There just doesn’t seem to be a good time to release a game right now, does there? We all saw the way that Hollow Knight: Silksong scared away plenty of games, even games with completely different genres. And sometimes it’s just a case of a particular month being stacked – just this month alone there’s Ghost of Yotei, Battlefield 6, Pokemon Legends Z-A, Ninja Gaiden 4, Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2, Dispatch, Arc Raiders, the list truly goes on. So, I really can’t blame developer Digital Sun, who’ve announced that Moonlighter 2: The Endless Vault has been delayed.
Sega and Athletic apparel brand Puma have announced a brand new limited edition Sonic the Hedgehog collaboration, which launches on 30th October 2025, all to celebrate the release of Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds.
This collection doesn’t just include the Blue Blur, either — both his sidekick Tails and Shadow the Hedgehog will be featured on much of the apparel landing in-store and online later this month.
For the first time ever, Call of Duty fans are getting back-to-back Black Ops games with the release of Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 this year. Leaping ahead to the future of 2035, the game is a direct sequel to the story told in Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 — but what’s really interesting is the way it builds on the foundation set by Black Ops 6, with its introduction of systems like Omnimovement and the return of round-based Zombies.
At Call of Duty: Next, I got a chance to jump into the combat boots of David Mason and a few other operators. I played on six new Multiplayer maps, tried out the updated Omnimovement, cleared Zombies off the new Wonder Vehicle, and picked a few dropzones on Warzone’s new Resurgence map and updated Verdansk.
You can check out just about everything we saw (and a few more things) in Black Ops 7’s open beta, which launches on October 5 if you pre-ordered the game, and on October 7 for all players.
Without further ado, let’s get to all the juicy hands-on action.
Gameplay Evolution
Even Omni-er Omnimovement: Treyarch is building on the foundation it established with Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 last year, making a few tweaks and adjustments to the Omnimovement system that allows you to run, slide, and dive in any direction. The big one is wall-jumping—you can now fling yourself into the air with a wall jump to bounce around corners, cross gaps, and confuse opponents. You can chain up to three jumps together, but each jump will cost you some momentum. Other additions include moving while mounted and a new finisher that lets you attach a grenade to another player and kick them toward their friends.
Movement as a loadout option: While Omnimovement still offers a lot of agility to every player, Treyarch has made some adjustments to the system by turning a few elements into Perks. The double-time Tac Sprint, for instance, now requires a specific Perk and comes with the trade-off that your normal sprint is slower when you equip it. But other Perks boost movement too, like Lightweight, which increases your movement speed and lets you slide and dive farther, and Dexterity, which lets you reload faster and aim down sights during dives and slides.
Overclock your stuff: Getting good at nailing enemies with frag grenades while they’re flocking to the hard point? In Black Ops 7, successfully using items like equipment, Scorestreaks, and Field Upgrades builds up progress that allows you to Overclock those items, unlocking an upgrade that makes them more powerful. You can choose your Overclocks when you select your loadout, with each Scorestreak, Field Upgrade, and piece of equipment offering two possibilities, allowing you to tailor your preferred playstyle.
Become a Hybrid Combat Specialist: In Black Ops 6, choosing three Perks of the same type unlocked a Combat Specialist bonus that amped up a specific playstyle. Black Ops 7 gives you a little more freedom; you can now mix two of one type of Perk with one of another to unlock a Hybrid Combat Specialist bonus, so you can mix and match a little more and still get useful benefits.
Near-future technology: Black Ops 7’s setting in the 2030s brings some new robotic and drone threats that you can deploy in battle as Scorestreaks. The D.A.W.G. is a dog-like combat robot; the Rhino is Treyarch’s take on the Juggernaut, a robot wielding a minigun you pilot into battle; HKVs are Hunter-Killer Drones that are deployed from aircraft and seek out targets once they hit the ground; and the VOTL Warship returns from Black Ops 2 with some new upgrades to terrorize from the skies.
Share the load(out): Ever wonder what weapon and Perks the person who just took you out was using? You can see the loadouts of opponents on the Kill Cam, and in the launch version of the game, you’ll actually be able to nab their Gunsmith customizations for yourself. Gunsmith codes will let you share your weapon builds with friends or online, so if you ever see a gun you wish you were taking into battle, you can have it.
Guns—lots of guns: Black Ops 7 will bring 30 new weapons compared to Black Ops 6, and thanks to its near-future setting, that’ll include 16 that are all-new to the franchise.
Multiplayer
Black Ops 7 will launch with 18 multiplayer maps—15 new 6-on-6 maps, plus three remastered maps from previous games, and two large-scale 20-vs.-20. I fought across six of the new maps, which will appear in Black Ops 7’s multiplayer beta.
Maps
Blackheart — Round and floating, Blackheart is a lot like a small oil rig, laid out like a wheel. At the center is a room where teams converge for big fights, while the outer edges have longer sight lines for sniping and setting ambushes.
Toshin — A Japanese cityscape with lots of small interiors, tight corners, and crashed cars and trains that can be useful for cover, or might explode at the wrong moment. There are numerous ways to slip between locations in Toshin, provided you can find the right vent or elevator shaft.
The Forge — The paramilitary organization known as The Guild also appears to be a corporate entity that enjoys showcasing and selling its robotics and drone technology. The Forge is a facility that serves as a testing ground on the outside and a sleek showroom on the inside.
Exposure — Set near a series of solar panels, Exposure is something of a prefabricated industrial site where you can clamber over buildings and slip between structures for ambushes.
Cortex — Cortex gives off heavy supervillain lab vibes, with lots of spooky-looking tubes and panels to use as cover. It’s a map with exteriors that loop around a series of interior pathways, providing multiple ways to approach a given objective.
Imprint — A snowy mountain fortress, Imprint combines open exterior spaces with sparse cover, and tighter interior corridors and vertical areas where it pays to be aware of your surroundings..
Modes
In addition to a few classic Call of Duty modes—Team Deathmatch, Domination, and Hardpoint—I also tried the new Overload mode at Connect. In the beta, you can also expect to play Kill Confirmed and Search and Destroy.
Overload — A new 6-vs.-6 mode, Overload, creates some frantic dashes, big team fights, and huge momentum swings. Two teams attempt to grab an overload device, and once one team has it, their goal is to reach one of two designated locations on the opposing team’s side of the map. If they can carry the device to one of the designated spots, they score a point; however, if the device is dropped, the other team can pick it up. As soon as a point is scored, the device respawns somewhere in the middle of the map, triggering another mad dash to grab it.
Skirmish — We didn’t play it, but at launch, Black Ops 7 also offers a massive new 20-vs.-20 mode that has its own dedicated maps to give you plenty of room to mix it up.
Zombies
In Black Ops 7, Treyarch builds on last year’s return of round-based Zombies with new maps and modes, along with new monsters to threaten you along the way.
Ashes of the Damned —The new map available at launch is the biggest Call of Duty has ever seen. It’s comprised of multiple locations to navigate and explore. They’re all linked together by roads, but between each of the main areas is a dense, deadly fog you’ll need to cross.
Meet Ol’ Tessie — To get around in Ashes of the Damned, you’ll need a ride, and that’s the new “Wonder Vehicle,” Ol’ Tessie. The truck starts as a bit of a clunker, but you can repair and upgrade it to turn it into a proper zombie-smashing crew transport—and even install a Pack-a-Punch Machine in the truck bed. You’ll need Ol’ Tessie to be tough, since the fog is home to unkillable zombies, as well as gremlin-like Ravagers that will attack your vehicle.
New ways to play — Zombies adds two new modes in Black Ops 7 that we didn’t play at Connect: Survival and Cursed. Survival mode takes place on smaller maps—in the beta, you’ll see locations taken from Ashes of the Damned—to provide a quicker, more frantic Zombies experience that still includes uncovering secrets while you fight for your life. And for the really hardcore Zombies fans, Cursed mode will offer an even steeper challenge.
Warzone
Haven’s Hollow: A new Resurgence map, Haven’s Hollow is set in Appalachia and draws inspiration from the Zombies maps Shattered Veil and Liberty Falls—before the undead ravaged the latter. The map features nine Points of Interest, including open fields at one end and a small but densely populated town at the other, with numerous buildings to hide in and rooftops to snipe from.
Updated Verdansk: Two Points of Interest are coming in Black Ops 7’s first season—the all-new Signal Station, and a remastered version of the Factory.
Try Multiplayer and Zombies in the Black Ops 7 Beta
Players who pre-order Black Ops 7 will get early access to the Black Ops 7 beta, running October 2-5. Activision is also offering an open beta for all players, no pre-order required, from October 5 to 8.
The beta includes all the multiplayer maps I fought across at Connect: The Forge, Exposure, Blackheart, Imprint, Toshin, and Cortext. It also packs the new Overload mode, as well as classics Team Deathmatch, Domination, Hard Point, Kill Confirmed, and Search and Destroy.
The beta goes beyond multiplayer to include Zombies, as well. Starting on October 3, you’ll be able to try the new Vandorn Farm map and Survival mode.
Black Ops 7 introduces numerous small yet highly targeted and meaningful changes to Black Ops 6’s foundation, while offering a substantial amount of new content across all its modes.
But you don’t have to wait to see for yourself—check out all Treyarch and Raven have to offer this week in the open beta. The full game launches on November 14.
When you review a game, if you don’t know anyone else that’s also reviewing it, it can be a bit difficult to guess how it might be received overall. There’s normally some assumptions you can make, but with a series like Silent Hill, a series where the general consensus is all over the place from game to game, it’s certainly not easy to predict. I myself ended up being quite fascinated by Silent Hill f in my review of it, but in a recent interview series producer Motoi Okamoto said that despite an overall positive reception, you shouldn’t expect every consequent game to be just like it.
Capcom’s upcoming new IP, Pragmata, features a main antagonist that’s really a rogue AI on the moon making the life of a spaceman and his android buddy difficult. But as much as artificial intelligence is in the news lately, especially in gaming, the developers of Pragmata say they had absolutely no idea it would be such a hot topic when they started developing the game.
Speaking to me at Tokyo Game Show 2025, game director Cho Yonghee and producer Naoto Oyama tell me that the concept for Pragmata simply came from Yonghee thinking about the moon, and asking the team to brainstorm ideas for a game set on the moon. From there, developers pitched a “black and white world” on the moon, and the concept of the enemy being AI came later.
But none of the team, they said, knew they were about to release a game about an enemy AI at a time when real-life AI was such a fraught subject.
“We really couldn’t predict that AI would be this big from where we started from what you see now, but now that we have AI become this huge thing in the real world, we see like, ‘Oh, maybe we should have added this or that from what you see in the AI right now,'” Yonghee tells me. “So we are like, ‘We should have thought of that.'”
However, the pair confirm that the real-world shifts around AI didn’t impact the game’s story or direction. By the time it became a hot topic, the direction was already set.
“We have this sort of the idea of the AI in the game locked down very early in the development back when we released the concept trailer back a few years ago,” Oyama says. “And so we had that as what you see in the game basically. And then we really couldn’t predict that the AI would become this big right now.”
“Yeah,” Yonghee adds. “So the real life AI’s progression or development, it’s been so fast that it’s perhaps overtaken what do we have in the game right now. So what you see in the game might not look as amazing than what’d you compared to real life.”
I laughed a bit at this and remarked that I didn’t think we had Dianas running around in the real world just yet.
“We created to be in the near future, but the future has come closer,” Oyama replies.
“Yeah, just the word AI is getting a bit old right now,” Yonghee says. “So maybe by the time that we reach the age or the time where Pragmata takes place, people are not using the word AI even anymore.”
Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. You can find her posting on BlueSky @duckvalentine.bsky.social. Got a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.
Right, there’s just a constant wall of bad news at the moment, so how about something a bit nicer. Earlier this year, Summerfall Studios announced that the Kickstarter for their demonic roguelike deckbuilder Malys didn’t work out, so they’d be releasing it in early access instead. Much like Kickstarters themselves, early access releases are risky business too, but it appears that at the very least it’s worked well enough to grant the game a 1.0 release.
It’s very easy not to see the funny side of Hollow Knight: Silksong. Don’t worry, I’ve been there. Something about bashing your head against a boss for the 20th time takes away the giggles a little bit, and that’s okay. But you have to hear me out here: I haven’t laughed this much at a game in a very long time.
It tickles a very Looney Tunes-esque niche that I didn’t realise I still found so funny. There’s none of the surrealism of Thank Goodness You’re Here or the quips of Portal, but if you’re the kind of person who likes watching Wile E. Coyote finally catch Roadrunner only to immediately land a heavy anvil to the noggin, then Silksong has more than enough opportunities to laugh away the pain.
Delve into a psychological survival horror, play as the GOAT, and puzzle out worlds within worlds with the PlayStation Plus Monthly Games lineup for October. Alan Wake 2, Goat Simulator 3, Cocoon will be available to PlayStation Plus members from Tuesday October 7 until Monday November 3.
Also starting October 7 Midnight Murder Club will be available as a Game Trial for PlayStation Plus Premium members. Enjoy up to one hour with this time-limited trial, and if you decide to purchase the full game, your progress and trophies will carry over.
Let’s take a closer look at the games.
Download the image
Alan Wake 2 | PS5
What starts as a small-town murder investigation becomes a living nightmare. From the studio that brought you Control comes a psychological survival horror starring two protagonists in two very different worlds. Play as both the returning Alan Wake and new hero Saga Anderson, witnessing the nightmare unfold from two perspectives – and two realities. Help Wake to rewrite his reality as he attempts to escape the Dark Place and enter Anderson’s brilliant mind as she races to solve the case. As Anderson, explore the magnificent forests and lakes of the Pacific Northwest and meet a cast of quirky characters in the towns of Bright Falls and Watery. As Wake, survive the hostile urban nightmare known as the Dark Place. It takes more than guns to survive: Light is both the ultimate weapon and a refuge in the battle against the supernatural darkness that threatens the heroes. Fight powerful enemies in deadly close-combat encounters, making careful use of limited resources.
Download the image
Goat Simulator 3 | PS4, PS5
Gather your herd and venture forth into Goat Simulator 3 – an all-new, totally realistic, sandbox farmyard experience that puts you back in the hooves of no one’s favorite female protagonist. That’s right – Pilgor is back, and this time is joined by other goats too. You can invite up to three friends in local or online co-op, create carnage as a team, or compete in mini-games and then not be friends anymore. Get ready for another round of udder mayhem. Lick, headbutt and ruin your way through a brand new open world in the biggest waste of your time since Goat Simulator!
Download the image
Cocoon | PS4, PS5
From Jeppe Carlsen, the lead gameplay designer of Limbo and Inside — Cocoon is a unique take on the puzzle adventure genre, where each world exists within an orb that you can carry on your back. Wrap your head around the core mechanic of leaping between worlds—and combine, manipulate, and rearrange them to solve intricate puzzles.
Interact with alien environments and biomechanical devices left behind by an ancient civilization. Journey through unique and diverse biomes, from industrial structures to massive organic caverns, and discover how they are connected to one another. Each orb has an ability that can be unlocked, thereby turning the orb into a unique tool for you to utilize within other worlds. Use these abilities to uncover hidden pathways and objects, fire projectiles to trigger switches, and more.
Last chance to add PlayStation Plus Games for September to your library
Download the image
PlayStation Plus members have until Monday October 6 to add Psychonauts 2, Stardew Valley and Viewfinder to their game library.
In the intro cinematic for World of Warcraft: Midnight, Lady Liadrin of the blood elves was joined by a conspicuously anonymous group of reinforcements to defend the Sunwell against this and last expansion’s big bad, Xal’atath. And it turns out there’s a reason for their ambiguous appearance: it’s us, the players. The first moments of the next chapter of the Worldsoul Saga, which I’ve played through a big chunk of on an alpha build, had me emerging at that precise moment to put a stop to this shadowy invasion. And the revamped elven kingdom of Quel’Thalas beyond was worth the abrupt summoning.
The Clock Strikes
If you aren’t caught up on the events of The War Within, Midnight is something WoW has never really tried before: a direct follow-up to a previous expansion, and the midpoint of a planned trilogy that tells a single, overarching story. And at the end of The War Within, the manipulative Xal’atath used us to knock out a godlike being called a Void Lord and slurped it up to power her favorite plot bauble, which has enabled her to launch a full-scale void invasion of Azeroth. To bring about her plans, she has to snuff out the Light itself, hence starting her invasion at the logical place, the Sunwell.
The design of the new void creatures is diverse and evocative, especially with the more powerful lieutenants, and they help sell the stakes of the invasion well. I won’t spoil exactly how this intro section ends, but Blizzard has once again done a great job using the skybox to tell a story.
The Eversong Woods one is one of my favorite zones since The Burning Crusade, and I was thrilled to come back and see it bigger, healed, and thriving.
I got a bit of a welcome breather once the immediate disaster was under control, though, as I was quickly shepherded into the new expansion hub of Silvermoon City. This was an awe-inspiring homecoming as someone who has followed the story of this elven kingdom since Warcraft 2 and would call myself kind of a Thalassaboo. The reimagined version is so much larger, richer, and more dense than the one that’s been around since 2007. Quel’Thalas, and the adjoining troll kingdom of Zul’Aman, are also now fully, seamlessly connected to the Eastern Kingdoms, finally letting us fly across the entire continent without entering a different instance.
Where once the Dead Scar left by Arthas tore the city in half is now the Path of Dawn, a highway stretching all the way across the zone and through the capital. Only small remnants remain of the undead corruption and mana addiction that once plagued these lands. What were once the gloomy Ghostlands are now folded into the larger Eversong Woods zone, with the eternal light having returned to all but the furthest corners. It’s been one of my favorite zones since The Burning Crusade, and I was thrilled to come back and see it bigger, healed, and thriving.
Summit of the World
In the city itself, most of the real estate is now a faction-neutral expansion hub with all of the vendors and services you’d expect. The Bazaar has been extended across the Path of Dawn to form a new city center, anchored by our command HQ in the war against Xal’atath – the imposing Sanctum of Light. What was once the Ruins of Silvermoon sub-area on the western side has been completely rebuilt with two lovely districts: Falconwing Square, new home of the Farstriders, and Thalassian University, a gleaming college of magic that’s also the setting of one of the new delves. Murder Row, representing Silvermoon’s shady back alleys, is also tweaked and now part of the faction neutral area.
Around a quarter of the city is still a Horde-only zone, taking up the remixed Path of the Elders, Royal Exchange, and Court of the Sun areas from old school Silvermoon. The old Farstrider Square has sort of been folded into the latter two, with the Exchange leading right up into the Court of the Sun, but there is also a new subdistrict on the Southeastern side called the Court of Blood, where all of the Blood Knight stuff has been relocated. The Sunfury Spire, center of the kingdom’s government, is now a floating tower above the city that is also restricted to Horde only.
Alliance players who enter these areas will get a 10-second grace period before all the guards become hostile like any other faction capital, but this aggro can be cleared instantly by re-entering a sanctuary area. Overall, I’m pretty satisfied with the balance of cross-faction to faction-specific areas, even if it feels like maybe we should be ready to bury the hatchet at this point. The tensions between the visiting Alliance and their Horde hosts play out in the opening hours of the story, which makes for an interesting political drama.
Blinded By the Light
The first conundrum we’re sent to solve in Quel’Thalas is an odd and unexpected one, having just come from beating up a bunch of void baddies. It seems that the reignition of the Sunwell has also caused areas called Lightblooms to pop up, which have become overgrown with life and brightness. In fact, the entire zone looks a bit washed out, with an altered color balance that makes it feel like someone has turned a floodlight up too high. The ongoing story of WoW has long hinted that Light can be just as dangerous as Void if you have too much of it, and it seems like we might be dealing with both this expansion.
This issue becomes even more dire in the first of Midnight’s delves, Collegiate Calamity, which takes us inside Thalassian University where the Lightbloom has gotten out of control. Compared to The War Within’s delves, it felt quite short, but I was playing it on a fairly low difficulty. On the other hand, it feels much more like a connected area, similar to a lot of WoW’s best dungeons, as opposed to several War Within delves that were caves with no real sense of place. You can see the rest of Silvermoon in all its glory from the upper terrace, which really helps situate it as part of the world and the story.
Replacing the cheerful Brann Bronzebeard as your delve companion is the ruthless Valeera Sanguinar, a blood elf assassin who still dresses like every female video game character did in 2007. She’s pulling it off, though. I like the new cape. I’ve only found a couple of her curios so far, so it’s hard to say how she fights, but the tone is very different when you’re running with a femme fatale edgelord instead of a happy-go-lucky explorer. The change of pace is kind of nice. I don’t know if we’ll be BFFs, but stranger things have happened.
In Shadow I Serve
We haven’t been able to play the new Haranir allied race yet, and Midnight isn’t adding any new classes. But it does include a whole new spec for the Demon Hunter, the Devourer, using the Void to fuel its powers rather than demonic energies. Thematically, it’s a very cool idea with a lot of grim reaper vibes and a rotation that encourages getting into melee for a bit, then getting some distance, and repeating that dance. If you’ve played a Red Mage in Final Fantasy XIV, it’s kind of similar. The best part about Demon Hunters has always been how much their fighting style relies on movement, and that’s still true here.
The biggest feature coming in Midnight is definitely player housing, and I was thrilled to discover how powerful the tools for customizing my own little abode in Azeroth are.
As for my trusty Marksmanship Hunter, it’s hard to compare apples to apples when this is still an alpha and my character on the test server is hilariously undergeared compared to my retail main, but it doesn’t feel vastly different, at least in single target. I did my best to recreate my talent build as close as possible to how it is on the live version, and the biggest thing I noticed was that cast time reduction for Aimed Shot is much harder to come by, which slows down the tempo of my rotation quite a bit. The Sentinel hero talents have also seen a significant rework, as have our main multitarget damage-dealing abilities. We’ll put a pin, or an arrow, in that.
Homecoming
The biggest feature coming in Midnight is definitely player housing, and I was thrilled to discover how powerful the tools for customizing my own little abode in Azeroth are – from the floor plan, to the decor, to the walls and flooring. It seemed like adding multiple levels was a little bit buggy in this build, so I didn’t get to mess with that much. But everything else works great.
The Horde neighborhood of Razorwind Shores is triumphant, with everything from a blooming desert to rocky bluffs to tropical islands to a rugged pine forest. I do think the Alliance might be getting the short end of the stick here, though. Their neighborhood of Founder’s Point seems really one-note in comparison. It’s mostly just a sweeping, green fairy tale forest with a couple areas featuring different kinds of trees, one being mildly spooky.
There’s still a lot of the Midnight alpha for me to see. Try as I might, they wouldn’t even let me into the mysterious realm of Zul’Aman! But having played it basically every waking hour since I got access, which was about 10 hours ago as I write this, I am certainly impressed with the new zones and the customization housing allows, and I’m excited to see where the story of the Worldsoul Saga goes next. World of Warcraft: Midnight is due out some time next year, but housing will be rolling out to anyone who owns the expansion in December.
Dune: Awakening developers Funcom have announced plans to lay off an unspecified number of workers, citing the same need to “restructure” that’s essentially become a byword for games industry job cuts at this point.
