Destiny has always been the “we’ve got Star Wars at home” looter shooter, and with Destiny 2: Renegades, Bungie has decided to lean into that directly with a crossover expansion. Weirdly enough, so far that decision seems to have kinda worked out alright! Renegades doesn’t solve many of Destiny 2’s longstanding issues, including the fact that it’s been awkwardly spinning its wheels for over a year now (reminiscent of the MCU post-Endgame), but embracing the cheesiness and over-the-top drama of Star Wars is at the very least a surprisingly nice change of pace in what has become quite a predictable universe. The story is silly, to be sure, but introduces a few new mechanics and weapon types that are a welcome change, and there’s an impressive level of enemy density throughout practically all of the activities that keeps the action interesting. I’ve still got a lot more questing and looting to do before my final review, but so far this expansion has been a pretty compelling breath of fresh air in a game I’ve otherwise been far less excited about than usual.
If you’ve read any of my previous expansion reviews (ofwhichtherearealot), then you’ll already know I am one those weirdo Destiny fans who has stuck with this game through thick and thin – so it should mean something when I tell you that saying I am also a Star Wars fan would be such a massive understatement that I’m actually too embarrassed to elaborate further publicly. But even with my undying love of space wizards, I was initially mortified to learn Destiny 2 was planning a crossover with it. For me, it was the ultimate sign that Destiny was out of ideas, had gone “full Fortnite” in a way that seemed cheap and tacky, and was making one last desperation play during the slow death it’s been suffering for a number of years now. And, yeah, that all pretty much turned out to be true. But when I found myself watching two lightsaber-wielding foes square off in an epic cutscene while listening to the John Williams-esque music this expansion makes heavy use of, I’ll admit it won me over… at least a little.
Renegades does go out of its way to include every little Star Wars reference to a degree that can feel a bit forced – a crutch that’s continuously leaned upon in lieu of any original ideas. For example, you find yourself trapped in a garbage compactor during the very first mission, rescue someone from off-brand carbon freezing, and make a jump to lightspeed while a brooding, masked villain angrily watches you escape his grasp. It’s extremely on the nose stuff, and I was just as likely to experience a full-body cringe as I was to smile about it. But the complete “screw it” energy at play here as it full-throatedly embraces all the corniness and drama for which Star Wars is known does have a certain kind of refreshing charm that’s at least a distinct direction for Destiny 2. I’ve been complaining about this game feeling stale for at least five years now, so I’ve got to give Bungie a bit of credit for trying something new here.
There are also a fair number of new mechanics that I wasn’t expecting, like a shielding system for certain enemies that forces you to deal a whole bunch of damage in a short span of time before you can actually hurt them, AT-ST-inspired walkers that have some unique attacks I wasn’t expecting, and even some new weapon types, like battery-powered guns that can be fired until they overheat and need to cool down. None of this is massively game-changing stuff, but they’re decent little tweaks to the sandbox that are welcome additions. Of course, there’s also a ton of stuff that hasn’t changed at all, and even while you’re facing off against a new kind of enemy in theory, you’ll still be fighting the same Cabal armored warriors and bony Thrall monstrosities you’ve been shooting for over a decade, which has made this feel like a cheap reskin at times.
I’m still fairly early into my space opera journey (I haven’t even crafted my lightsaber yet!), so I have a whole lot more to play before I can definitively say where Renegades lands. But so far this expansion seems much better than I expected… though that’s partially because I expected very little. I’ll have much more to say once I’ve completed the campaign and begin to dive into the endgame activities. For Light and Life!
For gamers of a certain age, Warhammer Quest is a name to conjure with. The original 1995 release was the premier dungeon-crawler of its day, a rare cooperative title in an age of head-to-head conflict games. Once it was out of print it became, and remains, highly collectable. But in 2016, publisher Games Workshop resurrected the brand with the well-received Silver Tower. Darkwater is the latest iteration, with a few new tweaks and a lot of new toys on board to try and uphold its considerable legacy.
What’s in the Box
Games Workshop is rightly known as the premier producer of plastic miniatures and, even by its own exalted standards, the range of figures included in this set are a little bit special. Six of them are heroes, the remainder are their enemies, servants of the noxious, squelchy plague god of the Warhammer universe, Nurgle. The Nurgle range has always been a terrible beauty, crammed with unpleasant details of open sores and drooling maws and there’s plenty of that on display here. But what makes these stand out is a sense of character, something that’s often missing in modern, dynamically posed figures.
These pop out of your tabletop with an air of individuality, particularly the heroes who display a fine mix of old-school adventurer alongside the current sensibilities of GW’s Age of Sigmar setting. Facial expressions and poses seem to tell you something about each of them, from the dour scowl of mercenary Bren Tylis to the gloating grin of the central villain, Gelgus Pust. And it’s worth noting for less experienced modellers that the box’s claim of push-fit is largely true. Most of the figures are fairly easy to assemble, although a couple will benefit from a drop of polystyrene cement. Painting them is another matter, however, as the level of detail may be a bit daunting for novices.
Outside of the miniatures, GW boxed games often skimp on the remainder of the components. That’s not the case here: this is a lavish production at every level, and you can see where the considerable asking price has been spent. Once you’ve lifted the figure sprues out of the box, the cards and punch-out tokens have their own carefully packed sub-box, with the cards for each of the game’s campaign acts presented in their own sealed envelopes. Although the cards could use more, and more varied, artwork, they’re sturdy, shiny and clear to read.
“This is a lavish production at every level.”
Most surprising of all is the book of maps that are used in the skirmish scenarios that make up most of the game. While this is hardly a new idea, most examples are clunky and spiral-bound. This one is hard-bound, yet it still lies flat, making it an absolute pleasure to use. And the maps within are full of the kind of detailed art that we should also have seen on the cards, effectively evoking the plague-corrupted environments of the game’s setting, the Jade Abbey. More detail on the setting and narrative are provided in the game’s rulebook, offering up a great foretaste of the adventures to come.
Rules and How It Plays
Warhammer Quest: Darkwater is a cooperative board game, but you’ll play with four heroes in every game, so it’s best with two or four players: solo is possible, but you’ll end up juggling a lot as the campaign progresses. It has two game modes, a one-off skirmish fight or a longer campaign game. The focus is definitely on the latter mode, as single fights can be unbalanced depending on the scenario you end up playing, and you don’t get the fun of slowly building up your characters and revealing your own narrative of attempting to free the Jade Abbey from Nurgle’s putrefaction.
A campaign consists of three acts, each of which sees you dealing out 14 random encounter cards from that act’s deck, with a boss card beneath. You then get a choice of two possible encounter cards for each adventure, and this is an important decision. Many of the encounters aren’t skirmish fights but little narrative snippets or mini-games. Most of these are of the push your luck or risk versus reward variety, but there are a couple of the more imaginative designs that made Silver Tower’s scenarios such a pleasure.
When it comes to battle scenarios, it’s important to read the cards carefully and consider how the fight might play out. They offer a variety of maps, of enemies to fight, sidequests, victory conditions and special rules. These cause them to vary wildly in difficulty, and some can be almost impossible if you haven’t found certain rewards for your party. This is a big deal because the price for failure is high: you lose some rewards and get to try again, with a second fail ending the campaign.
Duking it out on the map is based on a set of rules from another game in the series, Warhammer Quest: The Adventure Card Game (see it at Amazon). Each hero has three action cards: move, attack, and aid. Using one requires you to expend energy, which is most commonly obtained by exhausting one of said cards, either for the action you’re taking or one of the others. Essentially this boils down to heroes taking three actions each turn, which can be any combination of the available options, although some of the rewards you can get later in the campaign complicate the picture a little.
Combat involves you rolling dice, almost always a pair, hoping to achieve a target number depending on what you’re fighting. Many enemies have a defense value that cancels out an equal number of hits, meaning you’ll have to hit on both dice to hurt them. Between the probabilities involved and the flexibility of the action system, this provides a satisfying balance of decision-making and randomness. This is not a deep game by any means, but you’ll often be torn as to how to best distribute your actions, while the turn limit on completing each battle can lead to some thrilling, high-stakes rolls towards the close.
Between each hero’s turn, the monsters get to activate. How they behave depends on a dice roll, and most enemies switch between a sedate black die and a more threatening red die with each passing battle round. Mostly they’ll move toward a target at variable speed and try to attack, although all the monsters also have a special effect: horrible little pox-wretches spawn new companions, while the tough daemonic cankerborn blast all nearby heroes with an area effect attack. This roll can have a major impact on the difficulty of a scenario, as monsters sometimes do nothing and sometimes unleash a terrifying onslaught, a quirk that the rules put down to their chaotic nature.
One flaw in this system and the map design is that most of the boards have one or more choke points caused by impassable hexes, and most of the scenarios require players to get somewhere and do something in order to win. The result is that both players and monsters get funneled toward the tight corners and scenarios can bog down in repeated roll-offs until you either clear the enemies or the time runs out. Some character abilities and items can bypass this – the dwarf ranger Drolf Ironhead can move through the odd impassable hex – but while this gives some scenarios the feel of a spatial puzzle, in others having one or two characters get a shortcut doesn’t make much difference to achieving the goal. This issue also causes a sense of repetition, despite the fairly varied scenario design.
Victory, and the completion of sidequest goals, results in reward cards being doled out to the adventurers. Like the scenarios themselves these vary in power, with better items being available later in the campaign, but the more impressive items are often one-shot, while more minor power-ups can be re-used. They all add more tactical options to battles, which is absolutely a good thing. Weighing up whether or not to throw your magical one-off widget into the mix in an attempt to save a scenario that’s going south is always a knife-edge decision and adds extra frisson to the dice-rolls that usually result.
Even on-board battle scenarios only last about 30 minutes so, when you mix in the much shorter mini-game encounters, playing through an act doesn’t take all that long. “Saving” the game state between sessions is a minor pain but perfectly possible. All the adventure cards have their own text preamble to set the scene and, as you progress through the campaign, there are secrets to uncover and some new playable characters to unlock. The unfolding narrative isn’t going to win any literary awards but it’s effective at giving your playthrough a solid storybook backbone. Nurgle is a particularly fun opponent to tackle, his servitors by turns fatherly and feculent, so freeing the once-pristine Jade Abbey from their clutches feels like a worthy goal.
Fortnite fans believe developer Epic Games has indeed relaxed its rules around the depiction of male nudity, as the game’s first fully detailed areola have now been spotted.
A shirtless style for the game’s new Chapter 7 battle pass skin Carter Wu shows a relatively detailed nipple present and correct on the character’s chest — the first in almost a decade of Fortnite history.
At the time, Homer’s design featuring nipples was debated as potentially being an exception to Fortnite’s no-nips rule — perhaps due to some licensing requirement, or because his cel-shaded model was low in detail.
But the arrival now of a standard Fortnite skin — prominently available in Chapter 7’s first battle pass, no less — suggests otherwise, and points to more nipples likely now appearing within Fortnite in future.
In the past, everyone from Travis Scott to God of War’s Kratos, Avatar: The Last Airbender’s Aang, WWE’s John Cena, Dragonball Z’s Goku, and Marvel superheroes such as Drax and The Hulk have all appeared in Fortnite topless, with smooth nipple-less chests. Even third-party creator-made modes have been nipple-free, with a high-profile promotional crossover with body hair shaver brand Philips featuring a smooth-chested model.
Could Epic Games now re-add nipples to previous skins, restoring characters like Kratos to their fully chested glory? We will have to wait and see. IGN has often contacted Epic Games about Fortnite’s previous no-nipple policy for more detail, though is yet to receive an official statement on the subject.
Tom Phillips is IGN’s News Editor. You can reach Tom at tom_phillips@ign.com or find him on Bluesky @tomphillipseg.bsky.social
Unfortunately, there’s still a little ways to wait before fans will be able to boot it up in their PCs, as it’s currently set to be released on June 30, 2026. So it’ll have to be a slightly delayed anniversary celebration, but a fun one nonetheless.
Preorder the Fallout: New Vegas: 15th Anniversary Bundle
This looks like the ultimate bundle for New Vegas fans to enjoy, too. First and foremost, it comes with a PC digital code for Fallout: New Vegas Ultimate Edition, which includes the Dead Money DLC, Honest Hearts DLC, Old World Blues DLC, Lonesome Road DLC, Courier’s Stash Weapon Pack, and Gun Runner’s Arsenal Weapon Pack. What’s even better, though, is that it comes packaged in a retro Collector’s Big Box (which can be seen in the photo above) which was exclusively made to celebrate the game’s anniversary.
Alongside the PC code and collector’s box, it also comes with an 8-inch PVC statue of Victor the Securitron, a set of Doc Mitchell’s evaluation cards, a Vault Boy enamel pin, a Mojave Express patch, and an NCR Recon patch. What better collection to have to celebrate 15 years of this excellent game? Plus, with the Fallout TV show heading to New Vegas for its second season, there’s no better time to play it.
Looking for even more Fallout-themed items to pick up, whether for fun or shopping for a fan for the holidays ahead? Check out our guide to the best Fallout gear and collectibles to see some more of our favorite picks, alongside this bundle, that we think are well worth a look right now.
Hannah Hoolihan is a freelancer who writes with the guides and commerce teams here at IGN.
Depending on who you ask, Terminator 2: Judgment Day is either one of the best action movies ever, one of the best movies in any genre, period, or just the best movie of all time, full stop. But regardless of how you rank it, there’s no debate that this film lends itself to games — robots, lasers, explosions, chase sequences, boss fights, and a whole lot of guns — so naturally, it’s gotten its share of adaptations. Some have tried to translate the Terminator franchise’s most explosive moments into an interactive experience, some have woven original lore into the series’ tangled rat’s nest of a timeline, and some aren’t actually related to James Cameron’s creation whatsoever, but figured it couldn’t hurt to throw a killer robot or two into the mix.
Alas, there’s never been a definitive T2 video game, but this year, Terminator 2D: No Fate is attempting to change that. Much like an advanced cybernetic organism sent back in time to alter the future, a group of game developers is using cutting-edge technology from the year 2025 to make the Judgment Day game we’ve wanted ever since the movie was released back in 1991. So, come with me if you want to learn… about the best, worst, and weirdest Terminator video games ever made… in this timeline, anyway. But please, remain clothed. This isn’t that kind of time travel.
Terminator 2 Console Games
One of the best things about Terminator 2 is the sheer variety of its action scenes. It’s got multiple chase sequences with cars, bikes, trucks, and a chopper. In between chases, it’s got shootouts that make use of a whole arsenal of distinctive weapons, and it pits a nearly unkillable protagonist against an even less killable villain. Oh, and if that wasn’t enough, there’s a nice glimpse of future warfare full of flying laser robots and cyber tanks and chrome-plated skeleton men. Now imagine you’re tasked with combining all those things into an interactive experience that’s as fun to play as it was to watch on the big screen, while also making sure it fits on a floppy disk. Add to it that you’re on a tight deadline to get it shipped while the movie is still fresh in people’s minds. Oh, and one last thing: you haven’t actually seen the movie yourself.
Well, that was the case for several of the Terminator 2 video games that gradually trickled out in the two years following its theatrical release. Before hitting theaters, T2 was a closely guarded secret, so while the developers were allowed to read a draft of the script and see relevant reference materials, they had to fill in a lot of blanks, figuring out how the finished product would look. So while they weren’t quite flying blind, they were definitely gunning it down the freeway full speed with their headlights off, and it shows in those earlier games.
The T2 game that suffered the worst from these circumstances was Ocean Software’s officially licensed cash-grab, released exclusively in PAL territory in time for the film’s European theatrical release. This one is such a bizarre mess that IGN’s sister-site Eurogamer produced a whole video about it, titled “The Terminator 2 Game That’s Very Weird,” and while that’s an apt appraisal of that game in particular, there are quite a few others that fit the same description and were developed under equally challenging conditions.
Stateside, one of the first T2 games to market was for the Game Boy, released in time for the holiday shopping season of ‘91. It did an admirable job compressing the explosive events depicted on the big screen onto a monochromatic chartreuse display the size of a sugar packet. Like Ocean’s version, it too featured a mix of sidescrolling run-and-gun platforming levels and on-rails driving sequences. In between, there were multiple circuit puzzles in which you had to reprogram the Terminator – just like the unforgettable scene in the film where John and Sarah Connor void the T-800’s warranty by tinkering with its CPU. Unfortunately, unbeknownst to the developers as they scrambled to make a game based on a movie they hadn’t seen yet, that scene would be cut for the theatrical release, so those levels probably seemed especially tacked on to players at the time.
It’s funny to think about a movie studio splitting hairs about actors’ likenesses on a screen with such low fidelity, but it was genuinely a bone of contention. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s likeness couldn’t be used for the T-800 in-game (something that’s still the case for Terminator 2D), so there are no close-up images of him. It’s possible that’s why his character sprite looks more like Sigourney Weaver in Aliens than it does Arnold in T2, but that’s more likely a byproduct of it being twenty pixels tall.
Monochromatic low-res renditions of John and Sarah Connor do appear briefly to explain the story, and apparently, Linda Hamilton’s portrait in particular was the cause of some confusion. In an interview years later, it was revealed that UK-based developer Bits received feedback from T2’s production company that Sarah Conner’s bangs weren’t big enough. They were referring to the hair covering her forehead, which is referred to as fringe in the UK, but the developers briefly thought this was American slang for breasts. Thankfully, based on the finished product, this mix-up eventually got sorted out.
In 1992, a similarly shaped Terminator 2 game made its way onto the NES before getting ported to the Sega Master System and Game Gear. Like the Game Boy version, this broke up the movie into side-scrolling platforming levels and driving sequences, but thankfully scrapped the circuitry puzzles – suggesting that the developers of this version were actually able to see the film they were making a game about. While it’s a fairly boilerplate video game tie-in for the era, there is one rather ingenious wrinkle. Just like in the movie, John Conner gives his pet Terminator a scolding for terminating too many people, and this is reflected in-game by requiring the player to complete the mental hospital level non-lethally. Shooting human enemies while standing will result in a mission failure, so the player is forced to crouch and shoot them in the legs instead. Infuriating! But clever.
In December 1993, Terminator 2 games finally arrived on the Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis. These versions benefited from the more powerful hardware and extra development time, but they didn’t exactly strike while the steel was still molten. By the time they were released, time-traveling robots from the future had become obsolete, and genetically resuscitated dinosaurs ruled the world, following Jurassic Park’s box office success that summer.
Despite featuring larger, more varied environments and side objectives like collecting scattered future tech, the 16-bit T2 was not received well. Aside from frustrating players mechanically, it underwhelmed visually, especially when compared to other console games on store shelves at the time, like Ecco the Dolphin and Star Fox, or ports of arcade hits like Street Fighter II and Mortal Kombat. Though, bonus points for the authenticity of starting the first level with a butt-naked Terminator walking into a biker bar.
Terminator 2 Arcade Games
Considering that T2 shows the future savior of humanity gleefully burning through tokens in Afterburner and Missile Defense at his local arcade, it’s only fitting that the film got an arcade game of its own, which started appearing in arcades in 1991, before the movie had left cinemas. Compared to the scattershot attempt the console games made at distilling the film’s action setpieces to an interactive format, the original arcade game was more of a straight shooter, as in, all you did was shoot stuff, straight in front of you.
An on-rails shooting gallery played with cabinet-mounted light guns, T2: The Arcade Game let up to two players take on the role of the T-800. The score screen would refer to each player as an individual terminator, though it makes more sense canonically to pretend each player is controlling one of the T-800’s arms. After all, in the movies, he cocks a shotgun one-handed and dual-wields assault rifles, and sending twin T-800s back in time would just be silly. In fact, you can even play this game while dual-wielding, poorly, so if you have a couple of rolls of quarters you need to get rid of quickly, that’s one option.
The first five levels of the arcade game take place in 2029 — the near-future hellscape ravaged by the Skynet and resistance war depicted at the start of Judgment Day — with players blasting wave after wave of endoskeletons, including higher-level gold-plated ones, before eventually getting sent back in time to shoot stuff in the 1990s. The first ‘90s level takes place in the Cyberdyne offices, where the primary objective is “destroy everything,” which includes dozens of Cyberdyne Systems staff members in hazmat suits inexplicably hurling Erlenmeyer flasks full of chemicals at you. Why do they even have chemistry stuff here? Isn’t this a robotics company?One of the big selling points of the arcade game is that it used the digitized likenesses of Arnold Schwarzenegger, Edward Furlong, and Robert Patrick, as well as authentic audio clips from the movie. Of course, the context in which they’re used is less authentic. When the T-1000 finally shows up at the end of the Cyberdyne level, he delivers this chilling one-liner: “Are you John Conner?” Which is extremely funny, as it suggests that he’s still not 100% certain this child he’s come all this way to kill is in fact the guy he’s after.
Like the movie, the final showdown takes place in a steel mill, and the T-1000 must be doused with liquid nitrogen, shattered, and ultimately knocked into a vat of molten metal. However, unlike the movie, in between those sequences, the T-800 must protect John Conner from a bunch of gun-toting steel mill workers who come in rappelling from the ceiling, who are apparently really not happy about this robot fight interrupting their smelting of ingots or rebar or whatever.
T2: The Arcade game isn’t perfect, but it could’ve been a lot worse: it could’ve been about rescuing Aerosmith by launching CDs at stormtroopers dressed like MC Hammer… which is the premise of Revolution X, another Acclaim game that was sold as a conversion kit for the T2 cabinet. I would love to say I have fond memories of playing the original T2 arcade game, but for whatever reason, the proprietor of my local movie theater decided a game about Aerosmith made more sense in a multiplex lobby than a game about one of the most successful motion pictures of all time, but couldn’t be bothered to replace the cabinet art. So, I have very fond memories of the T2 cabinet, just not playing the game it advertised.
Terminator 2 PC Games
While arcades and home consoles were thriving in the early 1990s, PC gaming was evolving at an almost geometric rate. Alongside Terminator 2, a brand new Terminator game arrived for personal computers in July 1991, but it wasn’t actually based on the sequel. Rather than scramble to gamify all of T2’s massive setpieces, one studio had the bright idea to tackle something smaller: the first film, which hadn’t gotten a game at that point.
The Terminator was released in 1984, a year after the entire video game industry crashed, and when it was still in rough shape. Even if that hadn’t been the case, nobody was about to greenlight a game based on a low-budget horror flick from the director of Piranha II: The Spawning. But, as James Cameron would demonstrate, from humble beginnings come great things. Meanwhile, the studio behind this ambitious Terminator PC game hadn’t done much besides a handful of sports games, but that would change. The studio’s name? Bethesda Softworks. These days, Bethesda is known for making massively ambitious games set in sprawling open worlds, and in many ways, The Terminator was the studio’s first step toward developing genre-defining RPGs like Fallout 3 and Skyrim. Upon loading up The Terminator, players have the option to play as Kyle Reese or the Terminator. Playing as the former meant protecting Sarah Connor, while the latter was tasked with the titular termination. In either case, the scope of how and where players accomplished this was ridiculously ambitious for the time. The game took place in an almost 1:1 recreation of central Los Angeles that was roughly ten miles across. For comparison, Skyrim is only around 4 miles from Markarth to Riften.
Like in so many sandbox games that would follow in its stead, the player would have free rein to run or drive around, buy or steal weapons and other items, and avoid the police. That said, this was 1991, so it wasn’t exactly easy on the eyes, looking like somewhere between Duck Hunt and a Dire Straits video. It also wasn’t easy on the fingers. Later games of this ilk would let players commit grand theft auto with the press of a button, but vehicular theft in Bethesda’s first outing was only slightly less complex than hotwiring an actual car and then operating a stickshift to get it moving.
Bear in mind, this was 1991. Wolfenstein 3D was a year away, and the idea of a game where players fired a gun from a first-person perspective in a three-dimensional space was far from a surefire game mechanic, never mind doing it in a three-dimensional space the size of Los Angeles. Bethesda’s Terminator game did well enough to warrant a sequel, but rather than follow The Terminator with a game based on T2, the developers sidestepped the film’s many narrative and technical moving parts and set the game post-Judgment Day during the war against the machines.
Released only a year after the first game, Terminator 2029 shows noticeable graphical improvements, which were likely one benefit of its substantially narrower scope. Rather than attempt another open world, 2029 was broken up into levels. Instead of making players pick between a human or machine protagonist, 2029 gave them the best of both worlds: a member of the human resistance, outfitted with a cybernetic exoskeleton that could be outfitted with an arsenal of high-tech weaponry and futuristic gadgets.
A year later, Bethesda followed 2029 with The Terminator: Rampage, which further narrowed the scope and scale of the experience to a more conventional corridor-based shooter. Set entirely within a Cyberdyne Systems facility in the year 1984, players controlled a commando sent back in time by John Connor to destroy a computer that itself had been sent back in time and had begun manufacturing terminators. Rampage was released in December 1993, arriving on store shelves just in time for the holidays. Unfortunately, anyone with a PC and an interest in shooting stuff was likely preoccupied with DOOM, which was not only a much better game; iD launched it by releasing the first chapter for free online, under the correct assumption that players would eagerly pay for the rest of it.
Rampage might not have been the smash hit that Bethesda was hoping for, but its lead designer Vijay Lakschman’s next project for the company would more than make up for it: a little fantasy RPG called The Elder Scrolls: Arena. The Elder Scrolls would go on to become Bethesda’s most successful property, largely thanks to the ambitious vision of game designer Todd Howard, who’s since become a household name – at least, a household name in homes that own multiple swords. But long before venturing off to Tamriel, Howard would carve out his corner of the Terminator timeline.
Howard’s first producer credit at Bethesda was on The Terminator: Future Shock, which was released in 1995, but improved on the studio’s previous efforts tremendously. For one, it featured an unprecedented amount of 3D assets at a time when most shooters were still mostly 2D sprites in a three-dimensional space. Even more revolutionarily, Future Shock is the first PC game that used the mouse to look around – something Todd Howard makes no secret about.
And before you say Bungie did it first with Marathon, that was technically released on Mac, not PC. An expansion pack was planned for Future Shock, but it eventually grew into a standalone game titled Skynet. Skynet lived up to its supercomputer namesake by iterating upon its predecessor to a shocking degree, adding a multiplayer mode and refining the visuals. Okay, so maybe the FMV cutscenes haven’t aged great, but for the time, it was pretty nuts: Skynet’s complex indoor environments and large outdoor areas could be explored on foot or by vehicle, giving it a sense of scale that wasn’t quite as commonplace in games back in 1996.
There’s no saying what the state of Terminator games would’ve been like had Bethesda continued to develop them, but Skynet would be the studio’s last use of the license. Todd Howard would shift his focus from future wars to high fantasy, acting as project lead for The Elder Scrolls Adventures: Redguard – one of the most hated entries in the series – before following that up with Morrowind, which would become one of the most beloved RPGs of all time. No fate but what we make for ourselves!
From T-1000s to T-Viruses
For the late 90s and early 2000s, the Terminator franchise was largely in standby mode. However, a little survival horror series had begun to infect the gaming space: Resident Evil. While Capcom’s long-running series is clearly its own thing, we’d be remiss not to mention how much it owes to James Cameron’s work.
At face value, Resident Evil is mainly about horror of an organic variety – or at least, biological – so a series about shiny metal robots isn’t the first thing to come to mind. But the devs at Capcom took some major cues from the team at Cyberdyne Systems: For instance, in the original Terminator, the T-800 shows up looking like a big, scary human man who pursues the heroes relentlessly until he’s revealed to be something decidedly not human and eventually defeated. In Resident Evil 2, Mr. X has a similar trajectory, shedding his human disguise eventually to reveal his more monstrous Tyrant form. When developing Resident Evil 3: Nemesis, producer Shinji Mikami specifically credits the T-1000 as the inspiration for the titular bioweapon.
Much like Cameron did with T2, as well as Aliens, the Resident Evil series has also had great success by pivoting from horror to action, with things heating up in RE3 before exploding into the nigh-perfect action-horror masterpiece that is Resident Evil 4 – and then perhaps getting a bit too action-packed in subsequent games. But hey, making sequels to nigh-perfect pieces of media is not easy – as the Terminator franchise would soon show us, repeatedly.
Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines Games
Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines hit theaters in 2003, a decade and change after its predecessor. T2 is an impossibly tough act to follow, and T3 ultimately didn’t need to exist, but the fact that it emerged from a decade and change in development hell due to convoluted rights issues, it’s kind of a miracle that it’s as decent as it is. For context, the Terminator 3 Wikipedia page spends 600 words summarizing the plot of the movie, which isn’t exactly straightforward, and more than 4000 words describing the amount of back and forth that took place before filming even began.
Since T2, the gaming landscape had changed a fair amount, and console games were beginning to be taken more seriously as a form of entertainment for mature, discerning consumers. This may have had something to do with Arnold finally allowing his likeness to be used in the first Terminator 3 game, and based on the trailer, that was one of its biggest selling points: “For the first time ever, fight as Arnold Schwarzenegger!”.
Unfortunately, star power in a video game isn’t enough to carry it when the rest of the experience sucks. When the Rise of the Machines video game arrived alongside the film’s home video release, it got torn apart by reviewers and fans alike for its subpar graphics, loads of bugs, and AI so stupid that it kind of undermined the premise of the movie it was based on.
PC players didn’t have it any better – they got Terminator 3: War of the Machines, a team-based multiplayer experience vaguely reminiscent of Battlefield 1942, but set in the post-judgment day wasteland. One widespread complaint was the half-baked animations, with one reviewer noting it made sense for a Terminator to die by rigidly falling over like a wobbly store mannequin, but it was less convincing when a human did it, which, bafflingly, was still showcased in the official trailer.
In 2003, developers of console and PC games might have been targeting a more discerning crowd of gamers, but for hastily produced shovelware based on any license that wasn’t bolted down, the Game Boy Advance was the wild west. But, ironically, the GBA version of Rise of the Machines was the least worst adaptation. An isometric action game, it followed a similar structure to T2 games. Players took control of the T-850 and fought robots in the future for several levels before traveling back in time to get shot at by the LAPD instead. One really cool detail is when the T-850 takes damage, it’s reflected by his sprite’s appearance in-game – the lower his health, the more his metal endoskeleton is visible. However, picking up healthpacks makes his skin and clothing grow back, which makes absolutely zero sense… if you somehow forgot we’re talking about a Game Boy game.
A year after Rise of the Machines, Terminator 3: The Redemption was released for consoles and PC – and its title seemed more self-aware than Skynet on Judgment Day, especially after how the previous two games were received. Redemption began development around the same time as Rise and War, but was given extra development time due to its larger scope, which it benefited from greatly. When it was released in 2004, many critics lauded it as “The best Terminator game yet!” Unfortunately, that’s not really a high bar, and a bunch of 7 out of 10s didn’t quite redeem the franchise as a viable basis for more video games without a new movie to attach themselves to.
Terminator Salvation Games
Fast forward through several more years of legal tug of war, and it was announced in 2007 that The Halcyon Company was the proud new owner of the Terminator Franchise and had plans to produce a fourth film, which was intended to kick off a whole new trilogy. Shortly after that news, Halcyon announced the formation of Halcyon Games, which would handle the official video game tie-in in-house, ensuring it arrived alongside the film in 2009.
In some ways, the Terminator Salvation video game is a lot like its movie counterpart: it’s got decent visuals, lots of explosions, almost as many robots, a somewhat forgettable story, but the overall experience could be hell of a lot worse. In other ways, the game is nothing like the movie: John Conner looks and sounds nothing like Christian Bale, as the actor didn’t lend his likeness or voice to the project. The game takes place two years before the events of the film, so it could’ve had a totally original protagonist, and it narratively wouldn’t have made much of a difference. The console versions received pretty mediocre reviews, but the mobile game fared slightly better, largely thanks to its impressive scope compared to the average iOS and Android games of the time.
What’s most interesting about Terminator: Salvation is that it marks a major sea change in Hollywood’s approach to making games based on movies. Video games were starting to be seen as a lucrative entertainment medium of their own, rather than just another form of merchandise. The results of Terminator Salvation’s approach might have been middling, but it’s a substantial improvement from, say, farming out the license to the highest bidder who would then turn it over to a studio that hadn’t even seen the movie they were supposed to make into a game. Unfortunately, The Halcyon Company’s halcyon days were short-lived, and they declared bankruptcy two years after Salvation’s release.
Terminator Genisys Games
Several more years were spent wrestling over the franchise, and soon enough, Terminator Genisys rose from the ashes with lofty ambitions of rebooting the whole space-time continuum and, yes, also kicking off a whole new trilogy. But, no plans were made to return the video game space, and it’s not hard to see why: By 2015, the amount of time and money required to develop and market a AAA video game had begun to regularly eclipse that of your average Hollywood blockbuster. The closest thing we got to a new Terminator game in 2015 was a mode in GTA Online inspired by the film, where players driving semi trucks had to run down bike-riding opponents in an aqueduct. Okay, so full disclosure: I consider myself a pretty huge Terminator fan… and I never got around to watching Genisys, and based on everything I’ve seen and heard since it was released, I don’t feel like I’m missing out. From the jump, it looked like a cross between one of those fan-made trailers cut together from other movies, and a really expensive Super Bowl ad for a free-to-play mobile game…
So, it’s fitting that two years after Genisys hit theaters, Terminator Genisys Future War was announced for mobile devices with an explosive, extremely polished CGI trailer… which, like many mobile game trailers, may have oversold the actual gameplay just a tad. Awkwardly enough, by the time this Genisys mobile game was released, it had been announced months earlier that the next Terminator movie was in development.
Terminator: Dark Fate Games
Terminator: Dark Fate arrived in 2019, acting as a reboot-sequel hybrid that planned to pick up where T2 left off, ignore the events of all the movies released since then, and – yes, once again – kick off a whole new movie trilogy. James Cameron was actually involved this time around, and Linda Hamilton was back – so it seemed promising enough. Anyway, yet again, it didn’t get an official video game, at least not until Terminator: Dark Fate Defiance, which was an RTS that was rather unstrategically released almost five years after everyone had done their best to pretend this film never existed. However, leading up to its release, Dark Fate did align itself with gaming.
At E3 2019, the T-800 crashed two press conferences. On the Xbox stage, it was revealed that the pre-order bonus for Gears of War 5 would be a whole Terminator: Dark Fate character pack, allowing players to run around as lancer-wielding T-800 endoskeletons or turn Sarah Connor loose in horde mode. Meanwhile, Ubisoft hyped up Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Breakpoint by teasing plans for Terminator DLC coming post-launch, which would introduce a whole mode that let players rage against the machines.
Mortal Kombat 11, another of 2019’s biggest games, also got Terminator DLC, with the T-800 added to the roster weeks before Dark Fate hit theaters, featuring a fully fleshed-out moveset and the requisite fatalities. This was received so well that Mortal Kombat 11’s sequel, Mortal Kombat 1, would later add the T-1000 to its roster. Given Mortal Kombat’s inscrutably tangled timeline and irreparably mangled spinal columns, it stands to reason that a couple of time-traveling murder robots would make a good fit.
In the years since Dark Fate, not to promote any movie in particular, Terminator characters have made guest appearances in Fortnite and Call of Duty, where they fit in a lot better than plenty of DLC crossovers that have popped up since. Dark Fate’s director, Tim Miller, got his start producing video game trailers with Blur Studios, and it’s likely he was fully in support of this kind of brand synergy, if not partially responsible for how heavily his film aligned itself with gaming. Sadly, Dark Fate’s title turned out to be as prophetic as the frantic warnings of a naked man from the future, and it bombed at the box office, vaporizing any chance of a sequel anytime soon.
Post Dark Fate Games
Weirdly enough, a substantial Terminator game WAS released alongside Dark Fate, but it had nothing to do with that movie, presumably for boring legal reasons. If there’s one thing more convoluted than the Terminator continuity, it’s who owns the rights to it at any given time. My understanding is that a publisher named Reef Entertainment secured the rights to make games based on Terminator and Terminator 2 way back in 2013, but not any of the other films – and by the way, they’re also who are publishing Terminator 2D: No Fate, the game that’s the whole reason we decided to make this video in the first place.
Anyway, Terminator: Resistance was announced in September 2019 with a November 2019 release date. Generally, this short of a turnaround between the announcement and launch of a game is cause for skepticism, and that goes double when it’s based on a movie license that’s had as many bad games as this one has. Now, tack on that it was developed by Teyon, the studio behind the infamous Rambo: The Video Game, and you can see why gamers might’ve steered clear. If you’re unfamiliar, Rambo is one of the worst-reviewed games of 2014: on Metacritic, out of hundreds of games, it’s the 7th lowest scored by critics, and 5th lowest based on user reviews.
Upon launch, Terminator Resistance was slightly better received, generally being lauded as mediocre, in some cases flat out bad (Let the record show that I did not review that game for IGN) but you can’t say it wasn’t trying: in addition to having a clear respect for the source material, this little AA game was juggling more complex systems than anyone was likely expecting. In addition to shooting robots, it’s got crafting, stealth, sidequests, and multiple romance options, with sex scenes. Is it a little janky? Yes! Low budget? Definitely! Surprisingly horny? You betcha! But you know what else was? The original 1984 film that kicked off this entire franchise. Since Resistance was first released, the team at Teyon dropped an enhanced version and a handful of DLC, and have since amassed quite a following of players evangelizing all the stuff this game does right.
As a follow-up, Teyon tackled yet another beloved 80s cyberpunk cult classic with Robocop Rogue City. No one was expecting much, but Rogue City improves considerably on what Resistance was attempting, while still maintaining that same palpable appreciation for the source material – it’s a little bit janky, but it also kicks ass and is expecdtly funny – just like Robocop. Like you can throw dudes through walls, but there’s also a sidequest where Robocop has to stand behind a desk in the police station and respond to outlandish citizen complaints to uphold the public trust. These guys understood the assignment. So, whatever 80s movie Teyon announces they’re turning into a game next, keep an eye on it
Anyway, speaking of Robocop as I’m prone to do, that’s the perfect excuse to talk about Robocop Vs. The Terminator! Which I should’ve talked about sooner, but this franchise isn’t chronological, so why should this video be? Released in 1993 for almost all the handhelds and consoles on the market at the time, this delightful crossover was based on the Dark Horse comics miniseries written by Frank Miller, who, fun fact, also wrote Robocop 2 and 3. Anyway, there’s not much in the way of story in the video beyond Robocop shooting a bunch of T-800s and gold T-800s and then a really big T-800, but the music absolutely slaps, and periodically just says “TERMINATOR” for no reason. Also, when you start the game up on SEGA, Robocop says, “EXCELLENT.”
Man, how cool would a modern RoboCop Versus The Terminator be? Oh, if only there were some studio that had experience making Terminator AND Robocop games, and had a bunch of screen-accurate assets lying around just waiting to be mashed together.
After all, there have been weirder combinations. Like say, Terminator and CHESS. Yup, they did that in 1993 too with Terminator 2: Chess Wars, which was probably pretty exciting when it came out, since chess computers were some of the most terrifyingly smart AI in existence back then. Don’t fact-check me on that.
If you prefer PE to math class, you might prefer Terminator and WRESTLING! Yeah, that was also a whole thing in WWE 2K16. Despite not wanting his likeness used in dozens of Terminator games based on Terminator movies he was in, Schwarzenegger not only signed off on it appearing here, he also agreed to recreate the whole opening bar scene of T2, where he walks naked into the biker bar, but this time, they had WWE superstars playing all the bikers. They must’ve paid Arnold the big bucks for that. Hey, speaking of big bucks, did you know there’s a Terminator mode in BIG BUCK HUNTER? Yup, that’s right! You shoot Terminators. You probably could have put that together.
What does the future hold? Well, it may involve us banding together to scrounge for resources and fight for our lives in a scorched wasteland wrought by artificial intelligence. Worst case scenario, we’re doing that in real life, but more optimistically, we’re doing it in the open-world game Terminator Survivors, which was announced way back in 2024, but which keeps getting kicked down the road – so who knows when or if we’ll ever get to see it in action. There you have it, MOST of the games based on the Terminator films, featuring Terminator characters, or somehow loosely connected to this storied franchise. I skipped over a few. The future is not written.
Max Scoville is a senior writer, host and producer for IGN covering video games, movies, toys and collectibles. He has 15 years of experience in pop-culture media, previously writing for and/or appearing on Current TV, Destructoid, Revision3 and StarWars.com. He has been involved with several podcasts, including The Comedy Button, Weird Heat, Podtoid and you can currently find him hosting IGN’s weekly PlayStation show, Beyond.
The creators of the Fallout TV show have confirmed Season 2 avoids making any New Vegas ending canon by taking what they call “the fog of war approach.”
Fans of the Fallout video games had wondered how Season 2 might reflect the endings of Obsidian’s much-loved Fallout New Vegas, given the show is canon and is set 15 years after the game.
A quick reminder of where we’re at in the Fallout timeline: the Fallout TV show is set in 2296, nine years after the events of Fallout 4 and 15 years after the events of Fallout: New Vegas. We’ve already seen a debate about which Fallout 4 ending should be considered canon, if any. Based on already released trailers, we know Mr. House is in Season 2, so does that suggest a canon ending is being used?
Depending on the choices the player, aka The Courier, makes throughout the course of the game, New Vegas can end with victory for the player during the Battle of Hoover Dam, which drives out all factions including Mr. House himself, a victory for Mr. House in which he remains in control of New Vegas and takes over Hoover Dam, a victory for Caesar’s Legion, or a victory for the New California Republic.
There are variations within these endings, but given Mr. House is in Season 2 in a post-war setting, and is alive (sort of) when the main characters turn up at New Vegas, it seems he survived the events of New Vegas the video game.
But does Season 2 make a decision on who won Fallout New Vegas? It does not, executive producer, creator, and showrunner Geneva Robertson-Dworet and executive producer Jonathan Nolan told IGN in an interview.
Nolan said Geneva Robertson-Dworet and co-showrunner Graham Wagner took “the fog of war approach,” which he called “an absolutely brilliant way to make a bit of an end run around that whole question.”
“This was a really early decision that Graham and Jonah, and I made together,” Robertson-Dworet added, “was that we wanted to try, as much as possible in our show, to honor all gamers’ experiences and all the choices they might make as they play the game. So we always wanted to avoid trying to make one canonical ending the ending that led to the events of the show.”
In Season 2, all the various factions at play think they won the events of the New Vegas video game. “We had the delicious idea that at the end of a conflict, 15 years down the line, every faction might think they won, which I think has a bit of a poetic quality to it,” Nolan said.
“It’s like, the story of history depends on who you ask,” Robertson-Dworet added. “That was the idea.”
There is one fan-favorite minor faction in New Vegas who very much did not win: the Kings. In the video game, the Kings are a street gang made up of people who discovered an Elvis impersonation school and decided to live their lives according to the King’s ideals. But in Fallout Season 2, we see they have become ghouls.
“It hasn’t worked out very well for the Kings, at least some of them,” Nolan teased, confirming the Elvis ghouls we see in the show are indeed the Kings characters from the game.
Nolan continued: “One of the fun ideas is that, with all the factions, whether it’s the Legion, or the NCR, or the Kings, is that in any version of the ending, there’d be some rebuilding to be done, right? Whoever won, whoever lost, all these factions would be in rebuilding mode, and the sort of sanctity of Vegas, this place that House very carefully protected, has been, for reasons we’ll come to understand in the season, has been removed or violated, which means that the folks who were in the game, safe and sound, have had some hard times.”
Still, there is much about Season 2’s New Vegas that fans of the video game will find familiar. Robertson-Dworet described the Strip, for example, as “a very sacred kind of location.”
“You really feel like you’re almost going into the heart of the game when you reach the Strip. And so it was really unbelievable to see what our production designer, Howard Cummings, pulled off. We took over an abandoned shopping mall and built there, and the scale of it was just phenomenal. So that was really exciting to see come to life. Freeside was also unbelievable, also because it’s shot on the same street that Westworld was shot on and Deadwood. So just seeing that transformed at a place that’s had so much TV history, for me, as a fan, as well as now making a show there, was really, really exciting.”
Fallout Season 2 kicks off December 17.
Image credit: Lorenzo Sisti/Prime.
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.
The golden age of the BioWare RPG may be past, but there are still developers willing to go the distance with a genre that begs for good fantasy worldbuilding, good game mechanics, and interesting well-written stories all in one. Spiders is one of them, and Greedfall 2: The Dying World is their sequel to the colonial fantasy RPG that was a very welcome and pleasant surprise back in 2022. That said, there are a few big changes to how it plays that might put some people off the trail—but after a few hours with advanced portions of the game’s storyline I saw the makings of another success.
Kicking it Old School
Greedfall 2 takes cues from the early-2000s era of roleplaying games. It’s more like Dragon Age: Origins or Knights of the Old Republic than anything released recently, for better and for worse. I distinctly got the feeling that Greedfall 2 is specifically harkening back to this era of games for a reason: This is a style of game that the developers at Spiders want to emulate and keep alive because they prefer it—at least for their own games.
Whether or not you enjoy that style of real-time-with-pause combat and emphasis on character arcs, dialogues, and analyzing the environments for plot options will probably determine whether or not Greedfall 2 is interesting to you. At least based on what I played.
Fantasy Island
As with the first Greedfall game, the fantasy world is the real selling point here. Based on the ideas of the European Age of Discovery, or the Spanish golden age, with a dash of the 18th century, and delving into the fascinating clash between cultures in a world that is approaching what we’d consider modern. Except, you know, with the backdrop of magic, monsters, gods, and other fantastical things. Technically a prequel to the first game, I really got the feeling it’s narratively designed so that you can pick it up and play only knowing the most basic premise—which is helped along by the part where you’re a native of far-flung island Teer Fradee with little knowledge of the continent at the other edge of the ocean.
As with the first Greedfall game, the fantasy world is the real selling point here.
What’s cool is that whereas the first game took place entirely on the island, in Greedfall 2 you get to travel to the continental cities only loosely described in Greedfall. They’re delightful culture shock and a welcome change of pace: Winding streets of crowded buildings, huge port complexes of tall ships, including your own ship as a base of operations, and sprawling palatial estates for the wealthiest.
It also continues Greedfall’s tradition of including some absurd, wonderful, and downright dapper riffs on early modern clothing. Including an array of some absolutely wonderful hats. Seriously, someone’s going to play this just for the silly hats and helmets. Like I’m ready to do a second preview, right now, just talking to the Spiders art department about some of these hats.
On the Nose
Your character is Vridan Gerr, which means “Short Roots” in your own language, an up-and-coming initiate of your tribe’s combined magical tradition and religion. The character creation was pretty robust, introduced in the first scene with a cute little dialogue involving a foreign artist making depictions of the natives to send home. It had all the features you’d expect, and more besides—seven different sliders for the nose alone, for example. I’m sure some people will be able to make art with it, while others will make monsters.
There were a good amount of classes to play with. Across the three segments I explored I tried out a tank-focused Protector, a greatsword-and-magic-wielding Living Blade, and a stylish swashbuckling rapier-and-pistol-wielding class with a sideline in party buffing skills. Because, to be clear, when a game offers you an opportunity to arm yourself and behave like one of The Three Musketeers, well, you take it.
KOTOR Combat
Combat is much-changed from the first game, focusing on a real-time-with-pause combat where you control or automate your entire party rather than just your main character. It’s a pretty big tonal shift if what you loved from the first game was the action style, but it’s a familiar form if you grew up on Knights of the Old Republic or Dragon Age Origins.
I’ll admit that I wasn’t completely sold on the combat. Real-time-with-pause does sometimes feel like a dated way to play games, a halfway compromise between simultaneous resolution and turn-based combat. You’re often just using your best abilities in the order that it seems good to use them, or setting up and executing the same combo on enemies content to stand there and take it rather than react in unexpected ways or use surprising abilities. That said, it’s combat that’s playable in three forms.
There’s Tactical Mode that has a free-moving camera, has you control your entire team, and do lots of pausing to queue up moves. There’s a Hybrid mode that has more automated options for your companion team and fewer pauses. There’s also Focused mode, which defaults to your character’s point of view and has you really only controlling their moves in detail, with very limited pausing. I tried all three modes and found myself only really loving the Tactical mode, but even though I’m a tactics junkie I saw the genuine appeal of the Focused mode if what you really care for is the story and want to turn the difficulty down so the combat is there as flavorful excitement for the narrative.
Story Time
Greedfall 2’s story looks like it’s shaping up to be just as much epic fantasy as the first game’s. The stakes are high, the heroes are heroic, and the villains are properly awful. That said, I got the impression that more characters in Greedfall 2 were just stuck in the middle—morally grey, stuck between two worlds, powerless, or just playing politics. That really plays out in the opening, which sees your character and their friends abducted as the introduction to a rollicking adventure… the goal of which seems like to get back home. But the things you discover along the way mean that you’ll need to return to the mainland and play hero to ensure your peoples’ survival—whether you like it or not.
Greedfall 2’s story looks like it’s shaping up to be just as much epic fantasy as the first game’s.
Along for the ride on your adventure are some really choice companions across an array of cool archetypes—at least from what I saw. Each of the companions has their own preferred fighting style and unique skill tree, as does the main character, which really helped to sell me on these being different people and not just a possible player character class palette-swapped to a new body.
In true RPG style, these companions will also inject themselves into conversations you have during your travels. The veteran warrior Till, for example, busted out his sergeant’s bluster and pulled rank on some harbor guards when they confronted the party about permits for travel. The best example I saw, however, was older explorer Safia, whose years of wisdom and maternal character showed as she’d often admonish others for behaving in dishonorable ways, or ways that reflected poorly on their shared nationality.
I also quite liked Fausta, an exiled religious wizard from a theocratic state whose loyalties to the hero’s party were conflicted at best. Not only was her light-based magic interesting in combat, but her stance as yet another fish out of water alongside the player character made for interesting conversations.
Final Thoughts
It’s good that the companions are at least interesting from the about three hours of preview I played, but it’s better that those slices of storyline from different parts of the game all seemed pretty immediately compelling. There’s clear stakes, plots, and interesting things to do at every point I played, and all of it was written well enough that I stayed interested even when I was tossed into a situation and hadn’t fully played the few dozen hours of story that came before it—something that’s just not always true for RPG previews.
That said, there was a sense that the story was big and epic just for the sake of it, because the more compelling parts of the plot were the places where characters were interacting with each other amid the larger historical forces they had no power over. Upon finally returning to your home island, for example, you might find your village destroyed and your people missing. What of your loved ones? Your mother? Those stories were really compelling and could have carried the game on their own, to be honest—but I think that epic fantasy fans want something big and magical to happen and they’ll be pretty interested in what Greedfall 2 has cooking. It’s a twist on the exciting big reveals from the possible endings of Greedfall, and an obvious outgrowth of setting this game on the continent rather than entirely in the new lands.
Either way, this is definitely looking to be Spiders at the top of their game. I hope that bears out when it releases in 2026.
Xbox might not be making a new Banjo-Kazooie, but there’s a brand new game featuring everyone’s favorite bird and bear available now via Dreams on PS4 and PS5.
Banjo-Kazooie: Mumbomania is an impressive-looking platformer made for Sony’s game creation platform that looks good enough to have been made by Rare itself.
A trailer released via social media this week shows the kind of classic Banjo-Kazooie gameplay fans love, and have long called out for more of. In a level that looks straight out of the series’ history, Banjo the bear jumps, glides, rolls and gets shot out of a cannon as he explores and hunts down collectibles.
Banjo-Kazooie: Mumbomania is out NOW on Dreams for PS4/PS5!
Perhaps most impressive is the range of transformations on offer, with Banjo turned into a hulking rock golem, cutlass-wielding pirate, and more.
Originally launched on the N64 in the late ’90s, Banjo-Kazooie eventually arrived for Xbox 360 in 2008 following Microsoft’s acquisition of developer Rare. But despite earning a legion of fans, the franchise has not seen an all-new entry in 17 years, since Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts released for Xbox 360, also back in 2008.
“You’ve seen from our history that we haven’t touched every franchise that people would love us to touch — Banjo fans, I hear you,” Microsoft’s gaming boss Phil Spencer said back in 2023. “But it is true that, when we find the right team, and the right opportunity, I love going back to revisit stories and characters that we’ve seen previously.”
Outside of being playable in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, Banjo and Kazooie now feel largely forgotten. Still, fans of the duo have still had the spiritual successor Yooka-Laylee to enjoy. Developed by various members of the original Banjo-Kazooie team, the game recently got a polished-up re-release in the shape of Yooka-Laylee: Replayee, which arrived in October of this year.
Tom Phillips is IGN’s News Editor. You can reach Tom at tom_phillips@ign.com or find him on Bluesky @tomphillipseg.bsky.social
Magic: The Gathering has grown in the last few years, no doubt in part due to its Universes Beyond crossovers, and the current set, Avatar: The Last Airbender, has been well-received.
As we covered in our preview of the product, the contents are very similar to the same Beginner Box released in 2024 for Foundations, only with an Avatar focus instead.
Inside, you’ll find 2 play boards, and two pre-built half decks with one for Aang and one for Zuko, as well as a tutorial booklet to help you do battle between them.
Once you’ve played through the guided game, there are eight other half-decks, so you can put any two together to build an instant deck, with multiple combinations based around Fire, Earth, Water, Air and features like big creatures, spells, and more.
It’s a great way to get started learning how to play, and it gives you plenty of cards to start your collection with and learn how Avatar-centric mechanics like elemental bending work within the confines of Magic: The Gathering.
Believe it or not, there are still MTG Black Friday deals knocking around. You can still pick up a Tarkir: Dragonstorm Play Booster Box for just $99.99, which includes 30 packs of the dragon-themed sets, while if you’re looking to try Commander, it’s never been easier.
Lloyd Coombes is an experienced freelancer in tech, gaming and fitness seen at Polygon, Eurogamer, Macworld, TechRadar and many more. He’s a big fan of Magic: The Gathering and other collectible card games, much to his wife’s dismay.
Access to Roblox has been banned in Russia, as the country’s authorities have deemed it a host of “LGBT propaganda.”
Russia’s communications watchdog Roskomnadzor announced the move last night, news agency Reuters has reported, blocking the giant gaming platform to Russian citizens.
In a statement explaining its decision, Roskomnadzor said it had removed the ability to access Roblox as it was “rife with inappropriate content that can negatively impact the spiritual and moral development of children.”
By many measures the biggest game in the world, with more than 151.1 million daily active users, Roblox hosts countless player-made game experiences — including breakout hits such as Grow a Garden and Steal a Brainrot that enjoy player counts bigger than anything on Steam.
It’s unclear exactly which games on the Roblox platform have prompted Russia’s ire, though the country has taken an increasingly strict approach to any content featuring LGBT themes in recent years. In 2013, Russia implemented the Law for the Purpose of Protecting Children from Information Advocating a Denial of Traditional Family Values, which was designed to mark LGBT content as contradictory to traditional Russian values.
“We respect the local laws and regulations in the countries where we operate and believe Roblox provides a positive space for learning, creation and meaningful connection for everyone,” a spokesperson for the game said in a statement issued to Reuters. “[Roblox has] a deep commitment to safety and we have a robust set of proactive and preventative safety measures designed to catch and prevent harmful content on our platform.”
Russia isn’t the first country to block access to Roblox, though countries such as Iraq and Turkey which have also banned the game have done so citing concerns over child safety fears. Amid ballooning player numbers, and a user base primarily made up of users under 18, Roblox has spent the past year belatedly adding various features designed to improve its user safety, following a string of reports that have highlighted cases where users were contacted and groomed by adults.
Last month, Roblox announced plans to require facial age checks for all chat communication, with an aim to limit communication between minors and adults. The move came shortly after Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton revealed a fresh lawsuit which claims Roblox has allegedly been “deceiving parents” and “flagrantly ignoring” child safety laws.
Tom Phillips is IGN’s News Editor. You can reach Tom at tom_phillips@ign.com or find him on Bluesky @tomphillipseg.bsky.social
