You are leaving the mission area, soldier! Actually, the mission area is leaving you. It is sick of your shit. It has decided that your foxhole isn’t part of acceptable reality anymore. Battlefield 6’s long-awaited battle royale mode seems likely to be revealed on 28th October. In less than a week, we could be laying eyes on the Battlefield interpretation of the well-worn Plunkbat and/or Fortnite premise of a vast map fringed by corrosive oblivion that shrinks overtime, forcing scavenging players into a claustrophobic last stand.
If you are interested in catching up on the Metroid Prime trilogy ahead of Metroid Prime 4, Nintendo isn’t making it easy at the moment. We think that should be remedied — and so does Metroid Prime series producer Kensuke Tanabe.
In the new book, Metroid Prime 1-3: A Visual Retrospective, out October 28, 2025, the legendary Japanese developer brings up the idea of a Metroid Prime 2: Echoes remake himself while musing on the multiplayer mode Echoes introduced, saying: “Retro completed the multiplayer mode without compromising on quality… Being of its time, it was designed for local play, so the number of players who actually experienced it might not have been very large. If it is remade, I would be delighted for more people to have the chance to experience it.”
Metroid Prime’s 2023 remake for Nintendo Switch, which I scored a lofty 10/10, seemed to be, ahem, priming us for more remakes, with Metroid Prime 2: Echoes being naturally on deck. In the lead up to Metroid Prime 4’s December 4 release date, a series of remake drops seemed like a natural choice. But remakes take lots of time and resources, which made it even more likely, perhaps, that Metroid Prime 2: Echoes would appear on the Nintendo Switch Online + Expansion Pack’s recently added GameCube selection. But no!
As of right now, you can’t play Metroid Prime 2: Echoes anywhere but off of an original GameCube or Wii disc. It is not easy to play any Prime game other than Metroid Prime Remastered. The Metroid Prime Trilogy for Nintendo Wii was the last time Echoes or Metroid Prime 3: Corruption were made available, and that disc has long since become a hot collector’s item. And you can forget about playing Metroid Prime Hunters for DS, or Metroid Prime Pinball, which are both locked to DS carts – and you can just plain forget about Metroid Prime Federation Force for Nintendo 3DS entirely, that’s fine.
Samuel Claiborn is IGN’s managing editor and a fixes/breaks ancient arcade and pinball machines in his garage. TCELES B HSUP to follow him @Samuel_IGN on Twitter.
Right, so, I’ve thus far failed to grow a second pair of hands, despite Edwin suggesting me and Oisin try. Sorry, mate. As a result, here’s a quick run around the houses of interesting stuff we’ve not covered from yesterday’s Galaxies showcase that I think’s worth nattering about.
Look, you can’t ask a person to choose between writing about a shadow-dropped Pacific Drive expansion and some other things that folks in the RPSverse may also be interested in hearing about. I can’t be expected to make decisions. That’s illegal.
In a statement, The Pokémon Company announced that Pokémon Legends: Z-A, which debuted on October 16, has already sold 5.8 million units worldwide, with around half of those bought for Nintendo’s new console, the Switch 2.
This means the first Pokémon game to feature real-time Pokémon battles is the fifth best-selling game of the franchise in terms of first week sales.
By comparison, that’s more than Pokémon X/Y and Let’s Go Pikachu / Eevee managed in their first weeks, but, according to X / Twitter user Pierre485, not as much as Pokémon Scarlet / Violet, Pokémon Legends: Arceus, and Pokémon Sword / Shield managed.
Pokémon Legends: Z-A is set in Lumiose City, where an urban redevelopment plan is underway to shape the city into a place that belongs to both people and Pokémon and features a new battle system. It returned 8/10 in IGN’s review in which we concluded: “Pokémon Legends: Z-A finally feels like Game Freak hitting its stride in Pokémon’s 3D era, with a fun setting to explore, a well-written story, and a total battle system overhaul that works surprisingly well.”
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.
Yesterday was Fallout Day, the date in the series’ universe when the bombs dropped and permanently turned a lot of people into those skeletons you grind into dust while tramping about in your power armour. Bethesda awakened Todd Howard from cryo-sleep, and announced some stuff in a broadcast. Fallout 4 and New Vegas are being sold to people again. Also, in admittedly more exciting news, Fallout 76‘s Burning Springs update got a proper release date.
The upcoming second series of Prime Video’s Fallout TV Show was also there, with that and the 76 update set to make December very Walton Gogginsy.
Electronic Arts (EA) has already caused some controversy in recent weeks when it announced it had been acquired by the PIF (Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund), Silver Lake, and Affinity Partners for a cool $55 billion.
Now, the company is back at it again. In a new announcement, Stability AI (of which acclaimed movie creator James Cameron is part of its board of directors) has confirmed that it has entered into a new partnership with EA to “co-develop transformative generative AI models, tools, and workflows that empower EA’s artists, designers, and developers to reimagine how games are made”.
Instruments of Destruction Explodes onto Xbox Series X|S Today
Luke Schneider, Founder of Radiangames
Summary
Development history and what to expect from the highly-destructible sandbox.
Developed by Red Faction: Guerrilla’s lead technical designer Luke Schneider.
How fan feedback helped shaped gameplay design.
It’s been a pretty long journey to get here, but today, Instruments of Destruction is launching on Xbox Series X|S.
I’ve been working as a solo developer for over 15 years now, and this has been by far my most ambitious game to date. Most of my games have been smaller, more arcade-style titles like Fireball 2 (which launched on Xbox Series X|S earlier this year) that are designed for short bursts, but Instruments of Destruction has a whole lot more that I’ve added across five years of development.
In the game’s story, you’re a new hire at Sharpe Industries as a vehicle test pilot, tasked with taking the titular instruments of destruction out to see how much havoc they can wreak across various scenarios. There are over 50 Campaign missions with various objectives – destroy everything within a time limit, avoid damaging specific structures, and so on – each with additional challenges once you’ve finished the level. As well as that, there’s a 25 mission Build & Destroy campaign which introduces you to the mechanics of building your own vehicles. To top it all off, there’s a Sandbox mode where you can build whatever you want and take it out on any unlock level to see what wonderful creations you can come up with. There’s a lot to do!
I started work on Instruments of Destruction in 2020 with a simple goal in mind – I wanted to make a game about destruction. I had previously worked as the lead technical designer on Red Faction: Guerrilla, and while I’d worked closely with a team of programmers to make sure the destruction in that game looked and felt incredible, I hadn’t actually coded any of it myself. With this as my twentieth game, I wanted to push my own skills and see what I could come up with.
I spent a long time fine-tuning the physics and destruction model into something that looked impressive and played nicely with everything else on the screen. Building your own vehicles was also key to the game, and this was a ton of hard work, making sure all the joints worked correctly and vehicles didn’t collapse as soon as you tried to drive them.
But as I got further into development, it became clear that it wasn’t very beginner-friendly. I’d added all these granular tools for building vehicles and making them blow stuff up, and somehow, it felt like the game wasn’t reaching its true potential. So, I regrouped and considered what Instruments of Destruction is actually about – vehicles, physics, and destruction. How could I remove the barrier to entry so players could experience all of those elements within moments of booting up?
Looking around at other games, I saw people talking fondly about Blast Corps, a game I’d missed when it first came out. After taking a weekend to play through and understand what made it so beloved, I had the answer to my problem – a fully-featured campaign with pre-built vehicles, where you can jump in and get straight to the destruction. It took years of designing and fine-tuning to get the campaign levels just right, but in the end, it was worth it.
Instruments of Destruction wouldn’t have made it this far without the dedicated community of builders and destruction lovers who gave me their feedback throughout its development, from the early beta days through Early Access and all the way to launching in 1.0. And now with the support of publisher Secret Mode, I can bring it to an entirely new audience on consoles, complete with all the game modes and mechanics you’d get from the PC version.
I learned a lot making Instruments of Destruction, and I’ll be taking all those lessons into my next games, which will continue to be focused around pushing my skills in creating even better destruction mechanics. Thank you to everyone who helped me get the game this far and thank you to everyone who checks it out on Xbox Series X|S. I can’t wait to see what new vehicles people make!
Join Sharpe Industries as a vehicle test pilot and journey across the world to remote outposts where everything needs to be destroyed, using purpose-built wrecking machines such as flying bulldozers, tanks wielding quad rocket launchers, and ornithopters with grappling hooks.
Master these contraptions and demolish every structure in sight across two campaigns and a Sandbox mode. Deconstruct buildings piece-by-piece or take advantage of explosive chain-reactions with Instruments of Destruction’s advanced physics system.
Tackle a carnage-filled campaign filled with demolition-based objectives, then test your skills even further in dedicated high-score challenges that apply new parameters and objectives to each level. Or take a break from missions and unwind in the Sandbox mode to raze the world at your own pace.
And don’t just destroy: build. Learn how to design your own machines in a dedicated epilogue campaign for the ultimate demolition experience. Use the in-built editor to construct devastating vehicles armed with chainsaws, lasers, claws, wrecking balls, magnets, vortex generators, and much more.
Speaking as a veteran insomniac who routinely has to operate across time zones, let me share a few of my top tips for staying awake when you really want to sleep. Firstly, fill your eyes with as much light as possible – moonlight, fridgelight, phonelight, flamingoilbarrelight – and your lungs with as much bracing external air as they can take. Secondly, enlist a similarly restless friend for some mutual tickling. Thirdly, remember your failures. All of them. Fourthly, consume a carefully calibrated mixture of fresh fruit and coffee, then look up dad jokes on Reddit.
It doesn’t feel like any of these proven strategies will work in Sleep Awake, the new first-person “psychedelic” horror game from former Spec Ops: The Line director and designer Cory Davis and his team at Eyes Out. Nobody wants to tickle you here, going by the trailer. Nobody has any dad jokes to share. They just want to beat you to a bloody sludge with pipes.
Hades 2‘s true ending didn’t feel totally slam dunk satisfying to me in its 1.0 release form, and developers Supergiant Games seem to have agreed with those sorts of assessments. Hence, in the roguelike‘s first proper post-launch patch they’ve just put out as a Steam preview, some “true ending enhancements” being rolled out like a boon from a sassy god.
Shameless plug alert, if you want to read my full thoughts on that 1.0 version, you can read this here review. The short version is that it’s good.
Bluey, the popular Australian animation for children, is getting a new video game on the Switch and Switch 2 in 2026.
It’s officially titled Bluey’s Quest for the Gold Pen and is an “original story-led adventure game” by the show’s creator Joe Brumm. Halfbrick – the Fruit Ninja studio based in Bluey’s hometown of Brisbane – will be bringing this title to Nintendo platforms and other systems in partnership with PM Studios.
