The original director of Ubisoft’s Splinter Cell remake, David Grivel, has returned to recommence his role as director on the game after leaving Ubisoft in 2022.
“Today, I am very, very happy to announce that I’m rejoining Ubisoft Toronto as Game Director on the Splinter Cell Remake!” wrote Grivel, noting the team and project are very special to him.
Grivel previously worked at Ubisoft for just over a decade, from 2011 to 2022. Prior to his brief initial tenure as director on the Splinter Cell remake he contributed as a game designer on a variety of projects, including Splinter Cell: Blacklist, Assassin’s Creed: Unity, Far Cry Primal, Far Cry 4, and Far Cry 5.
Grivel rejoins Ubisoft after a stint at Ridgeline Games working on the campaign mode for Battlefield 6, until EA abruptly shuttered the studio in early 2024.
The Splinter Cell remake, which was first announced way back in late 2021, has been skulking around in the dark for many years now. Little information about the game has made its way into the light during that time, although we do know the story of the 2002 original is set to be updated to be “more authentic and believable” to a modern-day audience.
Luke is a Senior Editor on the IGN reviews team. You can track him down on Bluesky @mrlukereilly to ask him things about stuff.
Justin Lin is set to direct the upcoming film adaptation of Arrowhead Game Studios’ Helldivers franchise, according to The Hollywood Reporter. Lin is best known for his work on a number of Fast & Furious movies, and was the director of the series from The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift in 2006 until Fast & Furious 6 in 2013.
It won’t mark the first time Lin has set his sights on outer space, as he also directed Star Trek Beyond in 2016 – and later returned to the Fast & Furious series to direct 2021’s F9 (in which he sent Ludacris and Tyrese Gibson into literal orbit in a 1984 Pontiac Fiero).
The Helldivers movie has been written by Gary Dauberman, the writer of several Annabelle films and The Nun – as well as the co-writer of 2017’s It and the writer of its 2019 sequel, It Chapter Two.
Heavily inspired by Paul Verhoeven’s vision for 1997 sci-fi cult classic Starship Troopers, Helldivers 2 is “the rare modern multiplayer game that does almost everything right” by boasting a ton of freedom and a smart progression system that doesn’t nickel and dime players, according to IGN’s review.
After originally arriving on PlayStation 5 and PC, Helldivers 2 also came to Xbox Series X|S in August, 2025.
Luke is a Senior Editor on the IGN reviews team. You can track him down on Bluesky @mrlukereilly to ask him things about stuff.
It’s back, tabletop fans. Both Amazon and Target are running a “Buy 2, Get 1 Free” sale on board games, many of which are already individually discounted for Cyber Monday. And these deals are stackable, an elite-level deal-hunting move I always appreciate. Let’s take a look at what board games are eligible for the sale.
Buy 2, Get 1 Free at Amazon
The deals include a lot of standards that should be in most people’s game collection, like Ticket to Ride, Catan, and Azul. It’s also a great sale for parents looking to pick up family board games, as tons of classic games are on sale. Games like Scrabble, Operation, Mouse Trap, Guess Who, Twister, and the like are all represented here.
I’d especially recommend Flip 7, a simple card game that only takes a few minutes to teach newcomers, with matches that last just 15 – 20 minutes. That makes it great to whip out with a group of friends when you’re looking to kill some time. Check out our Flip 7 review for more information.
Flamecraft is an excellent strategy game with dragons (see our review here). The latest edition of Talisman brings a classic dungeon-crawler into modern times (review). And The Lord of The Rings Journeys in Middle-Earth Board Game made it on our list of the best fantasy board games.
Those are just a few of the games eligible for the Buy 2, Get 1 Free sale at Amazon. You can click through to the full sale here to see every game available. There are plenty. And remember, you can also check out the same sale at Target, where you may find a handful of different games available.
Chris Reed is a commerce editor and deals expert for IGN. He also runs IGN’s board game and LEGO coverage. You can follow him on Bluesky.
I’ve been annoyingly busy lately, and haven’t had as much time as I would have liked to dive into World of Warcraft’s housing feature, which is now live in the World of Warcraft: Midnight beta. So even though I’ve now had multiple tours of its features and possibilities at this point, I was blown away when I poked my head into the community and saw this:
Come on. There’s no way we’re going to be able to make that! Well, okay, maybe no way I, a deeply mediocre interior decorator, will be able to make that.
Nevertheless, early testing for housing in WoW is proving to be quite the success. In fact, amid a lot of controversy around both add-on removal and transmog, it’s nice that there’s one new feature everyone’s just sort of unanimously positive about.
Still, there are still plenty of questions still up in the air about how housing will work once it gets into the full game, and what its long-term future is going to be. I sat down with Jesse Kurlancheek, housing lead and principal game designer, and Joanna Giannullis, senior UX designer, to pepper them with questions specifically about housing: how will it work, what features can we expect down the line, and what the future holds. Here’s our full interview below, which has been lightly edited for length and clarity:
IGN: So in the past we’ve sometimes seen Blizzard introduce new features and then drop them at the end of the expansion, like Pandaria’s Farms, and the Garrisons in Warlordsof Draenor. Can we be reassured that housing is going to continue to be supported with new content and added to with each new expansion?
Jesse Kurlancheek: I will reassure you as much as possible that that is the case. We have a short-term, medium-term, long-term list of features and content that we want to add. We talk about what are we doing in 12.0 and 12.1 and 12.2 and beyond pretty regularly. One of the things that’s most exciting about housing is that, if I ask you, “Hey, what are the three things you want most from housing?” Just rattle off, and I ask Jo[anna Giannullis] and I ask Aramis [the PR representative on the call] and I ask 10 players, I will get a dozen different answers ranging the gamut, but chances are 90, 95% of those things totally make sense in housing. It’s such a wide, open field that you can’t really say no to a lot of stuff, and because of that, it’s really exciting to add all of these things. And you can see a through line as we talk about stuff, we want players to have this area to express themselves, to be creative, to build sort of what they want, their ideal home in Azeroth.
But then we also say, “But we want you to be amongst other players. We want you to be with your friends or Guildies. We want to give you a space that is not just yours but is ours.” And then from there, where do people get excited? What sort of sparks your joy? What lights your eyes up? What do players do on day one, on month one that they want to keep doing, that they want to build on? So, we have our roadmap. We have the things that we think are really exciting. We have the things that we know players want. We know that, yeah, you want more content, you want more decor, you want more of this culture or that culture or this expansion stuff or that expansion stuff. You want to be able to have access to these types of features and we want more customization.
We want better quality of life. We want to be able to do things together that we can’t right now. But then, we have things that you don’t necessarily think about. When you say, oh, when we announced neighborhoods back in the spring, you’d see people sort of be like, “Oh, now that we have this sort of collaborative space, what does that mean for us?” And watching people have conversations about the what ifs with housing is very gratifying. Hopefully, that very long-winded answer reassures you that we’re thinking about things as not just a single feature release, that this is a very long-running thing.
You were talking about having a space for people to hang out in. So, I log in and I go do dungeons or whatever it is I do and I play, but there’s also sort of a home base that I tend to hang out in. And generally in the history of WoW, that’s always been a capital city, because there’s an auction house and a bank, and a bunch of other people there. And I’m wondering how you’re thinking about the tension between, do I want to hang out in my house where there’s no bank and no auction house, or do I want to hang out in a capital city? But if I don’t hang out in a capital city, is the capital city going to be empty? How are you kind of thinking about that?
Joanna Giannullis: I think we are expecting players to sort of settle into different types. We made sure that a lot of things that you go to the capital city for, that’s still where you have to go to do that. You got to go and visit your professions trainers, do your crafting orders, visit the bank, the auction house. A lot of those things are still going to be central in the city. You may still want to go there so you can see the Brutosaur parades or whatnot. There’s still going to be a lot there for you. But we also wanted the neighbors to be a space where you could be more social with your friends and your Guildies because that’s a little bit harder to do in those hub cities. So, we’re hoping that there’s a nice balance. We’re also not making you choose where to put your Hearthstone, we’re going to give you a hearth to your actual home so you’ll be able to quickly go to either location to do the things that you need to do while you’re waiting for raid or what have you.
Is there any thought to making there be practical benefits to being in the house though? I know you probably don’t want to put a bank there because then everyone would just sit in there all the time, but I wonder if there’s anything else? I saw this thing where tourist NPCs were coming by and taking pictures, which is really cute. I don’t know, could NPCs come visit? Could there be a reason to just sit there and hang out that’s practical and gameplay oriented?
Giannullis: Right now, we do have cooking stations in your house. There are a couple small things and I’m sure there’s things that will happen in the future, but there are some things that you might find more enjoyable to just do in your home or your plot or your neighborhood, and there’s a lot of reasons to keep returning to your neighborhood. We’ve got endeavors coming up with the launch Midnight and that’s something that you’re going to be participating in, but then those are also going to send you back out into the world. So, there should be a lot of give and take there.
Kurlancheek: We do a fairly hard line on sort of the player power aspect of stuff not coming into housing. You should never feel that, “I have to go engage in a housing loop because if I don’t, I can’t attune to a raid, or I won’t have a 3% DPS boost or whatever.” So, that sort of practical stuff is really not on the table. What you mentioned about NPCs coming by and doing cutesy, neighborly, things like that, I think is very much a part of housing. Feeling like this little part of the world that is yours and your friends is alive is important. Seeing the NPCs put the little umbrellas up when it starts raining, seeing them sort of queue up for the shops and things like that really just gives a life and a vibrancy to this place. But it’s not practical, right? It’s all just vibes, man.
Is there any thought to eventually doing something where two people could have possession of a house together or you could give other people permission to decorate your house? I feel like there’s a budding scene of potential interior decorator professions that could spring up around this.
Kurlancheek: Yeah, one comes up a lot is, “I’m not especially creative or I’m not great with a tool set. Can my friend come over and sort of deck out my apartment or deck out my house?” Yeah, it’s certainly on our radar.
Was there anything that you had to leave on the cutting room floor for this initial launch that you really wish you could have gotten in? And are you willing to say what it is?
Giannullis: So much. So much. I mean, one of the things that’s known is we were able to get the outdoor rooms in for the testing, but those won’t be available to players until we actually launch Midnight, just due to some technical reasons, but we were really excited to get them out. We’re glad we got them out early so players could give feedback and test them and see what they like about him. But there’s some things like that.
Kurlancheek: There’s exterior lighting we had to disable during alpha or beta, I can’t remember what, just because of the performance impacts. If everybody in your sight line put 100 lights on their lawn, that was going to cause a problem. So, we had to disable those. We’re going to fix it up, get them working post-launch, post Midnight launch. Yeah, I think there’ve been a number of things that sort of people held near and dear to their hearts that we had to just not cut, but just be like, “That’s going to wait a little bit and then we’ll get to it.”
In the future, there might be more to types of neighborhoods, right? We have an Alliance and a Horde neighborhood look and then there’s set places in those, but are you thinking about other environments you might want to do down the line?
Kurlancheek: Yeah, I think there’s, letting players make a space that they vibe with. I’m sorry, I say vibe a lot with housing.
It’s very vibes-based.
Kurlancheek: It’s very vibes-based. But getting players a space that they feel like they can make theirs is really important. In designing the neighborhoods, we are very intentional about trying to hit a very broad spectrum of, here are players, here are houses that are for very hermit players, that they don’t want to live next to anybody. Here are houses that are in a little cute cul-de-sac, so there’s 2, 3, 4 houses that a small group of friends can live in. Here’s houses on the ocean, here’s houses in the woods, here’s houses sort of in all of these aspects. But that’s not going to necessarily hit everybody’s thing, and so figuring out what the large missing pieces there are is part of the early post-release sort of conversation.
Giannullis: Another thing to add to that, something that we’ve made an effort is going out and looking in the world, especially even in old content and finding decor or foliage, things that we could add as props and decor so that the players can make their space into what they want. So, if they’ve always loved a specific zone in the game, great, let’s add some of those trees and some of those flowers as decor that they can buy and then put in their yard. And that’s something that we’re working really hard, I think, to get a variety of decor that feels like every little part of the game has its place, and you can go back to old content and get those things and then you can put them in your house.
Going back into old content and finding things, from each of you, what is the most surprising or weird or favorite thing that you found that you’re like, “Oh, I have to put that in housing.”
Kurlancheek: So, there’s literally a spreadsheet or a form that people can fill out for, “Oh, this thing was something we should add.” It’s a little bit unfair being me because I can sort of nudge things a little bit harder to go in and say, “Hey, Jay,” Jay’s the decor lead. I’m like, “Can you add this for me? Literally just for me. I don’t know if anyone else cares about it, but I would like it.” And he’ll be like, “Yeah, fine, that’s fine.”
I think the more interesting thing has been, this is a massive game, right, and seeing players pull up props that have long been forgotten about. They’re like, “That was a cool prop. We should get that in.” Someone posted this, it was a shark, it was a new asset. So, probably from Battle for Azeroth if I had to guess. But it was a shark that had been caught, but that was maybe still alive, I’m not quite sure. But it was a very nice, they wanted to make a fishing village on their lawn. And I was like, “That’s great.” And so, having people post what they’re looking for is really useful for us because stuff like that shows up and we’re like, “That is a great asset.”
Giannullis: We also have had a lot of, this is oddly internal too. This is, everybody really wants goblin items and then trash items. Those get requested a lot. It’s really fun. Yeah, people love them and one of the ones I think we added was the Johnny Trash pile. So, if you get the achievement with him back in Battle for Azeroth, and it’s so funny, it’s like who wants that? But as soon as you see it, you want it. You are like, “I have to have that. I don’t know what for, but I know I need that.” And it’s so fun to see people get excited about those sort of sort of decor.
Kurlancheek: String lights. Everybody loves the string lights.
Would you ever consider making certain housing items super rare or super secretive? I’m thinking about a decoration equivalent of the Time-Lost Proto-Drake or something that’s the reward at the end of a secret quest, like the Hivemind or something?
Kurlancheek: Let’s see how I’m going to answer this. So, there’s the catalog that shows you all the items in the game, all the decor in the game. There’s a flag we can say to hide items until you’ve earned them. So, yeah, that.
Would you ever lock anything behind world first or make something fairly exclusive?
Kurlancheek: I think depends on your definition of fairly. So, meta achievements for expansions are pretty exclusive. And so, we have decor for meta achievements. I think where it’s maybe require more conversation of stuff that’s time limited. We try to generally err away from things that if, you’re like, “Oh, I just need this green placard or whatever, but it was only available for some weird event or something,” that kind of feels bad.
Giannullis: We’ve also, we talked a while back about what sort of decor would we reward for something like PvP, because we’d like to have, and this is no secret, you can get housing decor from everything in game. If there’s a way you can earn something in game, we’re going to let you get housing decor that way. So, we wanted to do something for PvP and it was like, okay, well if we do this and then other people that don’t PvP want it, is that going to feel bad? And so, the concept of trophies came up and you can see some of that early stuff is showing up on the beta. So, I think there’s been real conscious effort to make sure that if it’s something that you can get from something very exclusive, it’s not something that we expect everybody to want to have a ton of in their house or it’s something that you can get a version of another way. But if you see that specific version, you know they did something awesome to get it. It’s a balance there.
There’s been real conscious effort to make sure that if it’s something that’s very exclusive, it’s not something that we expect everybody to want to have a ton of.
When I log in on December 2nd and I have access to this feature, I’m just immediately going to have a bunch of decor already, right? Because I have achievements that exist, I have things that I have done before, so I should just have a bunch of stuff?
Kurlancheek: You will, if you’ve been playing hard for 5 years, 10 years, 20 years, you will potentially log into 150, 200 things that you will just get spammed with and showered with and be able to be like, “Oh yeah, I remember when I did that quest in MoP or something and it gave me whatever it gave me.” And the meta achievements kick in and you start with this very eclectic mix.
I’m sure whatever I have is totally mismatched and makes no sense.
Giannullis: Well, we also start you with the starter packs, which have some more streamlined modern items. Yeah. So, you’ll have a mix of some wild stuff and then some, okay, at least I have a bed and a chair. So, we’re going to start you with a good mix of things, I think.
Are you looking into any eventual copy-paste functionality or the ability to save custom item combinations? I know that’s something a lot of people have been asking about.
Giannullis: A lot of people have asked about that. Definitely copy-paste. Being able, once you get something just right in advanced mode, not having to do it all over again. We’re definitely keeping an eye on everything that people are asking for. There’s a lot of things that people want. There’s a lot of things we want to do, so it’s just trying to decide what’s going to help players the most.
Yeah, I mean the next question is basically the same one about export strings. If people want to decorate a house, show people and then have someone else copy it if they have those items.
Kurlancheek: Yeah, I think when we talk about any feature that’s sort of in housing, it’s what is sort of maximally useful across that spectrum of different players. And so, when you talk about something like importing or exporting strings of stuff, that helps the interior designer type player who wants to sort of provide services. It helps the players that are not necessarily super creative, right, are not really jazzed about the mechanical side of decorating. They have a vision but don’t want use the tool set.
It helps the players that they like to browse. You just sort of, I have a room for this and room for that, a room for this and a room for that. And also, I think maybe the most compelling part about it is it helps players have a sense of ownership where you might not already. So, if you’re a great decorator and I’m a less good decorator, and you make your little pirate cave and like a great pirate cave, “I’m going to take that pirate cave, but I don’t like that she doesn’t have sharks in the water,” or whatever. And then, I throw a bunch of sharks in the water. Now that’s sort of mine in a way that remixing of content in general is sort of a part of the internet. Being able to do that in game is also really valuable.
How are you thinking about things like housing contests and stuff like that? I don’t know. I think about Race to World First and how that’s a tune-in event, and I feel like I would watch an interior decorating show.
Giannullis: The thing is we’ve already seen a bunch of creators pop up that are like, “I’m a housing creator, this is what I’m doing.” And they’re starting to run their own challenges and contests, and so that’s really exciting to see. I think we’re all kind of watching that to see what sort of activities the players are getting up to.
Kurlancheek: Yeah, and how we can sort of build tools to support whatever that sort of shenanigans of being, right? A Trial of Style kind of thing. What do players need to be able to do that? What sort of functionality makes sense to better enable that?
Giannullis: I remember talking about how many people you can even have in your house at a time, and it was something that we were working really hard to make sure we could get that to a good place because we know people want to have parties, they want to do all these different things and we’re trying to make sure that what we’re building is supporting that and can handle that.
Is there a limit to how many people can come into your house at a time?
Kurlancheek: There is, there is. We’re still figuring out where the line is. We do our stress testing and throw a ton of bots into a very decorated house. What happens? In the neighborhoods, regardless of what the solution or whatever the number is there, everybody who lives in the neighborhood can come into the neighborhood. So, if there’s 55 players and the max number of players is 100, say, then we reserve those 55 lots or 55 places for people that live there. So, you can always come into your house.
So I know we can decorate the exteriors of our houses. Is there any thought to stuff like, okay, my guild has our neighborhood together. We can collectively decorate the parts of the outside that are not attached to a house. Can we build a little community center?
Kurlancheek: Yes. The idea of us building together is super compelling, I think. As soon as players can build something themselves, we want to build things together. And so, what that ends up being depends on what people are trying to do or what is interesting for them. If it is just us coming together in the town square and hanging up balloons or whatever, because we’re having a birthday party, what does that look like? Versus we want to build a racetrack for our mounts around the outside of a town and what does that look like? Versus we want to do prop hunts and dueling things and all of these different potential pieces of stuff. What’s juicy?
It feels really wild to talk about it. It feels like we’re almost discussing a completely different game than WoW, like a game within a game. I could very easily just do this all the time and then my raid team would wonder why I’m not there.
Kurlancheek: That’s an actual problem, by the way, that there are people that are finding housing really compelling and be like, “I don’t know if I can make it to a raid tonight. I’m busy with my house.”
I don’t know that that’s a problem you even need to solve, but you were talking about having creators that just want to do housing. And I don’t know, has that changed the team’s perspective on how they approach this? Has that changed the perspective of the holistic design of the game?
Giannullis: I think we’ve already always started wanting to make sure that we were kind of in it for the long haul. This is a feature that we know is going to live in the game for some time to come, and we’re going to be adding more to it with every, not just every patch, but in future expansions and we want to keep growing it. And so, when you say like, “Oh, well what about all these things we got?” It’s like, yeah, over time, yeah, let’s do it. Tell us what you want and let’s see what we can do.
The idea of us building together is super compelling, I think. As soon as players can build something themselves, we want to build things together.
This is how we eventually get the dance hall. This is the way.
Kurlancheek:
Oh, dance hall is, that’s a real low hanging fruit. People are going to toss that together right quick.
I’m sure they already have.
What is the biggest piece of feedback you’re seeing from players right now and what do you plan to do to address it?
Kurlancheek: I’m going to reframe that to critical feedback because the biggest piece of feedback is just, “We want, give us more decor, give us more features, give us more of this, that and the other thing.” I think one of the things that gets talked about most frequently is outdoor decor limits are too low. People want to be able to build more stuff outside their house. We’re trying. We’re going to see where things land and sort of, we want players to be as creative as they want to be. And placing restrictions on folks is never the goal in any of our sort of guiding principles.
Giannullis: I know a lot of players are giving feedback about bits and pieces of the UI and the UX for the actual act of decorating, and there’s not a strong one. There’s a lot of things and things that we know will help players decorate. I think we’re just trying to keep all of those in mind. We’re keeping accessibility in mind a lot as well. We know that there’s some things that might work for one player but not another. So, we’re just keeping in our eyes open to what we’re seeing and trying to make sure that’s all stuff that we’ll be able to address in the future.
Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. Got a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.
In IGN’s review, Simon Cardy called the game “an enthralling spectacle to behold,” and “a complete work of art from top to bottom.” That’s a pretty winning argument for it, so why wait any longer to grab it? This 64% discount may not last beyond today, so now’s the time.
Depending on who you talk to, beat ‘em ups are either repetitive, button-mashy coin munchers or a deceptively simple vehicle for absolute combat mastery. Me? I’m in the latter camp. But how do you get people who aren’t sickos like myself interested? How do you lure them into taking the first steps down Sicko Road? This year’s Absolum tried by merging a mechanically excellent beat ‘em up with a middling roguelite. Marvel Cosmic Invasion developer Tribute Games – the cats behind Shredder’s Revenge, the best TMNT game since Turtles in Time– takes a different approach. It looks to the Marvel vs. Capcom fighting games of old and asks one of the boldest questions I’ve seen a beat ‘em up pose in a New York minute: what if it was a tag game where you controlled multiple heroes? The answer, as it turns it, rules, even if the actual execution of Cosmic Invasion doesn’t quite live up to that concept.
I’ll be real with y’all; I’m not a Marvel guy. My dad’s into comics, and he got me into them, but DC was always his bag (he owns every Wonder Woman comic ever published, and no, that’s not an exaggeration), so I’m a DC kid at heart with a soft spot for indie comics. But I love the weirder parts of Marvel, especially the million conflicting X-men timelines and the cosmic stuff. It’s not the most popular thing Marvel publishes (that is and always will be Spider-Man, though X-men is no slouch), but it’s the most interesting. Give me that over the MCU stuff any day.
If the title didn’t give it away, that’s what Marvel Cosmic Invasion is about. The story here is real simple, almost like it has been ripped straight from the pages of a multi-issue event series. Big Bad Annihilus’s Annihilation Wave (listen, it’s comic books, okay?) is sweeping the galaxy! All life hangs in the balance! So it’s up to a rag-tag assortment of Marvel heroes, whether Earthborn or cosmic in origin, to bring him down. That’s all you gotta know. And you know what? It works.
A lot of it comes down to the team of 15 heroes that Tribute Games has assembled. Yeah, you’ve got the icons, the regulars who absolutely, positively accept-no-substitutes gotta be there. You know the ones: Storm, Wolverine, Spider-Man, Captain America. Then you’ve got cats that were B-listers before the movies elevated them to prominence: Black Panther, Iron Man, Rocket Raccoon, She-Hulk, Nova, Phoenix, Venom. And then there are the weird and wacky inclusions. Thor isn’t here; instead, you get Beta Ray Bill. Real ones know. How do you feel about Cosmic Ghost Rider? Then there’s my girl Phyla-Vell. Oh, and because this is cosmic Marvel, the Silver Surfer is also here, and he is caked up. To the Silver Surfer degenerate at Tribute Games: I see you, and I appreciate you.
Everyone looks stunning because the spritework is absolutely gorgeous.
But the reality is that everyone here looks stunning because the pixel art spritework is absolutely gorgeous. Whether it’s Phyla-Vell’s hair blowing gently in the wind, how Wolverine always looks like a coiled spring, or the subtle transformations that sometimes reveal Eddie Brock beneath the symbiote as Venom, Cosmic Invasion captures the essence of these characters, right down to their voices. Go ahead and watch one the videos on this page, tell me that doesn’t sound exactly like the way Wolverine or Storm or Iron Man sound in your head. True believers, the vibe is immaculate.
Structurally, Cosmic Invasion is a pretty standard beat ‘em up. Not counting the tutorial, there are 15 stages, including old Marvel standbys like New York City, Wakanda, the Savage Land, and Genosha, as well as more exotic environs like Fort Galactus, each with a fun little sub-description (Genosha’s is Heavy Metal; the Savage Land’s is Rumble in the Jungle). Stage selection is mostly a straight line, but occasionally the path will split before reconverging and you’ll have to complete both branches before moving on.
Levels themselves are good but unremarkable beat ‘em up fare with the occasional environmental hazard. There is a collectible to find to liven things up, as well as three challenges in each stage – two are hero specific, such as defeating a certain number of enemies with a certain character’s special attack, while the final one is related to the stage itself. All of this is good: the challenges encourage you to use new characters and learn the intricacies of each arena, and stages are well-designed, snappy (each one takes around 10-15 minutes), and visually distinct in cool ways – you’d never mistake Savage Lands for Klyntar or Genosha – but nothing here is going to redefine your expectations for what a beat ‘em up can be.
What makes Cosmic Invasion special is its characters. Up to four people can play Cosmic Invasion at once, each controlling two characters, and it’s impressive how different each character is, even if they might not feel that way at first. Take Nova and Iron Man; sure, both of their unique attacks are ranged energy blasts, but Nova’s can pass through and hit multiple targets at once. Iron Man’s don’t. Nova’s special attack is an energy field that only hits foes at close range, while Iron Man’s giant, Marvel vs. Capcom 2-esque laser can hit anyone standing anywhere on-screen, but it does require you to line up your enemies and aim well.
Levels themselves are good but unremarkable beat ‘em up fare.
Meanwhile, Rocket is a ranged powerhouse, but his charged heavy attack does massive damage, while Phyla-Vell’s, who is more melee focused, can stun – and no one else has anything like her sword, which she can throw and then teleport to in order to start combos and then keep them going across the screen. Beta Ray Bill and Cap can both throw their weapons, too, but Cap’s shield returns to him automatically; Bill’s will spin in place, potentially juggling anyone unlucky enough to come into contact with it until you manually call it back. Even She-Hulk and Wolverine, both up-close-and-personal bruisers, play differently. Logan is faster and all about chaining long stabby-stab combos together, while Jen is a powerhouse who focuses on short combos that launch her victims into the air for potential follow-ups. They both have grabs, but they operate in very different ways.
Some characters have dodges, while others can block and parry if they time things right, opening up more defensive options. Characters that fly have a much easier time dealing with winged foes than those who don’t, and it’s easier for them to avoid stampedes. Everyone is a little different, and that can have a massive impact on how they play.
What’s really cool, though, are the tag team elements. You only actively control one character at a time, and you can summon your tag partner for various assists to keep laying on the hurt, opening up cool new offensive possibilities – that could be a launcher, a standard combo, their unique ability, their metered “I want these guys dead” special attack, and so on. Figuring out the best combinations and how movesets interact is a lot of fun, especially since you don’t start with everyone unlocked. It’s possible to lose a character mid-level (they have separate health bars), but even then, all isn’t lost. You continue on with your remaining hero, and if you stumble upon some floor food, a time-honored beat ‘em up tradition, they’ll come back with a little health.
Characters also level up as you use them, gaining more health, passive abilities, and so on, encouraging you to experiment, especially in co-op. I played the whole game with my wife (a single run through the campaign took three hours), and while I think Cosmic Invasion is a good time solo, like basically every beat ‘em up, it’s better with friends.
If this beat ‘em up has any black eyes, it’s the lack of enemy variety. You’ll see the same core cast of baddies a lot in Cosmic Invasion, and while that’s not a huge problem (this happens in most beat ‘em ups), it can get a little old. It’s also hilariously obvious when you’re fighting a boss that will become a playable character later on because it feels like you’re fighting someone you’ll be able to play later. It can lead to some really funny moments, like when we were fighting the Silver Surfer on an elevator and kept knocking him into the abyss. Eventually, he’d levitate back up to us for more, only to get knocked down again. It wasn’t bad, but it was as goofy as Rob Liefeld-drawn feet or pouches.
If you get bored of beating on Annihilus’s minions, you can head to the Vault, where you can see each hero’s progress in the Hero Lab, learn about their history and the history of your foes in the Nova Corps Files, and listen to some of Cosmic Invasion’s excellent tracks. You can also spend Cosmic Cubes you earn to unlock nodes in the Cosmic Matrix for more color palettes, hero profiles, tunes, and Nova Corps Files. It’s a cool little system, and it even doubles as a neat way to make art if you unlock the right nodes in a way that forms a pattern. I made an adorable little bug, and I’ll miss him when I fill everything out and he’s gone.
IO Interactive is busy working on James Bond video game 007 First Light, but it has said it also has plans to release Hitman 4.
In an interview with Variety, CEO Hakan Abrak said “of course there will be more Hitman.” But it may be some time before Hitman 4 comes out. Abrak said that any talk of a Hitman 4 announcement will have to wait until Hitman co-op arrives in World of Assassination, which continues to enjoy support via DLC from the studio.
“So of course there will be more Hitman,” Abrak said. “But right now, I think we need to get to the other side of this year and next year you’ll get more news about Hitman co-op, because I think co-op is a really, really good extension to the universe, and will introduce very interesting mechanics and combinations in World of Assassination. But we will, after that, be talking about the next Hitman — because, of course, there’s going to be a next Hitman.”
The Hitman franchise kicked off in 2000 with Hitman: Codename 47. Hitman 2: Silent Assassin followed in 2002. Hitman: Blood Money came out in 2006, and served as the third game in the original Hitman trilogy. Hitman: Absolution followed in 2012, before Hitman, which acted as the first installment of the World of Assassination trilogy, came out in 2016. Hitman 2 followed in 2018, then Hitman 3 in 2021.
IOI has three main productions right now: ongoing work on Hitman: World of Assassination, 007 First Light, and a new fantasy IP appropriately codenamed Project Fantasy. “It’s not announced yet, exactly what it is, but it’s a multiplayer fantasy project, which is extremely ambitious and really cool and is something else than a gun in a suit,” Abrak teased. “So that’s also good to have something new within the creative outlook here.”
Will Hitman 4 have to wait until all three projects are wrapped up? Abrak didn’t say, but you can see why the studio would want to return to the franchise with a brand new sequel: overall, Hitman has had more than 85 million players and over 25 million copies sold. Each more, more than a million people play Hitman, Abrak added.
Cyber Monday is your last chance to secure the best offers of the year before the holidays. If you’re on the hunt for some last minute deals, we’re actively rounding up the strongest Cyber Monday discounts, and you can all our top picks and price drops in IGN’s comprehensive Cyber Monday hub.
Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.
Grand Theft Auto 6 work-in-progress development footage appeared online over the weekend before it was scrubbed from the internet. But while Rockstar’s hotly anticipated sequel has suffered substantial and damaging leaks in the past, this latest leak is anything but.
Eagle-eyed leak hunters uncovered an animation reel uploaded to Vimeo by a developer who has worked on a number of Rockstar games. In it were three snippets of development footage apparently showing GTA 6 (they were indeed labeled as such).
As you’d expect, the video was pulled from Vimeo, but the internet noticed and so the GTA 6 clips are doing the rounds. There are three separate clips, each brief and showing animations on what looks like a test map.
The first shows a male character removing and inserting a bike into a rental bicycle rack. We see the word ‘LomBike’ on the frame of the bike, which is probably a parody of real life LimeBike rental bicycles. No big surprise there for GTA 6! And we even saw this bike rental system in an official GTA 6 screenshot released by Rockstar earlier this year.
The other two, similarly brief clips, show a female character, presumably Lucia, getting out the back of a pickup truck in various stages. Again, nothing to write home about.
In truth, these very brief animation clips do hint at what we can expect from GTA 6 when it eventually comes out, but they tell us nothing we didn’t already know. Of course you’ll be able to rent bikes in GTA 6; it was right there in the screenshot, above. And of course you’ll be able to jump off a pick up truck. This is GTA 6 we’re talking about!
And let’s remember that when you’re actually playing GTA 6, you’ll see these animations in finished form — wonderfully detailed and high quality as you’d expect from Rockstar.
Cyber Monday is your last chance to secure the best offers of the year before the holidays. If you’re on the hunt for some last minute deals, we’re actively rounding up the strongest Cyber Monday discounts, and you can all our top picks and price drops in IGN’s comprehensive Cyber Monday hub.
Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.
Jennifer Hale has opened up on PlatinumGames’ controversial decision to hire her and replace original voice actor Hellena Taylor for Bayonetta 3, admitting, “I definitely got thrown under the bus by that whole thing.”
Just ahead of the third instalment of Hideki Kamiya’s stylish action game series, PlatinumGames revealed that Taylor — who voiced Bayonetta in the first two games — wouldn’t return, and would instead be portrayed by Hale.
“Various overlapping circumstances made it difficult for Hellena Taylor to reprise her role,” Platinum said at the time. “We held auditions to cast the new voice of Bayonetta and offered the role to Jennifer Hale, whom we felt was a good match for the character.”
A subsequent report from Bloomberg (and later corroborated by VGC) revealed that Platinum allegedly attempted to hire Taylor for five four-hour sessions at a rate between $3,000 and $4,000 apiece. This would have put Taylor’s total compensation for Bayonetta 3 at $15,000, much higher than the amount she claimed she was offered. Taylor then released a new statement, saying she was in fact offered $15,000 for the role, but she denied aspects of the reports.
Hale also released a statement amid increased scrutiny and social media harassment over the situation, although it was vague due to non-disclosure limitations.
Now, considering whether or not she’d reprise her role as the titular witch, Hale was cautious but candid, admitting that while she’d “love to play Bayonetta again,” “it was not fun getting thrown under the bus like I had.”
“I definitely got thrown under the bus by that whole thing, and I was unable to speak on my own behalf because I was under not one but two NDAs. Eventually, I was allowed to make a statement, which I appreciated, and I was able to present the facts,” Hale told GAMINGbible.
“There were some things said [that were] presented as facts, but were false. I would have never taken a role otherwise. Before I accepted the audition, I checked everything thoroughly, and I trust the director. Thankfully, playing Bayonetta was so much fun, and the community was so welcoming to me, especially after the fiasco had passed and the facts came out. But it was not fun getting thrown under the bus like I had, but I was happy to come out on the other side.”
It turns out she wouldn’t even need to reprise her role as Commander Shepard — just being able to step back into that world again in any form would make her happy.
Cyber Monday is your last chance to secure the best offers of the year before the holidays. If you’re on the hunt for some last minute deals, we’re actively rounding up the strongest Cyber Monday discounts, and you can all our top picks and price drops in IGN’s comprehensive Cyber Monday hub.
Photo by Roy Rochlin/Getty Images for ReedPop.
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.
CD Projekt is sticking to its ambitious plan to release all three video games in the new Ciri-fronted The Witcher trilogy within a six-year period.
Speaking during a recent financial call, joint CEO Michał Nowakowski said that future The Witcher video games “should be delivered in a shorter period of time.” That’s because CD Projekt has switched to Unreal Engine 5 for the full production of not only The Witcher 4, but The Witcher 5 and 6.
Here’s Nowakowski’s quote in full:
“We’ve been using UE5 for The Witcher 4 for almost four years now, and we’re very happy with what we’ve achieved. I think you could have seen some of that with your own eyes with our tech demo reveal at Unreal Fest couple of months ago, and we’re very happy with the results of that as well – we’ve already said that, but I’m always happy to say it again – and we’re happy with how the engine is evolving through the Epic team’s efforts, and how we are learning how to make it work within a huge open-world game, as TW4 is meant to be.
“In a way, yes, I do believe that further games should be delivered in a shorter period of time — as we had stated before, our plan still is to launch the whole trilogy within a six-year period, so yes, that would mean we would plan to have a shorter development time between TW4 and TW5, between TW5 and TW6 and so on.”
That’s a hugely ambitious release plan that comes across as all the more surprising given The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt was originally released on May 19, 2015 — four years after The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings. Based on Nowakowski’s comment, CD Projekt plans to release The Witcher 5 three years after The Witcher 4, then The Witcher 6 three years after that, assuming it wants to spread each release out equally.
As we’ve seen, AAA video game development can be a difficult endeavor that takes years to complete. Bethesda is still beavering away on The Elder Scrolls 6, which it announced in 2018. Microsoft’s new Fable game, due out in 2026, was announced in 2020, but development began before then. And there was a five-year gap between Sony’s release of Ghost of Tsushima and Ghost of Yotei.
So, the idea that CD Projekt will release three new The Witcher games in six years is certainly ambitious, and it remains to be seen if this plan holds when all is said and done. But assuming it does, when can we expect the games to actually come out?
CD Projekt has indicated The Witcher 4 won’t be out in 2026, which means 2027 at the earliest. According to CD Projekt’s latest financial report, 447 people are currently working on The Witcher 4, up slightly from the number reported at the end of July. Clearly, it is CD Projekt’s focus right now, and production is in full swing. Let’s say The Witcher 4 comes out in November 2027. That would mean The Witcher 5 in 2030, and The Witcher 6 in 2033.
There are multiple spanners that may end up being thrown in the works. CD Projekt will no doubt have to manage a console transition, which may or may not occur before The Witcher 4 comes out. And who knows where the world, generally, will be in just a year’s time, let alone four or five? The video game industry, already struggling through perhaps the most transformative, disruptive time in its history, could be in a very different place in just a couple years. It’s just impossible to predict much of anything right now.
Meanwhile, CD Projekt has Cyberpunk 2 in the works, although that’s further behind The Witcher 4. Will Cyberpunk 2 come out in between one of these new The Witcher games, or will CD Projekt wait until the new trilogy is out before pulling the trigger? And let’s not forget The Witcher 1 remake CD Projekt is working on in some fashion. Will that launch amid the new trilogy? There are other projects too at various stages of development at the Polish company, as well as non-video game projects involving its IP. In short, CD Projekt has a lot going on. A hell of a lot.
CD Projekt recently ruled out The Witcher 4 from this month’s The Game Awards, so don’t expect any new trailer there. Our last look at the game came via the hugely impressive Unreal Engine 5 tech demo in June, which Nowakowski mentioned in his comment. So, don’t hold your breath for The Witcher 4, but when it finally comes out — assuming everything goes according to CD Projekt’s plan — fans are potentially in for an incredible six years.
Cyber Monday is your last chance to secure the best offers of the year before the holidays. If you’re on the hunt for some last minute deals, we’re actively rounding up the strongest Cyber Monday discounts, and you can all our top picks and price drops in IGN’s comprehensive Cyber Monday hub.
Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.
