Rashid whirlwind kicks his way onto Street Fighter 6’s roster on July 24th, publisher Capcom have announced. The airbourne brawler originally popped up in Street Fighter 5 but he’s now Street Fighter 6’s first post-launch fighter, automatically available to owners of the Deluxe and Ultimate editions of the game. Otherwise, you can grab the Year 1 Character Pass on Steam to access Rashid and three more fighters over the next year. Check out the newcomer’s combos below:
Golden oldie.
According to a recent Nikkei report, last month’s Switch sales in Japan were the highest June figures that the console has ever received.
The article cites Famitsu, stating that the Nintendo Switch sold 380,000 units in Japan during the month, which is said to be a 68% rise from the same time last year. When you consider the fact that this is a console which is entering its seventh year on the market, these numbers are huge.
Read the full article on nintendolife.com
Greetings, future Helldivers. It’s Katherine, Arrowhead’s social media and community manager, back again to bring you new Helldivers 2 gameplay details: a more in-depth look at our cooperative play* and combat.
After your Helldiver defrosts on your ship, you and your squadmates must prepare for a mission by customizing your armor, your weapons, and your stratagems together.
Creating your loadout feels like part of the mission prep: changing your weapon to suit not only your appetite for destruction but the mission and enemy types you might encounter. Your greatest aids as a Helldiver are stratagems: powerful tools that can be summoned with short button combinations. Everything from airstrikes to Hellpods containing bigger, badder weapons to defensive gear and extra supplies are at your fingertips.
When selecting stratagems, it’ll be essential to coordinate with your team to select the best possible load-outs for the enemies and mission type. If you’re going up against armored enemies, like the Terminid Charger, you or a squadmate can equip armor-piercing weapons, like the AT-48 Recoilless Rifle or the AC-8 Autocannon, which feature a teammate-assisted reload to keep battles even more chaotic.
But don’t sleep on those defensive stratagems either. While one Helldiver is handling the heavy fire, another Helldiver can call down a shield generator to protect teammates as the enemies push back. In a four-person team, you’ll be able to select a mix of stratagems and weapons that will lead to a unique victory every time.
Once your Hellpod lands on a planet, you can start calling in support stratagems, which include more powerful weapons, shield generators, and supply backpacks.
Each member of your squad can play according to their own style: some of you will charge into the fight, others will call down a sniper rifle stratagem and maintain a safe distance while picking off the enemies. You can even sneak past encounters if your team moves carefully. You’re all free to decide how you want to spread Managed Democracy: up close and personal, or with tactical oversight.
Of course, once the action really picks up, get used to dying. Not only are the enemy hordes relentless, but you might run into some stray bullets from your fellow Helldivers. Either way, it’s your team’s first priority to use a Reinforce stratagem to call your brand new Helldiver down to the planet to pick up right where you left off. You can even grab the guns your previous corpse left behind.
There’s not only cooperative combat, but you’ll have cooperative objectives to tackle with your team as well. You’ll be able to share locations with each other and move together across the map. You’ll also encounter optional objectives to complete, requiring a small detour with your teammates, and of course, requiring more ammunition. But you’ll be rewarded for your efforts.
That’s it for now, soldier. Get ready to give ‘em hell!
Helldivers 2 launches on PS5 this year.
*Gameplay requires internet access and paid for PlayStation Plus membership (sold separately) on PS5. PlayStation Plus membership subject to recurring subscription fee taken automatically until cancellation. Age restrictions apply. Full terms: play.st/psplus-usageterms.
Square Enix has listened to player complaints and included an option to turn off motion blur in Final Fantasy 16’s first post-launch patch.
Outlined on the Square Enix website, update 1.03 adds a Motion Blur Strength slider in the main menu, allowing players to increase or decrease the intensity of motion blur or turn it off altogether.
This comes after several players found the visual effect — used for myriad reasons like giving a sense of speed, covering up a low framerate, or making in-game action seem smoother — to be nauseating.
“Motion Blur Strength allows the player to adjust the strength of the motion blur effect when the character or camera is in motion,” the patch notes read. “The default setting is the maximum of five. This can be lowered to reduce the strength of the motion blur effect, or set to zero to turn it off completely.”
A handful of other changes are coming in the patch, which is already available on PlayStation 5, including an increased range of camera sensitivity options, new controller layouts, and some bug fixes.
Final Fantasy 16 launched June 22 to generally positive fan reception, with players obsessing over Cid’s voice actor and a new feature called Active Time Lore. Final Fantasy 16 also shows a lot of love for the franchise’s past, with its intro being directly inspired by the original 1987 game and a reference to a beloved character.
In our 9/10 review, IGN said: “Featuring fast, reflex driven, action heavy combat, Final Fantasy 16 is certainly a departure from what fans may expect out of a Final Fantasy game, but its excellent story, characters, and world building are right up there with the best the series has to offer, and the innovative Active Time Lore feature should set a new standard for how lengthy, story-heavy games keep players invested in its world.”
Ryan Dinsdale is an IGN freelance reporter. He’ll talk about The Witcher all day.
Now that we’ve all escaped the clutches of The Tartarus Key, it’s time for another RPS Game Club pick! This month’s game has been chosen by yours truly and I’m very much in the mood to revisit a comfy, cosy puzzle game so I’ve chosen Unpacking. Cue the confetti!
Unpacking is a puzzle game that’s all about pulling your homewares and personal items out of cardboard moving boxes and placing them in a new home. It’s best described as a relaxing house moving sim but it’s also a sort of block-fitting puzzle game. Finding the perfect spot for each item is largely down to your own personal taste, but there are some loose ‘room rules’ (no, you cannot put your toaster in the bedroom for some midnight cheese toastie action). If you like organising games – A Little To The Left, Sticky Business, Wilmot’s Warehouse and the like – then Unpacking is the game for you.
This year’s Summer Game Fest gave us awkward celebrity cameos aplenty, but one icon stood out from the crowd with an energy usually reserved for talk show hosts, lottery winners, and golden retrievers. Yes, Nic Cage showed up to announce he’d soon be a playable character in horror multiplayer game Dead By Daylight. And now he is, starting today.
Nic Cage plays himself, Nic Cage, a role that he’s mastered over the years. He’s currently available as a survivor in Steam’s Public Test Build, although the full Nic Cage pack is available to purchase on all platforms from July 25th. Come look at Cage’s character trailer below, featuring his fabulous and dramatic voice.
Shoot for the stars.
Gimmick! is one of the most valuable after-market titles for the Famicom, and even more so for the NES, where it only received a limited release in Scandinavia as Mr. Gimmick. Sunsoft, the publisher, was an unsung hero of the 8 and 16-bit gaming eras, with titles like Batman, Gremlins 2, Panorama Cotton, and Waku Waku 7 to its name.
Gimmick was director Tomomi Sakai’s labour of love, appearing late in the NES’s life cycle. A lot of effort was put into its graphical quality and soundtrack as a response to the Super Nintendo’s emerging dominance. You play as Yumetaro, a small green creature who is accidentally gifted to a young girl as a toy. When she finds herself kidnapped to another dimension, Yumetaro decides to rescue her.
Read the full article on nintendolife.com
There’s something so comforting about old-school turn-based RPGs. Maybe that comfort comes from a childhood spent playing the genre until 2AM – muffling the sounds of an epic adventure by stuffing my DS under a pillow anytime an adult walked by the room. Enter Sea Of Stars, a love letter to the genre that’s full of both nostalgic charm and fresh new ideas.
Naraka: Bladepoint comes out on PlayStation 5 on July 13 alongside a switch across all platforms to free-to-play.
The mythical melee battle royale also gets a new mode, called Capture the Spirit Well, a new hero called Tessa, and a new Dual Halberd weapon. Cross-play across all platforms launches July 13, too.
Naraka: Bladepoint, developed by 24 Entertainment and published by NetEase Games Montreal, launched on PC in August 2021 before Xbox Series X and S in June 2022. The new PS5 version launches just over a year later.
NetEase said Naraka: Bladepoint has now crossed the 20 million unique player mark. It’s a regular in Steam’s top 100 played games by concurrents list. At the time of publication, Naraka: Bladepoint was the 17th most-played game on Steam with just shy of 60,000 concurrents.
IGN’s Naraka: Bladepoint review returned an 8/10: “Superb melee combat and gravity-defying movement make Naraka: Bladepoint a clever spin on the familiar battle royale formula.”
Here’s the list of new features coming with the F2P launch:
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.
What did the critics think?
Nintendo’s latest game release Everybody 1-2-Switch! has been out for almost a week now, and if you’re still on the fence about this Joy-Con and mobile app party game, here’s a round up of some of the critic reviews so far.
Starting off with our own here on Nintendo Life, we said it was a perfectly serviceable party game but didn’t think it got close to what Nintendo has achieved in the past with this genre.
Read the full article on nintendolife.com
