Author: Game Infliction

If you’ve been eyeing the Scarlet & Violet: 151 set — one of the most nostalgia-fueled Pokémon TCG releases in years — chances are you’ve come across the 151 Booster Bundle on Amazon. At $66.65 for just six packs, it might seem like a harmless splurge. But that price? It’s more than double the MSRP.

A standard six-pack bundle should cost around $29.99 to $34.99, making Amazon’s markup not just steep, but straight-up bad value. Despite the flashy marketing and glowing reviews, there’s no guarantee you’ll pull anything even close to worth that price. You’re basically paying premium for the privilege of disappointment.

Pokémon TCG 151 Booster Bundle

Cloudheim, an upcoming action-adventure RPG from developer Noodle Cat Games that we exclusively announced earlier this year, is now showing off its crafting system and shop system in a new gameplay trailer. You can watch it above and take a look at crafting and shop system screenshots in the new gallery below.

Noodle Cat explains that while they hope players will enjoy crafting in Cloudheim, it won’t be forced upon them: “Crafting in Cloudheim doesn’t force players to deeply engage if they don’t want to – you can spend time finding specific materials, or just throw all your loot into stations and see what happens.” Furthermore, there’s also smelting and forging, alchemy, and cooking.

Shopkeeping is also an opt-in gameplay element – but if you’re going to do it, you’d better do it right. “Correctly displaying items (e.g., swords on weapon racks) increases profits,” Noodle Cat explained. “Decorative items and banners improve shop appeal, influencing shopper behavior. Cleanliness and layout also impact success.”

You can wishlist Cloudheim on Steam if you’re interested.

Ryan McCaffrey is IGN’s executive editor of previews and host of both IGN’s weekly Xbox show, Podcast Unlocked, as well as our monthly(-ish) interview show, IGN Unfiltered. He’s a North Jersey guy, so it’s “Taylor ham,” not “pork roll.” Debate it with him on Twitter at @DMC_Ryan.

With poorly lit metal halls, flickering neon lights, a larger than life mechanical sprawl, and a cyborg ninja protagonist, Steel Seed has a lot on the surface that piqued my interest, as I can be easily lured into B-tier sci-fi stories if things look weird enough. Unfortunately, this one is weird in all the wrong ways. Its stealth action and energetic platforming are its best traits, but they are uneven across the roughly 12-hour campaign. Some really cool moments and creatures end up lost amongst miles of dreary and uninspired spaces, overshadowed by frustrating combat and a flimsy story that sap whatever shuddering signs of life this machine had in it.

The problems with Steel Seed start with its hero’s generic presentation. Zoe, awkwardly plucky and earnest daughter of the creator of the dystopia she woke up into, feels completely out of sync with the post-apocalyptic sci-fi world she is in. She’s well-voiced, but not well-written, relying heavily on some vapid self-reflection about a past she can’t fully remember and superhero movie-style banter with her robot pa. Ma’am, you’re the last living human on a planet overrun by killer robots and the only chance to bring humanity back from extinction. I need you to stop quipping and lock in.

Steel Seed is dense with lore about how some major corporation was humanity’s last hope until the CEO (who is also Zoe’s father) got double crossed by whoever and whatever, but its plot is light on interesting happenings or compelling reasons to continue to the next objective outside of “because it’s telling me to.” There’s a part that technically satisfies the literary definition of a plot twist, but you see it coming so far in advance that it might as well be a naked man covered in gold.

You’ll spend a great deal of your time navigating this post-human settlement by hopping on platforms and scurrying up walls. It’s all very reminiscent of the Uncharted games, where shimmying across a ledge could be filled with enough mishaps and jump scares to make the process a tense one. Steel Seed even goes a step further, making its high stakes sequences of sliding through collapsing structures or outrunning gunfire feel way more precarious as it’s pretty easy to fail some of the more intense sections.

Light puzzle mechanics can add some small speed bumps to your progress, often in the form of commanding your R2D2-coded companion, KOBY, to shoot unreachable buttons while your hands and feet are busy keeping you firmly attached to a wall. These were just dynamic enough to stay engaging, which is all I can ask for for a game that has platforming but isn’t entirely focused on that kind of gameplay, a la Astrobot. Things do get more clever in certain chase encounters, where your perspective changes from 3D to 2D in order to outrun enemy fire from the background – but these moments are scarce, and Steel Seed does nothing that clever anywhere else.

The vast environments you’ll be doing all this poking around in are very hit and miss, visually speaking. There are quite a few stretches of pretty generic techno-hallways or oft-troped rust-chic junk yards that don’t really inspire awe if you’ve seen any science fiction ever. But occasionally those halls will be filled with weird little robot bugs, or a X-story tall mech that rivals the scale of some of God of War’s largest creatures will rise to greet you, and you can’t help but think, “they cooked with this one, at least.” Generally, though, there’s very little about the world Zoe is tasked with saving even worth remembering, something me and the amnesiac protagonist have in common.

There are a lot of enemies in all of these spaces looking to stop you from saving the day, and you can take care of them with stealthy wit or brute force. The stages where you find most enemies are rife with nooks and crannies to hide in and precariously placed obstacles to use as distractions, or to cause killing blows themselves. At first stealth is pretty simple thanks to the very slim variety of different bad guys that patrol around, as well your limited starting skills. I was happy to see that blossom into something more robust as time went on, though. Even though you don’t really see more than five different enemy types in any given encounter throughout Steel Seed, each one is so different and they are mixed together well enough to create checkpoints that can be a real challenge to navigate safely.

Sections get larger and more dense with lookouts that have overlapping patrols and vision vectors, and while some of the mid-game scenarios hit the “just right” mix of enemies and area size, the late-game stealth sections drag on way too long. The fairly strict checkpoints also mean you need to start from the beginning of the section if you fail during it, sometimes throwing 15-20 minutes of patient stabbing and enemy hacking directly into the recycling bin when you slip up. You also run out of new ways to take down foes pretty early on, and I found myself setting a lot of the same traps throughout. So while the hunt started tense, it became stale sooner than I’d hoped.

Zoe and KOBY gain more tricks as they progress, but you sort of have to earn the ability to buy them with the points you find by breaking containers or enemy robots, completing what can often feel like busy work first. Kill five enemies without being seen and you’ll earn the privilege of buying the extremely useful glitch mine skill, which goes a long way towards killing bots without being seen. A lot of the skills have requirements that can come naturally through play, like scanning a number of enemies individually in order to unlock a version of the scan that hits everything of interest in a small zone – ,but others were more tedious tasks, such as searching the mostly bland locations for hidden pick-ups or completing more challenging skill tests like killing a certain amount of enemies a specific way in a small window of time, which were things I happily avoided.

I less than happily avoided outright combat like a computer virus, though. From the buggy lock-on that lets you focus on an enemy but will still pull you towards other nearby foes, to the mashy attack strings with mushy responsiveness, to the dry attack animations from both Zoe and all of her victims, confronting your foes directly is generally a mess. None of the skills you unlock make combat feel any better, despite giving you some admittedly strong options for late-game encounters that can spin out of control with the number of potential participants in any given melee, attacking from off screen with reckless abandon. By the end of the campaign, if I got caught during a stealth section, I’d more often just reload at the last checkpoint than clean up the foes that caught me because it was simply less boring that way. Zones where you have no choice but to fight in open combat were consistently my least favorite parts of the Steel Seed, but mercifully, they are few and far between.

Baldur’s Gate 3 has seen a significant boost in player numbers on Steam following the release of the hotly anticipated Patch 8, and this has set developer Larian up nicely to focus on its next big game.

The enormous, game-changing Patch 8 launched last week and with it added 12 new subclasses to Baldur’s Gate 3. Its release sparked a player surge as fans flocked to test out the new subclasses as well as the brand new photo mode.

On Steam, Baldur’s Gate 3 hit a player concurrent peak of 169,267 over the weekend — an incredible feat for a single-player focused role-playing game in its second year. Sony and Microsoft do not make PlayStation nor Xbox player numbers publicly available.

Reflecting on the release of Patch 8, Larian chief Swen Vincke tweeted to say he expects Baldur’s Gate 3 to “continue to do well for quite some time,” not just because of the Patch 8 player boost, but because of “thriving” mod support.

This in turn gives Larian “room to focus on making our next big thing as good as we can,” Vincke continued. “We’ve got big shoes to fill.”

“Feeling good today about where we are with BG3,” Vincke said. “Patch 8 got a lot of people playing again. It took a lot of development effort but I’m happy we did it.

“With mod support thriving, I think the game will now continue to do well for quite some time. It gives us room to focus on making our next big thing as good as we can and that focus is more than welcome. We’ve got big shoes to fill.”

Patch 8, as Larian has signalled, is the final major update for the game and draws a line under what has been a remarkable time for the developer. Baldur’s Gate 3 launched to critical acclaim and enormous commercial success back in 2023, and has continued to sell strongly throughout 2024 and into 2025.

Larian shocked the gaming world by confirming its intention to leave Baldur’s Gate 3 and Dungeons & Dragons behind to work on a brand new game, which it teased at various points before announcing a media blackout to focus on the new mystery project.

D&D owner Hasbro, however, has teased plans to continue with the series. Speaking to IGN at the Game Developers Conference, SVP of digital games at Hasbro, Dan Ayoub, let on that with Larian moving on, Hasbro has “a lot of people very interested in Baldur’s Gate.”

“We’re kind of working out our plans for the future and what we’re going to be doing with that,” Ayoub said. “And actually, in pretty short order, we’re going to have some stuff to talk about around that.”

Ayoub didn’t offer any further information about whether this “stuff” would be a full-blown new Baldur’s Gate in the works, or some sort of crossover like the characters had with Magic: The Gathering previously. However, he did acknowledge that he eventually wants a Baldur’s Gate 4, but that making one will likely take a while.

“It’s somewhat of an unenviable position,” he said. “I mean, we’re not in a hurry. Right? That’s the thing, we’re going to take a very measured approach… We’ve got a lot of plans, a lot of different ways to go about it. We’re starting to think about, okay, yeah, we’re ready to start dipping toes a little bit and talking about a few things. And I think, in really short order, like I said, again, not to over-tease that point, we’re going to have some other things to talk about around that.”

Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.

Surprise! Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones has just been added to the Nintendo Switch Online library.

Although originally released on Game Boy Advance way back in 2004, The Sacred Stones didn’t come to the West until 2005. It tells the standalone tale of twin heirs to the throne of Renais, Eirika and Ephraim, who fight to free their kingdom and uncover the secret behind their former ally’s treachery.

For some, this may be the first opportunity to play The Sacred Stones — not only did it release a full 20 years ago, but at the time it was only the second Fire Emblem game to release outside Japan, and the final to be developed for GBA.

We thought Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones was great, awarding it 8.5/10 way back in 2005, saying: “Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones is to the original Fire Emblem just as Advance Wars 2 was to the original Advance Wars. It’s only a letdown in the sense that all this game really offers is an entirely different storyline on top of the pre-existing gameplay built for the GBA Fire Emblem released in 2003.”

Nintendo Switch Online is a subscription-based online gaming service for the Nintendo Switch gaming platform. Memberships include online functionality, allowing you to compete or cooperate with friends, as well as a collection of classic Nintendo games spanning four decades, including titles from the NES, SNES, Game Boy, Nintendo 64, and (with the upcoming launch of the Nintendo Switch 2) the new GameCube libraries. A free seven-day trial is also available.

Talking of Nintendo’s highly anticipated new console: Nintendo Switch 2 was supposed to arrive on June 5, 2025, with prices starting at $449.99, but the Nintendo Switch 2 pre-order date was delayed in the United States after import tariffs enacted by President Trump sent financial markets spiraling. Consequently, Nintendo Switch 2 pre-orders will now go live later this week on April 24, with the price still fixed at $449.99.

You can currently register your interest with Nintendo to be notified about pre-orders for Nintendo Switch 2 and accessories from My Nintendo Store. Invitations to purchase will be sent via email on a first-come, first-served basis, although they will prioritize users with a 12-month Nintendo Switch Online membership and at least 50 gameplay hours as of April 2, 2025.

Vikki Blake is a reporter, critic, columnist, and consultant. She’s also a Guardian, Spartan, Silent Hillian, Legend, and perpetually High Chaos. Find her at BlueSky.