Inspired is one word for it, anyway. Still, since Heroes Of Might & Magic-likes aren’t exactly giving roguelite deckbuilders a run for their ubiquity, I’m broadly receptive – the warmest and most exploitable of the four gamer emotions. Stormbinders is a turn-based strategy set in a fantasy land with bad weather and badder shimmering angelic eyeballs. You may recognise what it’s going for. This may delight you.
You’ll choose a hero, then get stuck into the campaign. “The story progresses across unique scenarios, uncovering a tale of magic, heroism, unlikely alliances and betrayals,” reads Steam. The titular Stormbinding sounds like the interesting twist here. The game randomises weather patterns each time you boot it up, which apparently adds new wrinkles to both battle and the global map.
In case you missed it, yes, Deltarune Chapters 1-4 has been confirmed for the Nintendo Switch 2, launching on day one with with console on 5th June 2025.
It might not have been super clear from the trailer, but information posted on the official website confirms that the game will include a small, special room in which you can use mouse controls on both Joy-Con 2 at the same time.
Helldivers 2’s runaway success continues. It’s just won two BAFTA Game Awards: one for Best Multiplayer, another for Best Music. That’s from five nominations. The BAFTA wins bring to an end a fruitful video game awards season, drawing a line under what has been a remarkable year for Swedish developer Arrowhead.
Let’s remember, Helldivers 2 is the fastest-selling PlayStation Studios game of all time, with an astonishing 12 million copies sold in just 12 weeks. It is a record no first-party Sony-developed game will likely ever beat. But so much has happened since that initial explosive release: a dramatic U-turn on PSN account requirements on Steam, review-bomb campaigns, and a community often at war with Helldivers 2 itself as nerfs and buffs either went too far or not far enough.
Through it all, Arrowhead has struggled to cope with a bigger, more mainstream playerbase than it’s ever had to contend with. But now, 14 months after Helldivers 2 hit PC and PlayStation 5, how does Arrowhead reflect on what’s gone before? Has it finally started to get to grips with the brutal, unforgiving world of live-service? And after that Killzone collaboration, could Warhammer 40,000 be next?
IGN sat down with Alex Bolle, production director on Helldivers 2, to find out more.
IGN: Congratulations on all the awards! When you were in the thick of development and things weren’t perhaps going as well as they might have otherwise been, did you ever imagine that a year after the game came out it would be considered one of the best games of 2024 and win all these awards?
Alex Bolle: No, no, definitely not. It’s a very humbling experience. I would say a year ago exactly, we had a hint that it would be a sweet year for us, but we were also in the thick of it. We were still fixing a lot of things, preparing our next big release for the content. So no, definitely not realizing we would get there.
Last time we spoke, we were preparing Omens of Tyranny. Even then we are like, okay, we have The Game Awards. We were preparing the whole shadow drop and everything. We were ready to make that shadow drop and be like, okay, this one is going to be fun. The awards part, maybe not that much.
I was next to my release manager trying to monitor the progress of Omens of Tyranny and the whole major order with the Illuminate. And I turned my head towards the TV at the office, it was like 2am. And I see Mikael Eriksson, the game director, just shaking hands with Snoop Dogg. And I’m like, what is going on here? Which reality are we?
So yeah, it’s been good. The Golden Joysticks, DICE, all those awards, it’s a good way to take a step back and look at the impact of the game. We’re nearing the end of the awards season and this one feels really good, because the credibility and the fame of it is just amazing. So yeah, it’s great. It’s going to be a good addition for the team, I hope.
IGN: It’s been over a year since the game came out, so people have had time now to reflect upon its release and its impact. Have you come to understand why it’s won so many awards, why it’s done so well? Why it’s resonated so much with gamers? Have you worked out why Helldivers 2 has ended up being the success it has been?
Alex Bolle: I wish the interview was two hours! It’s a whole soup recipe, or maybe more like a very sophisticated French dish. I don’t think we figured it out. One thing we keep at heart is just the interaction with the community. All the players, taking the time to really talk to them, understand what they want. We have so many devs that are continuously looking at Discord, at Reddit. We have a lot of things that come from there and we want to keep that interaction level.
That has been the thing that we thought, okay, when we prepare the fantasy for the next updates and so on, this is the part that we want to keep. We were talking about the future of the game with Mikael and it was all about that. What is it that the player wants? What is it that we are not achieving yet? What’s next? And this is always like, players in mind. It’s what works well. It’s the ability to talk to them, ability to make that kind of fantasy in the game around the Galactic War.
Last week with Pöpli IX, it’s been a year and we still manage to get those moments in-game. I think it’s important. These are needed. I was talking to our Game Master this morning, it feels good to have that. It’s one of the things we’ll cherish until we don’t make the game, but so far it’s working well.
IGN: You’ve spoken as a team before about the impact Helldivers 2 had on you as a studio, and it was a big shock to the system. Do you feel like now you’re starting to get a handle on what Helldivers 2 is, what the audience is, and settling into a sustainable, healthy way of keeping it going as a live service? Especially after having that influx of players that you weren’t perhaps expecting and the type of players that were different than what you were expecting?
Alex Bolle: We’re still trying to figure out the good recipe for a healthy cadence for the developers, for the players as well. Who do we cater to as well? It’s been super interesting. I’ve been at Arrowhead for a bit more than three years now, coming from bigger studios and yeah, there’s a lot of things that we had to go back to square one, on how it works at Arrowhead.
Johan Pilestedt, as one of our founders and the lead of the studio for so long, has been key in setting a development culture that we try to keep at heart while maintaining that live service aspect. This has been catching lightning in a bottle.
And I feel like every week is taking learnings again from the different wins and failures that we had along the way. Also from other developers. I think it’s been one of the good advantages that we had, is that success also allows us to talk way more openly with all the devs. It’s been very good on that side. It’s sharing ways to do it, better ways, more sustainable.
On who do we make the game for? That’s a tricky one. Arrowhead’s motto has always been ‘a game for everyone is a game for no one.’ When you add this amount of players, no one and everyone is a bit muddy. So it’s always a bit of a puzzle of like, okay, this content is for these type of players, this content is for this type of player. And this is where we are still working very hard with PlayStation, with the team internally to understand, hey, when you want to make this enemy, who do you have in mind?
I think it’s a very fingertip sensitivity that we are getting slowly. I think there’s a lot of work within direction as well to remind us who we were making the game for at the very, very, very beginning, because we have a lot of the old guard of Arrowhead still around to help us figure this out. We have one of the features upcoming that we’ve been developing with one of our old-time founders for example, and it’s been so good because he brings that magical angle on the co-op.
IGN: The internet loves to talk about Steam concurrents, but I would like to get your take as someone who knows the data. Do you think Steam concurrents are misleading? Do they give some insight into the success or otherwise of a live service game? Obviously you had a huge peak, but it is unreasonable to expect that to maintain itself forever, and Helldivers 2 seems to have settled on Steam. From your perspective, how do you view that?
Alex Bolle: I am far from being the expert of the studio on this. I do see sometimes a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy. The more you talk about it, the more you show it, the more people are like, wow, interesting, it’s going up.
It’s a metric among many others. There’s many reasons for a game’s success or failure. I think we’ve been doing good numbers, like breaking some trends and everything. On our side, the only thing I can say is that, yeah, we want to keep that steady floor of players and bringing people again for new memorable moments for the game and for the community. So I would say that’s pretty much where we want to go. Do we have screens all around the studio with CCU [concurrent users] and all those metrics? Of course, because it’s always good to keep them in mind. But we’re not obsessed by it. I think we are in a position we don’t have to be, but we want to make sure, hey, when we make something, it’s meaningful. That’s the thing.
IGN: Whatever happens, you’ll probably forever now be the fastest-selling PlayStation Studios game of all time. I can’t see a game ever really topping that. As a studio, does that mean you can be a bit more relaxed about what you’re doing with Helldivers 2?
Alex Bolle: Yes and no. Yes, in a way, especially in these days for the industry, it feels like such a privileged situation. That is amazing. I think we are cherishing that a lot. At the same time, we don’t want to take this for granted. There’s a studio, we have developers to pay. We have a studio life to keep on for years and years and years. So that’s the thing where we’re like, yeah, it’s been good. We need to make sure it keeps going great.
There’s also an accountability for, again, the people we make the game for. We’re not going to just start to be like, okay, it’s fine. It’s going to be fine. We can take a bit more time. We want to take more time to make things better, especially now that the players are asking for it. But yeah, there’s definitely an ambition to keep things going, keep our standards of development, keep finding creativity and innovation. If we just became complacent, I don’t think Arrowhead would be Arrowhead.
IGN: Do you think it’s reasonable for a game like Helldivers 2 to have a multi-year plan that envisages the game being around for a decade? For me, Helldivers 2’s gameplay feels almost timeless, so it could become a forever game. Or will there come a point where you have to think about what’s next when it comes to Helldivers itself?
Alex Bolle: Thank you for acknowledging that the game might not age at all! I love when you boot a game after 15, 20 years and it still plays the same.
IGN: Helldivers 2 has that about it doesn’t it? It‘s about the things that happen in the game and the physics at play and the feel of it, as opposed to it being future-proofed in terms of visuals, for example.
Alex Bolle: Absolutely. When I talk with the team, when I talk to the directors, when I talk to Mikael about the future, it’s exciting because we want it to be around for years and years and years to come. And it’s almost like, how do we stay true to the Helldivers 2 fantasy, challenging enough that we keep making amazing new features and new systems and all that while we stay true to who we are? And I think it’s something that is so motivating for the years to come.
The more we figure out how to thrive in a live environment, and we still have a way to go to figure out a lot of things around that, the more we can let creativity loose on new systems that we would’ve never thought about a year ago when we released. I’ve worked on live games before and it’s where you feel like you have something you can figure out: what if I would do this cool thing I’ve seen in other games and adapt it to our sauce, that still makes it true to ourselves? I’m looking forward to this moment.
IGN: You’ve done a Killzone collab. I’m a massive Warhammer 40,000 fan, and as soon as I started playing Helldivers 2 I thought, oh my God, if I was an Imperial Guard soldier dropping down, facing off against waves of Tyranids or Necrons… can you give me any hope as a fan of both Helldivers 2 and Warhammer 40,000 that this is even possible?
Alex Bolle: What I can say is that we had a blast working on the collaboration with Guerrilla on Killzone. One thing that everyone agreed internally is that making something from a different game IP in our universe, this is quite fun. It has challenges because again, we are very, very cautious about our fantasy. So we want to be able to explore those possibilities. We got super excited with Killzone. We want to do more for sure. I can’t tell you more.
Our devs are players, they play so many games. Obviously Warhammer 40,000 is something that a lot of guys internally love to death. So the devs are discussing, the devs are proposing stuff, and the hype is building. So these are discussions internally that we are having. Warhammer 40,000, I can’t really tell you. Maybe. Who knows? We’ll see!
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.
Palworld developers Pocketpair have announced their next gig as a fledgling games publisher. They’re palling up with MythicOwl to release the latter’s jaunty delivery sim Truckful, in which absolutely nothing waits for you in the woods. In which there are no ghost trucks. In which “hidden paths, misty wetlands, unforgiving marshes and dusty quicksands [do not] tell the stories of the past, waiting to be discovered”. Here’s a trailer.
Astro Bot has once again won big at an awards show, this time securing five gongs at the 2025 BAFTA Games Awards, including Best Design, Best Family Game, and Best Game.
The BAFTA Games Awards — the UK’s independent arts charity celebrating excellence in games — took place overnight on Tuesday, April 8, 2025, in London, UK. Senua’s Saga: Hellblade 2, Astro Bot, and Still Wakes the Deep led the charge with 11, eight, and eight nominations, respectively. Thank Goodness You’re Here! also received seven nominations, Black Myth: Wukong six, and Helldivers 2 was up for five awards.
Accepting the award, Astro Bot director Nicolas Doucet paid tribute to the game developers of the past, who paved the way for Sony-owned Team Asobi and other current studios to find success in the modern era.
Whilst Astro Bot was the night’s most-crowned game, The Chinese Room’s impressive Still Wakes the Deep secured three wins — including both performer awards — and Helldivers 2 won two BAFTAs.
BAFTA polled the public to discover that while games like GTA, Tetris, World of Warcraft, Minecraft, Doom, and Half-Life 2did make the list, the top as ranked by the number of votes received was Sega’s 1999 action-adventure game.
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.
Warning! Potential Mario Kart World spoilers follow:
As with the Donkey Kong snafu, the guilty images were removed speedily from the official website, but not before someone snapped them and posted them to Reddit, of course.
As the images are pretty fuzzy — and there’s no accompanying text — this is essentially all we know so far. With a little cross-checking, it looks as though a hidden Rainbow Road track will sit just below Princess Peach’s Stadium on the four-way intersection in the bay area (thanks, Eurogamer), although it’s unclear if it’s a secret track or some kind of unlockable extra.
“I would say it’s less about the strategy of pricing Mario Kart World, it’s more just whenever we look at a given game, we just look at what is the experience, and what’s the content, and what’s the value?” Trinen said at the time.
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.
Last week, Nintendo shared a lot of fine details about the Switch 2 and in case you missed it, one thing it also confirmed was the new system would support the GameCube Controller adapter.
Whether twiddling their thumbs during the decades since Commandos 3 or calmly hiding in a hedge waiting to knife a nosey Nazi in the neck on his next stroll past, if there’s one thing Commandos fans are known for it’s lurking patiently. Good things come to those who’ve waited, and Commandos: Origins fits that bill. Slow-paced, challenging, and consistently satisfying when all your plans come together, its brand of isometric stealth action is intact and has never looked better. I’ve sunk nearly 60 hours into it over the last week and a half just to see out the missions, and there are potentially dozens more hours available should I return to play through some of them again with the intention of leaving no stone unturned and no soldier unslain. The only major issue is the assortment of bugs I’ve had to become accustomed to in order to keep enjoying myself. Like a peskily placed German sniper, some of these I learnt how to avoid entirely, but there were others I just needed to find a way to neutralise.
For those of you who skipped basic training, Commandos is a classic series of real-time tactics stealth ’em ups set during the Second World War that goes all the way back to the late ’90s. Picture a crew of elite but generally crabby commandos crawling around on their bellies behind enemy lines, driven by a whole lot of mouse clicking, and you’re most of the way there. For a modern comparison, it’s a lot like The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, only filmed exclusively from a drone (and without Guy Ritchie’s wit or Henry Cavill’s perfectly curled cookie duster). Or the BBC’s Rogue Heroes with 90% less swearing and 100% less AC/DC.
However, while its cheesy yet otherwise stony-faced approach may lack the outright humour of those crackling British Special Forces capers, Commandos: Origins is arguably the best version of the series’ concept to date. It’s a familiar yet modern experience for grizzled veterans, and also an intuitive and approachable one for new players who are ready to test themselves against a steadily escalating difficulty curve.
Where eagles stare
Like any great stealth game, Origins is as much a game about tactics as it is a salvo of deadly puzzles to solve. It essentially boils down to analysing every upcoming encounter, inspecting each enemy soldier’s vision cone, and finding a way to dispatch them that won’t bring the whole German army down on your squad’s heads. A large part of my time with Origins has been spent simply staring at the screen, surveying my prey like an ambush predator.
A large part of my time with Origins has been spent simply staring at the screen, surveying my prey like an ambush predator.
Each of the six commandos on your team has a set of unique tools and abilities. For the most part, Origins curates the characters available for each mission, tailoring the action for their skills. There are only two instances where all six soldiers will be on the same battlefield at once, which is kind of a shame because those are real highlights. That said, I probably would’ve played a huge amount of Origins exclusively using the Marine’s throwing knives and harpoon gun had I had the chance, so forcing me to expand my approach by sidelining him sometimes was probably wise and almost certainly kept things from becoming stale.
Speaking of sidelining, I actually don’t miss the inventory management of the previous games, though I feel like I wouldn’t have removed the ability to pick up and use enemy weapons for the Green Beret in particular. The argument here is that Origins is more about thoughtful stealth at all times – and less about spraying lead from scavenged MP40s at anything with a swastika on it. Thoughtful stealth, luckily, is empowered by the coolest part of Origins: Command Mode. Riffing on similar modes in the late, great Mimimi’s Desperados 3 and Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew, Command Mode allows you to freeze time indefinitely and queue up individual actions for each of your commandos. Back in real time, they’ll execute those simultaneously on your say so. Nailing the timing on a set of Command Mode instructions is powerfully satisfying, whether it’s simply two crawling commandos stabbing a distracted pair of soldiers from the side, or a more complicated and elaborately choreographed ballet of harpoons, blades, and bullets.
It’s all quite a slow process to do well, but it’s a truly rewarding one when you figure out the solution to taking on what initially may seem like too many meticulously positioned soldiers to tackle. Maybe your first choice of target is impossible to kill quietly because he’s always in sight of one of his other comrades, and maybe that very squadmate is always in view of a third, and so on. But there’s fun in uncovering who should be the first domino to fall throat-first onto a Fairbairn–Sykes combat knife. Some enemies will leave their posts to investigate strange sounds, like the Sapper’s whistle or the Green Beret’s radio – or inspect the Driver’s burning packets of cigarettes. Some will only temporarily turn and face a distraction, giving you precious moments to slip by them. Experimenting with which routes and tools work best is a task that tapped into a compulsive part of my brain.
There’s fun in uncovering who should be the first domino to fall throat-first onto a Fairbairn–Sykes combat knife.
The opportunities are always there; it’s just on us to find them – and the fact that they’re not telegraphed or signposted makes every victory feel like you’ve outfoxed the developers. At one point I spotted a tiny gap in the view cones of four soldiers on a small set of stairs in the water. It allowed me to not only get behind them to wipe them out, but also to bring three other squadmates via boat to the rear of my main objective. Was that there on purpose? Probably, but maybe not. Leaving it ambiguous as to whether you’ve gone about an encounter in the precise way Claymore Game Studios surreptitiously left ajar for us – or succeeded with an unpredictable sequence of moves the dev team perhaps never saw coming – is just good design. Either way, the encouragement to explore every corner of the maps for the best opportunities is thoroughly baked in.
In large part, that’s because these levels are all exceedingly detailed dioramas, sprawling and dense, and every one feels like I’m playing a high-stakes game of toy soldiers on the kind of miniature map exhibits you might see tucked behind glass at a war museum. Missions take place all across Europe and North Africa, too, so the variety of backdrops is terrific – from snowy Scandinavia to lush, soggy fields and baking deserts.
The huge environments are also rendered entirely in three dimensions and you can enter buildings seamlessly, and the fact that I felt the need to say that should give you an idea of how long it’s been since we’ve had a proper Commandos game. You can make fine camera rotations in any compass direction, so getting the right angle to spot a gap in security is easy. That said, scrolling around too fast sometimes introduces a bit of temporary choppiness, but it’s a short-lived gripe. It’s otherwise great looking overall.
There is, unfortunately, some occasional clumsiness when navigating particularly complex, multi-storey structures. Over the course of the campaign I encountered a few enemies that appeared to be sharing a floor with me, but who were actually on a different level entirely and should’ve been hidden from view at that moment. I also had the misfortune of placing down a beartrap that became irretrievable because it wasn’t on the same platform I wanted to leave it, and being shot through a solid container that apparently wasn’t really there is never any fun. There were also occasional instances where my commands were being misinterpreted and my men were setting off to unintended areas and directly into enemy sight lines, due to an apparent disconnect between what floors are being displayed and what floor Origins thinks I’m clicking on. These aren’t major frustrations, though, and remedying them typically just required some minor zooming, or panning the camera slightly. That, or a quick reload to bring back the prematurely deceased.
Saving dyin’ privates
In the trial-and-error world of tactical games like Commandos, quick save is your friend – and Origins is no exception. The ability to pick up directly where you left off after doing something risky and/or stupid is what actually gives us the freedom to experiment with different approaches in the first place. Make no mistake, quick save well and truly saved my bacon (and quickly!) on many occasions – but, unfortunately, this essential feature also seems to provoke some of Origins’ most bothersome bugs.
For instance, loading a save you made while one of your commandos was climbing a wire – or perched high on a climbable pole – appears to leave the poor bastard marooned on an invisible level above the map, fruitlessly crawling or moonwalking into oblivion. The solution, naturally, is to simply resolve to never save while one of your men is climbing anything. That wasn’t the end of my issues, though. After another reload I noticed my Marine was no longer in his boat, but walking on water back to the marker I’d placed. This bug eventually resolved itself, but one where my Sapper simply disappeared off the map and became unselectable did not.
That kind of issue could’ve become game-breaking, but Origins – seemingly aware that it has a few technical landmines for you to step on – keeps a queue of several quick saves. For the most part, if something goes awry, there’s a strong chance you’ll have a slightly older save you can revert too. In this instance, though, I’d sadly filled all my saves without noticing my Sapper was no longer present. The only solution was restarting the mission entirely, which was over an hour lost.
One weird issue, and one I can’t tell whether it’s related to the quick saves or not, is the occasional instance of enemies falsely detecting one of your commandos in a bush they’re no longer hiding in – and getting locked in an alert state about it. They’ll subsequently circle it and blast it to hell to no avail. It wasn’t so bad because I was able to either skirt around it or totally exploit it by stabbing all the soldiers while they were busy slaughtering the unfortunate shrubbery, but it definitely wasn’t supposed to happen.
I wouldn’t necessarily call the enemies smart overall, and it would’ve been nice if they displayed a little more of the initiative we see in other modern stealth games. Instead of callously ignoring dead bodies after an alert phase resets, for instance, they might want to drag their kaput companions off to a predefined location, à la Hitman. They make up for their dim bulbs by being extremely dangerous, though – and they’re just unpredictable enough to keep you on your toes when you think you’ve got their patterns figured out. They won’t inspect the nearest hiding places in the same order after a reload, for instance, so you’d better have a backup plan – or at least make sure nobody’s climbing a telephone pole when they come looking.
There’s been a lot of talk about the $80 price tag attached to the Switch 2 launch title Mario Kart World and Nintendo has justified it by claiming the game is “so big and so vast”, but what if it ends up charging for additional content in the long run?
Ex-Nintendo Minute duo Kit and Krysta, who now run their own YouTube channel, have touched on the idea of Nintendo potentially demanding even more gold coins in the immediate future for possible Mario Kart World DLC – suggesting it would go against the current messaging:
The Switch 2 has been officially confirmed for this June, and ahead of the big launch, Nintendo is now offering a new themed item on the My Nintendo Store in North America.
