Category: IGN

The Silent Hill series has been at the forefront of feel-bad survival horror storytelling for close to three decades now, and with the success of 2024’s Silent Hill 2 remake and the recent release of Silent Hill f, it felt like the right time to take a look back through Konami’s catalogue of psychological horrors to see how each scarefest stacks up.

Now, admittedly the series hasn’t been immune to the odd misstep here and there, and there have certainly been periods of time where things have gone more downhill than Silent Hill. Thus you won’t find the likes of forgettable mainline entries like Silent Hill: Homecoming and Silent Hill: Downpour here, or the inappropriately aggressive shoot ‘em up action of Silent Hill: The Arcade, or indeed the co-operative dungeon crawling of Silent Hill: Book of Memories that absolutely nobody asked for.

With all that in mind, here’s IGN’s picks for the very best entries in the Silent Hill series, from portable terrors to playable teasers.

9. Silent Hill: Origins

A Silent Hill adventure that can fit into your jeans pocket and still scare your pants off? That’s Silent Hill: Origins, the 2007 prequel originally developed for the PlayStation Portable and later ported to the PlayStation 2.

With its story taking place several years before that of the original Silent Hill, Silent Hill: Origins puts you into the shoes of Travis Grady, a truck driver who takes a wrong turn into North America’s freakiest fog-shrouded town, and things get appropriately hair-raising from there.

What makes Silent Hill: Origins stand out from other instalments in the series is how it handles the exploration of the sleepy small town’s nightmarish otherworld. Unlike most other Silent Hill games that drag you kicking and screaming towards the jagged edges of the industrial nightmare realm when you least expect it, Silent Hill: Origins gives you full control in determining when and where you want to shift between realities via the use of special mirrors scattered around the town.

On the one hand, this does diminish Silent Hill: Origins’ ability to surprise you with scares, but on the other hand it creates some uniquely creepy scenarios for puzzle-solving, such as examining the plastic organs of an anatomy mannequin in one reality, only to find that it’s an actual corpse in the other.

Combined with a dread-inducing atmosphere on par with the foreboding feel of the original game, Silent Hill: Origins on PSP made for some truly terrifying train trips.

8. Silent Hill 4: The Room

Although it sounds like some sort of bizarre crossover between the much-loved survival horror series and director Tommy Wiseau’s infamous best worst movie ever made, Silent Hill 4: The Room isn’t quite as wild a departure as that – although it does shake up the formula pretty significantly. Shifting the terror out of the foggy streets of Silent Hill and into the new setting of Ashfield – specifically the locked-down apartment of protagonist Henry Townshend – Silent Hill 4: The Room alternates between claustrophobic, first-person exploration of Townshend’s home and more traditional third-person combat in the nightmarish otherworlds he can reach by stepping through the ominous holes in his apartment walls.

These otherworlds serve as small pocket dimensions, each visually distinct and with its own story to tell, from the filthy, tiled circular hallways of the water prison to the abandoned hospital packed with a variety of disturbing dioramas. As the story progresses, the apartment you return to gradually evolves from safe haven to haunted house, as Townshend’s tracking of an undead serial killer gradually consumes his reality and the game’s skin-crawling atmosphere grows all the more oppressive.

While the sudden switch in the story’s second half to an annoyingly dragged out escort mission proved to be divisive amongst fans, there’s no question that its cast of genuinely disturbing creatures, haunting original soundtrack from Akira Yamaoka, and the uniqueness of its decaying apartment hub made for arguably one of the most spectacularly tense Silent Hill adventures in the entire canon.

Silent Hill 4: The Room would also mark the fourth and final instalment in the series to come from Japanese developer Team Silent. That team would then disband, with its members going on to work on various other horror games like Forbidden Siren and The Evil Within, and it also saw the development of subsequent Silent Hill games shift into the hands of western developers with fairly mixed results… We’re looking at you, Homecoming and Downpour.

7. Silent Hill: Shattered Memories

Not all of the western-made Silent Hills have been bad, though. The only entry in the series to ever make it onto the Nintendo Wii, Silent Hill: Shattered Memories from British developer Climax Studios reimagines the original Silent Hill and features the same premise: Harry Mason is the survivor of a car crash searching for his missing daughter in the fictional American town of Silent Hill. However, its plot unravels in an entirely new way and the gameplay is dramatically restructured, shifting between first-person psychotherapy sessions to the more typical over-the-shoulder explorations of Harry’s harrowing journey through Silent Hill.

Shattered Memories is a tricky instalment to rank in the Silent Hill series, because it’s so unlike any other entry to date. It completely ditches combat, instead forcing Harry to flee in regular chase sequences inspired by the unstoppable antagonists of slasher movies. It swaps out the fog of previous adventures for ice and falling snow to limit player visibility and build an atmosphere of dread in interesting new ways. It also makes quite brilliant use of the Wiimote, using its motion controls to give players full command over the beam of Harry’s flashlight, and its built-in speaker for the hiss of the series’ signature radio static among several other unsettling bits of sound design.

Shattered Memories also profiles the player while they play, taking the answers chosen during the psychotherapy sessions to make subsequent changes to level and enemy designs, as well as altering how the story progresses and eventually determining which of the multiple endings you will arrive at. While this mechanic is yet to resurface in subsequent Silent Hill stories, Supermassive Games’ Until Dawn seemingly took a great deal of inspiration from it given its similar mix of psychotherapy sessions and slasher-style horror.

Meanwhile, Shattered Memories’ writer/designer Sam Barlow (who also worked on Silent Hill: Origins) has since gone on to find considerable success as an independent developer with his critically acclaimed works of interactive fiction: Her Story, Telling Lies, and Immortality. All three involve solving a mystery by sifting through assortments of out-of-sequence video clips, which in a way are their own form of shattered memories.

6. Silent Hill f

It took 13 long years for a new mainline Silent Hill game to emerge from the fog, but Silent Hill f finally arrived in 2025 with a brand new Japanese setting, a twisted and compelling story that continues to unfold and satisfy in subsequent playthroughs, and a strict focus on melee-based combat to further distinguish itself from the more gun-centric assaults of the previous year’s Silent Hill 2 remake.

To be fair, the deliberately sluggish feel of Silent Hill f’s fighting system might not be to everyone’s taste. With its mix of light and heavy attacks, dodges and counters, and a reliance on the careful management of health, stamina, and sanity bars, its monster-mashing seems inspired by the slow and weighty combat of the Dark Souls series, though thankfully minus the punishing difficulty. Yet even though your controller might not be in any danger of being smashed to bits after repeatedly dying to the same boss, your lead pipe or crowbar certainly is due to the irritatingly brittle nature of Silent Hill f’s destructible weapons.

However, if you can embrace the clunky combat clashes – or simply force yourself to endure them – there are huge rewards for persevering because Silent Hill f’s story is simply one of the most captivating tales in the entire series. The psychological effects of high schooler Hinako Shimizu’s domestic abuse and bullying is truly gut-wrenching to examine, the monsters she encounters provide a full-fat dose of nightmare fuel, and the world around her is an absorbing place to pore over, whether it’s the misty streets of her mountainside village or the mysterious shrine realm she enters in her dreams.

You would think that a Silent Hill game that doesn’t actually feature the town of Silent Hill would be like a Resident Evil game without some sort of resident evil in it, but Silent Hill f successfully proves that you can take the series out of Smalltown, USA, but you can’t take the spinechilling psychological horror out of the Silent Hill game.

5. P.T.

While ultimately a proof of concept rather than a fully fledged Silent Hill game – the P.T. stands for Playable Teaser – this standalone slice of psychological torment got fans’ appetites whet for a Silent Hills game that sadly never saw the light of day. Quietly shadow-dropped as a free download on PlayStation 4 amidst a number of more headline-grabbing announcements at Gamescom 2014, P.T. quickly took social media and Reddit threads by storm as more than a million players discovered it and collectively set about unravelling its most enigmatic puzzles.

Set in a single, looping, L-shaped corridor inside a suburban family home, P.T. was capable of delivering scares in ways both micro and macro; subtly rearranging the decor to unsettle you in one loop, before ensuring you’d never sleep with the lights off again by surprising you with a murderous ghost named Lisa the moment you dared to look over your shoulder. Much like the apartment sections of Silent Hill 4: The Room, P.T. also broke from the Silent Hill series’ typical third-person perspective, presenting its horrors in a more claustrophobic first-person view that made them all the more immediate. It was compact, cryptic, and completely terrifying.

What further adds to P.T.’s mystique is that it’s extremely hard to actually play at this point. After the cancellation of Silent Hills and Kojima Productions’ seemingly acrimonious split with Konami in 2015, P.T. was removed from the PlayStation Store for good, making it impossible to reinstall even if it was attached to your PSN account. There are some questionable PC-based workarounds to regain access to it, but otherwise the only way to play P.T. today is by somehow tracking down a PlayStation 4 console with it already installed, or playing a fanmade remake such as the impressively faithful recreation in Media Molecule’s Dreams. Or perhaps by breaking into that same warehouse that the Ark of the Covenant was stashed in at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark.

As for its legacy, though, P.T. has gone on to be one of the most influential horror games released in recent memory. Layers of Fear ran with P.T.’s looping environments to unsettle players exploring its artist’s mansion setting, while Resident Evil: Village terrified fans with the P.T.-esque tight hallways, combat-free puzzle-solving, and nightmare-inducing deformed fetus found in its House Beneviento section. That’s not to say anything of the countless P.T. pretenders that continue to flood Steam to this day. Not bad for a playable teaser for a Silent Hill game that never was.

4. Silent Hill 3

The storytelling brilliance of Silent Hill 2 made it a hard act to follow – and we’ll get to exactly why in a moment – but Silent Hill 3 distanced itself slightly from its landmark predecessor by positioning itself as a direct sequel to the original Silent Hill instead. The third game in the Silent Hill saga digs into compelling new details about the doomsday cult from the original game, as well as introducing an almost entirely new line-up of nightmarish creatures, brought to bowel-loosening life by visuals that pushed the PlayStation 2 hardware to its limits.

Its biggest departure from its two predecessors, though, is the fact that its protagonist is a plucky teenage girl instead of a miserable, 30-something year old man. Heather, who’s surname we’ll keep vague for story spoiler reasons, came as a breath of fresh air through the fog and proved to be one of the best written and most relatable leads in the series’ history. Not to mention that up until the release of Silent Hill f, she was the only playable female lead in the mainline entries (unless you count Maria in the Director’s Cut of Silent Hill 2).

Upon its release, Silent Hill 3 was criticised for lacking gameplay innovation and being a bit too similar to the first two games, but given the string of subpar Silent Hill games released in the aftermath of Silent Hill 4: The Room, perhaps in retrospect staying true to the look and feel of the two most respected entries in the Silent Hill series wasn’t such a bad thing.

3. Silent Hill 2 Remake

Unlike Shattered Memories which completely overhauled the structure and dramatically altered the plot of the original Silent Hill, the 2024 remake of Silent Hill 2 preserves the story, characters, and vibe of the PlayStation 2 original, but updates it all for modern audiences with superb visuals, anxiety-inducing audio design, and controls that allow for far more fluid player movement and inventory juggling.

Developer Bloober Team wasn’t exactly new to the horror genre nor the process of remaking of horror games, having previously both made and remade its own spooky stories in the form of Layers of Fear and Observer. This experience evidently served the team well since the Silent Hill 2 remake is by far and away its biggest triumph to date, dramatically enhancing the unsettling and claustrophobic atmosphere of the original, and expanding the small town setting to make it utterly absorbing to pore over for returning fans.

Crucially, almost every modernisation made here has resulted in Silent Hill 2’s overwhelmingly shuddersome setting seeming all the more immersive and alarming. The volumetric fog feels thicker and more oppressive than ever. The new level of detail applied to the dwellings you shuffle through make them seem infinitely more dank and depressing, if not completely disgusting at times. The use of light is particularly brilliant, and being forced to explore every inch of the Toluca Prison area in limited bursts of illumination thanks to failing circuit breakers makes for one of the most frantic and frightening sequences the series has ever seen. Or indeed, not seen, since so many of its horrors are quickly plunged into blackness.

Add in some superior voice acting and a terrifying soundscape from Akira Yamaoka that will have you doubting your own sanity, and there’s no question that the Silent Hill 2 remake is the best way to visit – or revisit – one of the most dread-inducing destinations in the history of survival horror.

2. Silent Hill

Take a splash of Stephen King, a dash of David Lynch, a flash of Francis Bacon, and filter it all through the Japanese cultural lens of developer Team Silent, and you have the twisted and truly terrifying journey through the original Silent Hill. Stepping away from the typically campy, B-movie style popular in ‘90s survival horror, Silent Hill plunged you into previously unseen depths of psychological torment, putting the emphasis on properly disturbing atmosphere in favour of cheap jump scares, and establishing the tone for a series that, at its best, is somehow incredibly uncomfortable yet utterly enthralling.

Unlike prior survival horror games like Resident Evil and Parasite Eve that relied on pre-rendered backgrounds, Silent Hill bucked the trend by putting you into an environment rendered entirely in 3D. Remarkably, this meant that the series’ signature darkness and oppressive fog were actually borne out of a need to mask the meagre draw distance and ugly graphical pop-ins that plagued the original PlayStation, turning the system’s hardware limitations into a powerful tool for terror that has remained a constant in the series to date.

From your first steps as Harry Mason entering the eerie small town searching for his lost daughter, Silent Hill assaults you from all sides with its genuinely unsettling nothingness, and the fear of not knowing what’s waiting for you in the fog is arguably more petrifying than the actual beasts that lie in wait. This unending sense of unease was only intensified further by ingenious atmospheric flourishes, like the screeching static from Harry’s radio that hissed with more urgency as you arrived in the vicinity of some unseen mess of pissed-off polygons.

Silent Hill ushered in a chilling new standard for slow-burn survival horror, and its influence can still be felt decades later in the likes of The Medium and Alan Wake 2. Yet it only took Team Silent a couple of years to drag players into new depths of depravity and despair…

1. Silent Hill 2

The original Silent Hill may have established the series’ combination of overwhelmingly bleak atmosphere and disturbing adult themes, but 2001’s Silent Hill 2 perfected it. A thoroughly absorbing and emotionally-draining examination of grief and guilt, Silent Hill 2 put us into the role of the recently widowed James Sunderland and set us on a tortured tour through his own private hell, one crawling with awful apparitions that symbolised his increasingly decaying mental state and the suffering of the people around him.

Whereas the original Silent Hill focused primarily on the corrupt religious practices of a local cult and how it permanently altered the town’s reality, Silent Hill 2 deals with themes that were more nuanced and extremely taboo at the time, at least in the world of gaming. Sexual abuse, suicide, and self-harm are all explored as Sunderland encounters other survivors trapped within the foggy lakeside town, with each form of trauma made all the more confronting by the twisted creatures they manifest as. 2001’s Grand Theft Auto 3 might be widely regarded as the first proper video game for grown ups, but Silent Hill 2 arguably beat Rockstar’s opus to the punch just one month prior.

Silent Hill 2 also introduced one of the most iconic antagonists in the series’ history, if not survival horror in general. There are few enemies as shit-your-pants scary as Pyramid Head, an intimidating and unstoppable tormenter who stalks Sunderland at several stages through the story, and who also does unspeakable things to mannequins. Ominously dragging one half of a giant pair of scissors and with an angular skull so rusty you need a tetanus shot just from looking at it, this pointy-headed predator’s potency was diluted somewhat by subsequent appearances in weaker instalments such as Silent Hill: Homecoming and Silent Hill: Book of Memories, but his importance to Silent Hill 2’s sustained sense of dread cannot be understated.

From its tragic story to its provocative symbolism and no shortage of genuine scares, Silent Hill 2 remains the bone-chilling benchmark for the series, and is therefore the obvious choice for the number one slot on this list.

And there we have it: the nine best games in the Silent Hill series. Did your favourite make our list? Let us know what we forgot in the comments.

Tristan Ogilvie is a video producer on the IGN reviews team, based in Sydney, Australia. He has over 18 years of experience covering video games. When he doesn’t have a controller in his hand, Tristan is happiest playing guitar, taking photos, or watching cricket.

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At the most recent Nintendo Direct, Nintendo fans were blessed with the news that not one, not two, but three modern Resident Evil games would be coming to Nintendo Switch 2: Village, Requiem, and Biohazard. But according to Requiem’s developers, this wasn’t always the plan. In fact, the team didn’t originally plan to bring anything to the Switch 2 at all.

Speaking to me at Tokyo Game Show, producer Masato Kumazawa explains the story of how the Nintendo Switch 2 ended up with the three most modern Resident Evil games on their way to the system:

The Switch 2 hadn’t been announced when we started planning this game [Requiem], so of course it wasn’t in the original plan. When the Switch 2 was announced we were able to start testing developing games for it, and we thought it would be great if we could bring the Resident Evil series to this platform. We started off with internally porting Resident Evil: Village to see if it would work well on the hardware, and it looked really great, so that gave us the confidence to add a Switch 2 version of Reqiuem to the plans, and that led us to the recent announcement where we confirmed not only Reqiuem was coming, but 7 and 8 would also be coming to Nintendo Switch 2 at the same time.

It’s no surprise that Kumazawa is gassing up the Switch 2 port of his own game, but I played a brief section of Resident Evil: Requiem at Tokyo Game Show in handheld mode on the platform and…yeah, it looks pretty good! I asked him as a follow-up if there was anything unique about the Switch 2 version of the game, and his response that no, there isn’t, “in a good way.” It’s just Requiem, on the Switch 2, able to be taken on the go. And though my sampling of this experience was brief, I’m optimistic from that short demo that Kumazawa’s not just all talk here.

We previewed Resident Evil: Requiem just last month, and you can read our impressions of what we’ve seen so far right here. You can also check out the rest of my discussion with Nakanishi and Kumazawa, including continued efforts to get them to say something, anything, about Leon Kennedy, and why the pair are struggling to figure out what qualifies as “scary” after all these years. We’ve also previously spoken to the pair on a number of other topics, such as Raccoon City’s return and the game’s new monster design.

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.

When I walked into my interview with Resident Evil: Reiquem director Koshi Nakanishi and producer Masato Kumazama, I came equipped with a big pile of questions about a character who, as far as we know officially, is nowhere to be found: Leon Kennedy.

I had these questions prepared because the day before my interview, Capcom aired its Capcom Online Program showcase to coincide with Tokyo Game Show. And to eager Resident Evil fans, me, and many of my coworkers, it seemed obvious that we were finally going to get a new trailer revealing Leon’s official precense in the game, as a playable character or otherwise.

But that’s not what happened. We did see a new trailer, but no Leon. And a preview build available at TGS, which I went hands-on with after my interview, was similarly bereft of Leon.

When I brought up the strangeness of my expectations and the resulting Leon Kennedy drought to Nakanishi and Kumazawa, they just laughed.

“We will take on board this feedback,” Kumazawa said.

Fan clamor for Leon has been going on for months now, ever since the game’s first trailer appeared to contain multiple teases for, at minimum, a Leon appearance. But rumors have since grown, with some suggesting Leon might show up in the game as a secondary playable protagonist alongside newcomer Grace Ashcroft. Nakanishi and Kumazawa have attempted to brush those rumors aside, saying that Kennedy is a poor match for Reqiuem’s less action-heavy tone, but the fervor has persisted anyway, and the two are stopping short of saying outright that we won’t get to control him at all, even for just a little bit.

Given all this discussion, I asked the pair if they had any concerns that all the Leon nonsense was distracting from their attempt to position Grace as the game’s star. But they’re not worried. “We’re always happy that people are interested in the game enough to speculate so much,” Kumazawa said.

If, then, the pair are so insistent that Grace is the new face of this Resident Evil story, could Reqiuem server as a sort of passing-of-the-torch between old and new Resident Evil? Not quite, Kumazawa says.

“Although we don’t have firm plans for the future storylines of later titles in the series, I still think passing the torch is probably going a bit too far, because we’re not just going to wipe the slate clean completely in terms of the series lore and history. But at the same time I don’t want to always have to just go back to the well of existing characters to create new games, which was part of the motivation to introduce Grace.”

We previewed Resident Evil: Requiem just last month, and you can read our impressions of what we’ve seen so far right here. You can also check out the rest of my discussion with Nakanishi and Kumazawa, including how Reqiuem came to the Nintendo Switch 2. We’ve also previously spoken to the pair on a number of other topics, such as Raccoon City’s return and the game’s new monster design.

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.

The long-awaited Mega Evolution era has finally arrived in Pokémon TCG following the Japanese releases of Mega Brave and Mega Symphonia in August 2025. With their towering HP values, spectacular full-art designs, and that notorious 3-Prize rule when a Mega ex is knocked out, these cards are already shaking up both the collector market and early deck-building experiments in Japan, and we expect the same to happen worldwide, too.

Like every major set, certain chase cards have risen to the top. That’s whether for playability, stunning artwork, or simply the popularity of their featured trainer or Pokémon. Below, we’ve ranked ten of the most expensive Mega Evolution cards in today’s market on our favourite dedicated marketplace, TCGPlayer, starting from the lowest on the chart and working up to the crown jewel.

The original Mega Brave and Mega Symphonia expansions have already delivered some of the most eye-catching and valuable cards of the year, with the 10 most valuable of which from the combined Mega Evolution set can be found below, for those who don’t feel like scrolling through the whole larger list.

However, with the set only just being released, TCGplayer’s exact most valuable card rankings are changing rapidly, due to continuous market price changes. So, be sure to also check out the live page showing the most expensive Mega Evolution Pokémon cards on TCGplayer right now.

Still, as for our top 10, from dazzling behemoths like Mega Venusaur ex and Mega Gardevoir ex, to nostalgic Special Art Rares of fan-favourite trainers like Lillie’s Determination, collectors are still scrambling to secure them before prices climb higher. Here’s a quick look at the ten of the most expensive cards currently dominating the Mega Evolution market.

10. Mega Venusaur ex – 155/132 (Ultra Rare)

Over the last few decades, soccer (or football, if you’re not from the US like me) hasn’t changed much. Sure, there are new rules, improved tactics, and so much more money involved in the modern game – but at its heart, it’s still all about kicking a ball into a goal more than the other team. So how does a series like EA Sports FC improve each year when the sport it’s emulating isn’t introducing massive changes? For me, it’s about quality-of-life updates, and FC 26 has those in spades. It’s filled with small adjustments that make this one of the best versions of the beautiful game in the last several years, from stickier dribbling and crisper passing to smarter goalkeeper positioning. Unfortunately, the goodwill those changes garner have also been undercut by some of the most aggressive microtransactions EA has ever introduced. So while FC 26 is inching in the right direction, that progress is primarily kept to the pitch.

A phenomenal example of this is the new gameplay presets. In the past, everyone was using the same gameplay style, whether diving into competitive games in Ultimate Team or trying to win the league against CPU opponents in Manager Mode. This year, EA has split things between two different presets: Competitive and Authentic. With the Competitive preset, you can expect the fast-paced action and smarter AI teammates that you might be used to from previous FC/FIFA games. Meanwhile, Authentic will feel more realistic to what you see on the real-life pitch every weekend. Players are slower, and you need to use your tactical intelligence to get into scoring position.

The most important part of this change is that these two options do not impact each other. That means EA can tune Competitive mode however is needed without changing the balance of Authentic mode, something they couldn’t do in previous versions of FC. People come to FC 26’s various modes for different reasons: Career Mode players want a game that plays as close to real-life as possible, while Ultimate Team and Clubs players want fair and balanced online competition. Those two ideals have sometimes worked against each other in the past, so giving us two totally separate gameplay styles is a great way to serve both communities.

What’s strange about the implementation is that the Authentic preset is restricted to offline modes only. That means you can’t even use it in your Squad Battles matches despite them being the only single-player content in Ultimate Team. It’s something I hope is added in the future, as it feels odd not to include all of the single-player content by default, especially when it does exactly that with the new version of the Season Pass.

Before diving into some of the other positive changes, let’s go over that Season Pass, as it’s one of the biggest points of contention for me. Last year, EA introduced a paid Season Pass into FC 25 toward the end of the cycle, so we knew this was coming, but seeing it drop on day one does sting. You can ignore it and stick with the free version of the pass, or even earn enough in-game currency to buy it without spending real-world money, but I would argue that this might be the worst version of a Season Pass we’ve seen in a sports game yet.

The issue with FC 26’s Season Pass is that you’re not just earning rewards for Ultimate Team, where people are already (unfortunately) conditioned to spend money. You’re also earning a ton of rewards for Clubs, Player Career, and Manager Career. The latter is where things really get icky, because one of the big draws for FC 26 is that Icons and Heroes are finally available in Manager Mode. For the first time ever, you can take classic players like Luis Figo, Toni Kroos, and Julie Foudy and put them into your Manager Mode saves. It should be a revelation, but instead, EA made the strange decision to lock many of these players behind the Season Pass.

There are several reasons this is frustrating. The first is that you probably won’t be able to acquire enough XP for them by playing either Manager or Player Career Mode alone. EA might implement more ways for non-Ultimate Team players to earn XP, but with how things are currently constructed, you’ll need to dive into that lootbox opening simulator or open your wallet if you want to finish enough of the pass to claim Career Mode rewards like Gianfranco Zola, Miroslav Klose, and Park Ji-Sung. Even as someone who primarily plays Ultimate Team, this change sucks.

And keep in mind, this is only the first Season Pass. If FC 26 continues to lock Icons and Heroes behind future passes, we’ll likely see desirable players like Ronaldinho, Toni Kroos, and Johan Cruyff tucked behind a paywall as well. It’s an unfortunate situation that reeks of EA trying to get even more money out of its playerbase than usual. It’s bad enough that Ultimate Team players are being milked dry, but now you can’t even enjoy your offline Career Mode without feeling the pull to spend money. Forcing this Season Pass on everyone feels like a bridge too far, even for EA.

What makes this situation all the more painful is that most of the modes feature fun updates on their tried and true formulas this year. For example, the new Manager Live Hub lets you dive into specific challenges and earn new jerseys for your club. These feel like the next step toward a historical mode like the Negro Leagues option in MLB The Show, as you’ll be challenged to recreate moments like Jamal Musiala’s double with Bayern Munich or take a mid-level club like SK Rapid or Strasbourg to European glory. The classic version of Career Mode is still there, but Manager Live gives you a rotating list of challenges that will test your skills in fun ways on and off the pitch.

Even Ultimate Team is home to several small yet meaningful changes. Everything from the return of tournaments to the ability to choose the cosmetics on your Evolutions feels carefully crafted to deliver the improvements fans have been asking after for years. EA has been actively working on making its online play more stable as well, and so far I haven’t run into many server issues. Don’t get me wrong, you’ll still run into slowdown at peak times, but it’s never felt unplayable.

Unfortunately, EA also promised a slower power curve in Ultimate Team, and while it’s still early days, all that’s meant so far is that the mode has become even more pay-to-win than usual. Rewards from every mode have been nerfed, and slowing things down like this seems well-intentioned on paper, as it would theoretically allow your cards to stay viable for longer. But you can still buy the best card packs in the store for the chance to get top-end players, so those intentions look a lot less noble when they are placed next to $30 lottery tickets that’ll help you compete at the highest level right away. In the past, if you didn’t pay with money, you could pay with time and effort. That’s still true if you want to work the Transfer Market to make Coins, but average players are going to be stuck firmly in the rearview mirror until they open their checkbook. B

Elsewhere, Clubs have probably seen the least changes, though the Archetype system is a nifty new form of progression. I’m not much of a Clubs player but, to my untrained eye, the ability to pick a famous player from soccer’s past to emulate makes it a little easier to stick to a role and provides a better way to gauge forward momentum.. While a meta will surely settle over the mode in the coming weeks, it’s a change that has piqued my interest enough to make me wish I had a group of 10 friends to play with consistently.

Thankfully, the on-pitch gameplay might be better than it’s ever been during the current console generation. Part of that is thanks to the split between Authentic and Competitive, but it’s more than that alone, as FC 26 is just generally more responsive than ever. There are dozens of ways this manifests, but the thing you’ll notice most is left-stick dribbling. The ball feels sticky to your feet, letting you make microadjustments as you dribble down the pitch. With the extra control, you’re better able to set up passes and find lines to cut through the defense.

Speaking of passing, everything is a bit crisper this year. You can’t ping up and down the field with no-look passes, but you can use positioning to tiki-taka your opponent to death while you look for an opening. Speed is still king on the wing, but in the middle of the pitch, it’s all about controlling the flow and looking for that one incisive pass to get in front of the goal for a shot. If that sounds like FC 26 could become a score-fest, especially online, with the faster pace of Competitive mode, you’d be partially correct. Defending can be difficult. Mistimed tackles will leave you even further out of position than usual due to the dribbling improvements, and your AI teammates tend to run out of position already.

However, EA has given goalkeepers an AI boost to help offset that. Your shot-stopper isn’t perfect, but they’re much more intelligent with their positioning. Don’t get me wrong, you’ll still see a few weird bounces here or there – that’s soccer, after all. But goalkeepers are much less frustrating in FC 26. Not only do they set up better to close off shooting angles, but they’re better at punching and pushing the ball out of danger. Instead of blocking a shot directly into the path of an attacker, they’ll send it wide to give your defense a second to catch your breath. FC 26, especially in online play, is much more offensive than the real-life version of the sport, but goalkeepers will at least keep you honest this year.

EA is reportedly closing in on a $50 billion deal to go private in what could become the biggest leveraged buyout of all time.

Details on what could be a monumental shift for the Madden and Battlefield publisher come from a Wall Street Journal report. The site’s sources say investors include private-equity firm Silver Lake and Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF). Affinity Partners, an investment firm led by Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, is also said to be in the mix.

Should the alleged deal be made official, an announcement could be made as soon as Monday. EA had a market value of about $43 billion before Wall Street Journal’s story was published. That jumped nearly 15% to around $48 billion since word of a move to go private first arrived.

A $50 billion deal to remove EA from the public stock exchange would be about $18 billion more than the $31.8 billion buyout of Texas power company TXU, which occurred in 2007. Should the EA deal go through, it would likely stand as the largest leveraged buyout of all time (without adjusting for inflation).

PIF’s supposed involvement in the buyout would see Saudi Arabia strengthen its already deep roots in the gaming industry. It currently has a 10% stake in EA, and in 2022, it became one of the largest Nintendo shareholders with 5.01% ownership. Pokémon Go developer Niantic also announced that it had sold its library of games to mobile games maker Scopely, which is controlled by Savvy Games and PIF, earlier this year.

Ubisoft faced backlash after announcing Assassin’s Creed Mirage DLC set in Saudi Arabia last month. The content was announced following a report from French outlet Les Echos, which shared details regarding a deal between the publisher and PIF. Ubisoft employees had also raised concerns about a partnership with the controversial entity, according to GameFile.

Silver Lake, meanwhile, has partial ownership in game engine tech company, Unity. Should the deal with EA go through, it would see PIF, Affinity, and Silver Lake as new owners as EA goes private.

The publisher’s list of recently released games includes a number of EA Sports titles, such as EA Sports FC 26 and Madden NFL 26, as well as Skate. Next month, EA developer DICE will release Battlefield 6, which has been poised a particularly important moment both for the series and the publisher.

IGN has reached out to EA for comment.

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).

Wizards of the Coast is keeping its line of Magic: The Gathering crossovers cards going with the announcement of three new card sets: Marvel Super Heroes, The Hobbit, and Star Trek.

Wizards of the Coast announced its latest trading card collaborations at a MagicCon: Atlanta panel today. Along with updates to the base MTG universe, the show has featured reveals for expansions in its line of Marvel and Middle-earth sets, as well as a completely new set of cards featuring familiar faces from Star Trek.

The Marvel Super Heroes set is the first bombshell of today’s show and comes with the promise of a June 2026 release date, which will be revealed at a later time. Although we’ll have to wait to see each card and its abilities (and hopefully more Infinity Stones), Wizards of the Coast shared a first look at key art featuring an army of Marvel heroes and villains.

It comes hot off the heels of the Spider-Man set, which launched today. The Marvel Super Heroes MTG cards will take things a step further, with the art featuring Thanos, Ultron, Black Panther, Iron Man, Luke Cage, Squirrel Girl, and many, many more.

Details on The Hobbit MTG set, which follows the monumental release of The Lord of the Rings Magic set in 2023, are quite a bit lighter. We know The Hobbit cards will drop August 2026, with key art featuring the likes of Gollum and Gandalf, but we’ll have to wait a while for any additional updates.

Finally, there’s the long-rumored Star Trek set, which is set to take MTG players to new worlds November 2026. This is uncharted territory for Magic fans, with key art revealing cards based on characters like William Shatner’s Captain Kirk and Gowron, son of M’Rel.

Including the newly announced Lorwyn Eclipsed (January), Secrets of Strixhaven (April), and Reality Fracture (October) sets, as well as an unannounced Universes Beyond set (March), MTG players can currently expect seven new sets to drop throughout the year. Meanwhile, more expansions in the MTG Universes Beyond line of sets should come as no surprise. The recently released Final Fantasy set, which is also prepped to receive new cards this December, managed to be quite the success for Wizards of the Coast when it launched earlier this year. Featuring names like Cloud, Vivi, Noctis, Sephiroth, and more, the set managed to rake in $200 million in just one day.

Spider-Man swung into the MTG universe today with cards based on everyone from Doctor Octopus to Miles Morales, with an Avatar: The Last Airbender set lined up with even more crossover content later this year. For more, you can see why MTG got their hopes about fake Star Trek cards earlier this year.

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).

Marvel’s Spider-Man set for Magic: The Gathering has finally swung into stores (after its recent prerelease), and the unique combination of comic book icons and fun new play designs is making it pretty popular so far.

So popular, in fact, that one rare card has already sold for $10,000, while others are also making a strong case for collectors themselves, tallying in the hundreds for market value. That’s at least for now, as these values could still change wildly in the coming weeks.

Yet, suppose you were hoping to snag these rare cards without dropping a fortune, tough luck, as standalone prices on these bad boys likely won’t change that much.

Collector Boosters were the only real shot to pick them up, and they’ve already vanished from shelves. The only ones left are with online resellers, who are asking over $1,000 for a box of just 12 packs.

So if you’re opening packs this week (particularly if you were lucky and snagged some Collector Boosters before the rush), these are some of the priciest cards to look out for, courtesy of data from our friends at TCGPlayer.

10 – Gwenom, Remorseless (Extended Art)

Dying Light: The Beast has rolled out a hotfix to ensure all players who pre-ordered the game can get their Kyle Crane Legacy Skin. This means that if you’ve updated to version 1.2.2, you only have to check your in-game stash to find it.

It follows a number of other brief updates deployed since the standalone zombie game released on September 18, most recently Hotfix 1.2.1 which addresse the “indoor rain and disturbed day/night cycle” issue and similarly popped the APEX Car Skin into the in-game stash for all who pre-ordered the game or own it through the Dying Light 2 Ultimate Edition.

Techland had spotted the weather abnormalities shortly after launch, promising players it was “aware that you’re experiencing issues with Indoor Rain and the Disturbed Day/Night Cycle, and fixing them is our top priority.” But because the bug only appeared in “rare situations, it takes a lot of extra testing.”

Commenters on the post expressed relief that the hotfix had been sent out, although some are still asking for more information about ray tracing, stuttering, frame drops, and memory leaks.

In Dying Light: The Beast you play Kyle Crane, a legendary hero who breaks free after years of brutal experiments. It’s currently sitting on a ‘Very Positive’ Steam review rating, and secured a 7/10 in our recent review, in which we called it “a goofy, bloody sequel with a monstrous twist, but doesn’t do much else to mix things up.”

Dying Light: The Beast Hotfix 1.2.2 Patch Notes:

• If you’ve pre-ordered the game, this update makes your Kyle Crane Legacy Skin automatically granted from the server. After updating, check your in-game stash – if it’s not there immediately, it should appear shortly.

Dying Light: The Beast Hotfix 1.2.1 Patch notes:

• The fix addresses the issues with Indoor Rain and the Disturbed Day/Night Cycle.
• Once the hotfix will be live on all platforms, the APEX Car Skin will be waiting in the in-game stash for all of you who pre-ordered the game or own it through the Dying Light 2 Ultimate Edition.

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.