the release of Mortal Kombat 1.

Players are already bringing up prior comments from NetherRealm development chief Ed Boon, who had promised fans years of support. Indeed, many are now pointing to a September 2024 tweet from Boon, who at the time moved to reassure fans already concerned that the studio had moved onto its next game by saying: “NetherRealm is still fully committed to supporting Mortal Kombat 1 for a long time to come.”

Mortal Kombat 1 enjoyed something of a resurgence in January with the secret fight with Floyd, the pink ninja developer Boon had been teasing for years. That sparked a fun community-wide effort that breathed new life into the game. But that was a rare bright spot for what has, overall, been a disappointing release for many core Mortal Kombat fans.

What now for Mortal Kombat? Parent company Warner Bros. Discovery has indicated that it still believes the gory fighting game franchise has a future. In November, CEO David Zaslav said that on the games side of things, the company plans to double down on just four titles, one of which was Mortal Kombat. Movie adaptation Mortal Kombat 2 is due out later this year.

Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.