Good news, Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 fans — Activision has extended its open beta to run an additional 24 hours to October 9, taking it right up to competitor Battlefield 6‘s release, which is slated for October 10.
“The reaction to the Black Ops 7 Beta so far has been awesome to see! Whether you’re calling in Nukes in Multiplayer or going for high rounds in Zombies Survival, there’s plenty to jump into and we’ve had a ton of fun playing alongside everyone,” Activision wrote in its latest blog.
“On behalf of all of us at Treyarch, we’re truly grateful for your feedback so far… and speaking of which, we heard you might want a little more, so we’re extending the Black Ops 7 Beta to 9am PT on Thursday, October 9!”
The beta now includes sixth Beta MP map, Toshin, and Open playlists, which have classic matchmaking where skill is minimally considered, Activision said.
Activision also confirmed it will be extending 2XP + 2X Weapon XP through the rest of the Beta “to help everyone hit level 30, try out all the weapons and gear, and unlock plenty of attachments and Overclocks along the way.”
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.
Amazon are currently running another Prime Day sale, of sorts – technically it’s Prime Big Deal Days, which is like Prime Day, but worse. Yes, you still need an Amazon Prime account to get the full discounts, and no, there isn’t nearly as much worthwhile PC gaming hardware with discount stickers as there were in the ‘main’ sale.
Still, this one isn’t entirely deprived of good finds. For one, there’s the Logitech G305 Lightspeed, probably my favourite cheap wireless mouse among all cheap wireless mice. It’s even less of a money sink with a Prime account, which currently snips it down to £28 in the UK and $28 in the US, with the latter getting a few different colour options as well.
Battlefield 6 has suffered numerous leaks throughout 2025, and now, just three days before launch, the game itself may have leaked its way into the public’s hands, too.
Reddit users grecea_vlad and SS-Enter-Thighs shared they had recently managed to secure early copies, posting images of what seem to be Phantom Edition versions of the game that have been unintentionally released days before Battlefield 6’s October 10 release date.
Box art highlighted in both posts features labels from the European video game ratings board, PEGI, suggesting both copies were sold by European retailers. It’s unclear which store(s) could be responsible for the alleged leak or how pre-release copies of Battlefield 6 could have slipped through the cracks and into the fans’ hands. Of course, that may not be a concern for the two – or maybe even more – Battlefield 6 fans who now have the game in hand days before everyone else.
It’s unclear which features these supposed early Battlefield 6 adopters have access to, so for everyone else still waiting for official launch, it’s probably best to be wary of spoilers for the next few days, just in case.
Meanwhile, EA and the four-company team that makes up Battlefield Studios recently previewed some of the changes set to be introduced with the Battlefield 6 day one patch. It’s a tease for this Friday’s patch that also came with an update regarding the debate between Closed and Open Weapons, as the developers insisted that “the vast majority of players” prefer the latter.
Michael Cripe is a freelance writer with IGN. He’s best known for his work at sites like The Pitch, The Escapist, and OnlySP. Be sure to give him a follow on Bluesky (@mikecripe.bsky.social) and Twitter (@MikeCripe).
Right, it’s time to get ahead of the game. Approach your router and force it to repeat the things Lightning McQueen says about speed at the start of Cars, because Battlefield 6 has a launch patch coming and it sounds like it’ll be weighty. EA say “over 200 changes” will be dropping as part of it and have also teased some potential future additions in their latest beta learnings post.
Looking for a pick-me-up on a chilly morning (or afternoon, or whenever you happen to be reading this)? This five-minute arrangement of classic Koji Kondo tracks from the Mario series just might do the trick.
Recorded back on 23rd August, the WDR Funkhausorchester takes a delightfully brisk jog through some classic platforming tunes, spanning 1985’s Super Mario Bros. to New Super Mario Bros. (yes, that is now retro, folks) by way of SMB3 and SM64.
If you’re still on the hunt for certain Switch 2 accessories and are looking for alternatives to Nintendo’s products, there are plenty of third-party offerings. Accessory maker Turtle Beach has already released a headset and it’s now announced it’s bolstering its own line of Switch 2 products.
This includes a new range of wired and wireless controllers, cases, and screen protectors. There’s the Rematch, Afterglow Wave and Afterglow controllers as well as a PlayTrek 2-in-1 Case and cases for the standalone system.
Yacht Club Games’ new title Mina the Hollower was on track for a 31st October 2025 release, but it seems the plans have now changed.
In an official statement on the company’s website, the “delay extravanganza” continues – with the team behind this new retro Zelda-inspired adventure having to make the “tough decision” to delay the title on Switch, Switch 2, and all other platforms, as “it’s just not quite there yet”. Fortunately, this delay isn’t a major one.
Megabonk is a 3D survivors-like with a very specific sense of humor that has been getting a lot of buzz lately. I’ve played about 15 hours as of writing this, so while this quick look is more meant to share my early impressions across that time rather than being a full, scored review, I’ve already done plenty worth talking about. There is still a fair bit I haven’t seen, but I got a little more than half the achievements and unlockables in that time, and I have been enjoying myself a lot. Adding an extra axis of movement does a lot to set it apart, and it’s more than competent at all the usual conventions of the genre already.
If you’ve played these kinds of games before, the basics are pretty much the same. You run around and fight endlessly-spawning waves of enemies that get harder and harder as the time ticks down. It’ll start with little goblins, and then you’ll get goblins with swords, and eventually build up to some more dangerous stuff like ogres or giant scorpions. Every once in a while a miniboss will pop up and those add some variety and a nice little spike of challenge.
There are also shrines that let you summon powerful elite packs and even more bosses with the promise of greater rewards, and I always appreciate that kind of thing where I’m not going into a menu and turning the difficulty up, but I can kind of tweak the difficulty as I go based on the decisions I make in the run. I prefer that, honestly.
As is common for these kinds of games, all of your weapons do their things automatically, whether that’s a sword or a rocket launcher. The only controls you’re worried about are movement-related. I like the variety and the bombastic attitude of the weapons. There are no two that feel overly similar, and they’re all pretty fun to use in different situations. Getting the revolver and the missiles and stacking bonuses to the number of projectiles I can spawn is great.
But of course the most obvious and I think the coolest difference here is that Megabonk is built with fully 3D levels and 3D movement. You can jump, and even get power-ups that give you better jumps or double, triple, quadruple jumps which is a ton of fun. There’s an item that makes all your weapons do more damage while you’re airborne, which can be quite powerful. One of the characters, Monke, can actually climb walls, which gives him some big advantages.
There’s a frantic but tactical loop of going fast while planning out your path carefully.
And this exploration and planning routes across steep cliffs, up and down ramps, is a big part of Megabonk, which makes every run feel interesting and challenging in some ways a lot of survivors-style games aren’t. First off, to finish a level, you have to locate the boss gate so you can summon the final boss before the timer runs out and you’re eventually overwhelmed by endless waves of ghosts. So there’s that added need to get out and comb the map, unless you get lucky and spawn right by the boss gate which sometimes happens, and I like that.
Then the second part is that the map is littered with breakable containers, shrines, and chests, and your power level is going to be directly related to how many of these you can hit within the time limit before you move on to the next level. So there’s this frantic but also very tactical loop where you want to go fast while planning out your path carefully to avoid backtracking and tag as many points of interest as possible. Chests also, at least most of them, cost gold to open, and that price goes up every time you open one, so sometimes you have to know when to pass one up because it’s not worth waiting around to farm coins when you’re not going to be able to afford to open every single chest anyway. The number of considerations I have to weigh in my head to put together a really good run feels satisfying and like I can usually overcome at least a lot of the capricious force of randomness by playing smart.
Now I do have to talk about the humor, because it’s one of the first things I noticed. The entire theme of Megabonk seems to be Millennial and Gen Z internet brain rot. And it’s honestly hard to tell if – at the rist of sounding a bit mean or snotty – this supposed to genuinely make me laugh in a surface-level way. Like is this the straightforward sense of humor the developers were aiming for? Or are they doing a Tim and Eric cringe comedy thing, like the real joke is that it’s kind of stupid on purpose? How many layers of irony deep are we? In the former case, it doesn’t work that well. But if it’s the latter, it kind of does. Yeah, in 2025, I’m totally still sending my friends all the latest GigaChads. Remember him? There’s an item that spawns “borgars.” Dang, did John Hammond show up to pop your champagne after you dug that one up? (The irony is not lost on me that I’m using a reference from a 1993 movie to criticize how old this meme is, but it’s a classic, okay?) There’s a surprisingly safe for work boss called “Scorpionussy.” There’s a power-up that “claps cheeks.” Practically everything you pick up is some kind of reference to years- or decades-old meme culture. It never got in the way of the gameplay for me, but there were a few times I thought my eyes were going to roll so hard I might sever my optic nerves.
Megabonk currently only has two levels, a spooky forest and a deadlier desert, at least unless there are some secret ones I’m not aware of. But they do each have three different tiers of increasing difficulty. The first is just a single stage, while each subsequent tier adds one additional stage with a new boss that lets you carry over all your power-ups from the previous one. I do find the lack of changing scenery a bit disappointing. Those two biomes are definitely starting to feel repetitive, and I couldn’t find anything like a roadmap that said the devs plan to add more. It’s not labeled as Early Access either. But the three tiers definitely provide a good challenge and give me more room to push myself.
Meta-progression isn’t super deep, but it is meaningful and rewarding. Everything outside of a run costs a separate currency called silver that you can pick up on runs. Getting permission to buy new characters, items, and power-ups requires you to first complete an objective or achievement thematically tied to each one, which is kind of neat. Then you have the more straightforward buffs to level up like getting more rerolls or more weapon slots. I appreciated that you only have to pay for the ability to toggle unlocked items on or off once and then you can use it as much as you want, since I really like to optimize my loot pool going into a run in these types of games.
The characters are mostly pretty simple in their design but enjoyable to use. I think my favorite is CL4NK who is a robot cowboy gunslinger that starts with the revolver and gets increased critical chance every level. But you’ve also got a skeleton on a skateboard who does more damage the faster he moves, and the ninja is also a lot of fun because he automatically kills any enemy who misses him with an attack.
As far as survivors-likes go, this is a pretty strong one. Especially with the added consideration of the jump button and the whole vertical axis, and the emphasis on route-planning and exploration, I found it had that crucial ability to make me want to start a new run as soon as I finished the last until it was suddenly several hours later. I’m regularly groaning at some of the uninspired image board humor, but I feel like I can sometimes appreciate it in an ironic way, and otherwise just ignore it. I’d say it’s worth a look if you have an appetite for another one of these that isn’t basically just a Vampire Survivors reskin. I just wish there was a little more level variety.
Mina the Hollower is quite clearly a Halloween game. The thing about Halloween is that there should always be a little bit silliness amongst the horrific and the scary, and Yacht Club Games’ next retro throwback seemed quite well fitted for the season. It was so appropriate that it was even planned to be released on October 31st! All of this to say, yes, Mina the Hollower is delayed, and it doesn’t have a new release date either.
Marathon lives! Well, of course it does, it would be quite shocking if PlayStation were to cancel it before it even got a chance to become Concord 2, but that’s neither here nor there. What is here, and soon to be there, is another playtest, of which sign-ups are now available. It is being dubbed a “closed technical test,” and plans to run for just a few days, between October 22nd and October 28th, but there are a few differences to be found compared to when we last saw it.
