Save the World, Fortnite’s original PVE survival mode, is finally going free-to-play after almost nine years.
From April 16, all Fortnite players will be able to access Save the World without having to purchase access — as long as they play via a supported platform. To date, the mode is unavailable on Nintendo Switch, Switch 2 and smartphones. On April 16, however, Switch 2 players will also gain access for the first time.
Back in the bygone days of summer 2017, Fortnite only existed as its Save the World portion. A mix of zombie shooting and base building, it made a modest impact — but is now far more famous as being the precursor to Fortnite’s hugely popular battle royale.
In the time since, and despite an initial plan to make Save the World free to all players years ago, developer Epic Games has kept its PVE offering paywalled off, accessed via a rotating selection of add-on packs. Updates to the mode have been sporadic, though continue to bring occasional drops of new content or gameplay tweaks.
Now, however, all of that is going away — so if you want to give Save the World a go, you’ll soon be able to. A website with a community goal to drive interest ahead of April 16 has also now been launched, with a smattering of free rewards if you register there.
Two million people have already downloaded the demo for Capcom’s upcoming sci-fi game, Pragmata.
Pragmata Sketchbook — the free slice of the game that offers players across all platforms (PC via Steam, Nintendo Switch, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S) — gives players a taste of the “tactile combat system that fully engages both sides of your brain,” as well as what it’s like to explore the lunar research station, including its hacking gameplay.
“Hugh, look — I can’t believe millions of people are excited for our game!” protagonist Diana tells her companion on social media. “Pragmata has reached two million wishlists, and two million demo downloads. Thank you so much for all your support.”
“Hugh, look – I can’t believe millions of people are excited for our game!”
PRAGMATA has reached 2 million wishlists, and 2 million demo downloads. Thank you so much for all your support. 💙#PRAGMATApic.twitter.com/kqtB2rESuh
If you’ve yet to give it a go, there’s still time. In fact, Capcom teases that even though some contents of the demo will differ in the final version of the game, it’s worth replaying the demo, as “you might discover new things,” and Diana will have an illustration for you upon completion.
Pragmata is an all-new sci-fi action adventure with its own unique hacking twist. Set in the near future, protagonists Hugh and Diana must work together as they make their way through the cold lunar research station.
Capcom kicked off last week’s Capcom Spotlight presentation by sharing a brand-new look at Pragmata, confirming it was “undelaying” the game and moved the release date up from April 24 to April 17, and gave us another look at Pragmata’s Deluxe Edition, which includes the Shelter Variety Pack.
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.
[Editor’s Note: Minishoot’ Adventures was first released on PC in 2024, but we did not review it at that time, so we have taken its recent port to Nintendo Switch 2 as an opportunity to do so now.]
Minishoot’ Adventures answers a question I never would have thought to ask in a thousand years: What if you mixed classic Zelda with a twin-stick shooter? Developer SoulGame Studio’s take on that combination is an absolute delight. Between the silky smooth controls, your spaceship-shaped hero’s growing repertoire of abilities, and a top-down world that opens up at a satisfying pace, I loved all 10 hours it took me to roll credits. That felt like a perfect length, even though I would’ve gladly kept playing if it had offered more.
SoulGame Studio makes absolutely no effort to hide Minishoot’ Adventures’ Hyrulean inspiration. Just like Zelda, the overworld is populated with enemies, caves, trees, waterways, and areas you can see but can’t reach until you unlock a new ability. Your health is displayed as a row of hearts in the upper corner of the screen, and you can add more by finding heart pieces hidden around the world. If that’s not proof enough, just travel one screen down from your home base and you’ll find an exact replica of the starting screen from The Legend of Zelda on NES. While an uncharitable interpretation might consider this stealing from Nintendo, it all comes off as a loving homage. The developers have used familiar ingredients to create a new, twin-stick shooting-infused dish that’s different enough to stand on its own.
Instead of an elfin boy, you play as Minishoot’, a small beige ship that exhibits a surprising amount of personality thanks to the cartoonish art and animation. That odd apostrophe in the ship’s name is actually to abbreviate “Minimalist Shooter Adventure,” and that minimalism extends to the story, which gets maybe a minute of total screen time. Basically, you and your fellow sentient ships are enjoying your lives together when an invading force comes in with guns blazing to break up the party, flinging ships to all corners of the map and encasing them in crystals. Your job, once you break free of your own gemstone prison, is to find your Shipling friends and “restore balance to the Great Crystal,” whatever that means. It’s not Shakespeare, but it sets you off on a fun adventure.
If you’ve played top-down Zelda games before, then you know exactly what to expect here: You’ll poke around the overworld, delving into caves, fighting enemies, and solving light puzzles. This is all extremely pleasant, thanks in no small part to the controls. Minishoot’ glides along so smoothly that simply moving across the screen feels satisfying.
You glide so smoothly that simply moving across the screen feels satisfying.
Some areas are blocked off by obstacles like pits and water, but you can explore these regions later, once you obtain the right equipment. For instance, you unlock a surf ability that lets you glide over water, and a boost that lets you use ramps to leap over pits. These upgrades are a joy, both because the controls are so good and because they let you explore further into the map. This is a tried-and-true formula, and it works particularly great in Minishoot’ because of how frequently the upgrades are handed out during the adventure. The pacing feels just right, so I never felt like my progress had stalled.
The only major aspect that’s not inspired by Zelda is the twin-stick combat, which (if you’re using a gamepad, as is highly recommended) has you move around with the left stick while firing bullets in any direction with the right. This addition is incorporated so seamlessly into the otherwise recognizable framework that you might wonder if Link should’ve been a little ship all along.
Your starting weapon is as weak as a peashooter, but as you take down enemies and blast through gemstones scattered throughout the world, you level up, earning points you can feed into 11 different enhancements — things like fire rate, damage, range, and bullet speed. Each of these enhancements can be upgraded numerous times, making any single upgrade feel a little too incremental, which is somewhat disappointing. Worse, the cost of the upgrades increases as your enhancements become stronger. That means, for instance, you need to spend three levels’ worth of currency to gain the second damage upgrade.
Thankfully, you’re also picking up new abilities as you bolster your damage output, so I always felt like I was making progress regardless. And your attack upgrades do eventually add up; by the time I confronted the final boss, I could unleash a bullet hell barrage of my own.
Unlike Zelda, the enemy designs are largely forgettable in Minishoot’ Adventures, at least when it comes to their looks. Like the Shipling protagonists, the bad guys you’re blowing up are all mechanical constructs. Most are beige ships that come in different geometric shapes – this one’s a circle! Here’s a triangle! Lynels and moblins these are not.
Enemies don’t look too interesting, but they have a nice variety of attack styles.
On the other hand, these enemies do have a nice variety of attack styles, and they’re strategically placed around the environment to pose different kinds of challenges, making them far more interesting to fight than they are to look at. For instance, stationary turrets might snipe at you from a distance while a cluster of small enemies swarms your way, giving you plenty to consider as you try to kill the cluster while avoiding the incoming bullets. Many rooms lock you inside while spawning increasingly difficult waves of enemies. (There are even a handful of races for you to compete in, complete with a starting block and finish line.)
Bosses are also mechanically interesting, big and challenging battles divided into phases – and it’s here that this twin-stick shooter veers into bullet hell territory. You usually have to thread your way through a maze of projectiles, all while directing your own stream of bullets at the boss. It’s a blast. I died a lot in these fights, but just like in top-down Zelda games, the dungeons are designed to give you a short route back to the boss room from your respawn point, so I was always excited to try again rather than getting frustrated.
Every inch of Minishoot’ Adventures is packed with smart little details, like hidden paths hinted at by gentle indents in the walls, or how enemies gradually turn redder as they take damage so you can tell when they’re about to die. There are plenty of collectables to seek out, from red coins and heart pieces to chunks of the overworld map. As you progress, various symbols start to appear in unexplored regions to point you toward new areas of interest, so I never felt aimless or lost.
It’s all set to a charming and engrossing electronic soundtrack. The sound effects are full of little bloops and plooks and ASMR-friendly tinkles, as well. Combine that soundscape with surprisingly cute animations (an especially impressive feat for a game about faceless ships) and you get a cozy vibe, even when you’re sweating through an onslaught of bullets.
Sony’s PlayStation Plus game catalog additions for March 2026 have been leaked, with notable additions from both the Persona and Warhammer franchises.
As ever, Dealabs‘ reliable billbil-kun has beaten Sony to its own announcement for which titles it is adding to the PlayStation Plus Extra and Premium rosters this month.
From March 17, the Extra catalog is set to include both the highly-acclaimed Persona 5 Royal and chunky shoulder pad shooter Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2, plus the latest Madden game, indie sandbox Astroneer, and more.
Looking at this month’s list, Persona 5 Royal is the obvious standout. Available through the catalog on PS5, this is the expanded 2022 release of the original Persona 5 which added new missions, music and social elements.
Rounding out the list are sci-fi robot shooter Metal Eden, plus dwarven survival game The Lord of the Rings: Return to Moria. If you’re a Premium subscriber, meanwhile, you’ll get access to the classic PSP game Tekken Dark Resurrection, which Sony had previously confirmed was on the way at some point.
Check out the full list of leaked additions below:
Battlefield Studios says it plans to listen to and work with the Battlefield 6 community for “a very long time” as it continues post-launch support with Season 2: Nightfall while dealing with an unsatisfied fanbase.
IGN caught up with Ripple Effect studio design director Justin Wiebe to learn more about how the team is adapting to feedback in response to mixed opinions from fans. And as it and the rest of the four-studio group that makes up BF Studios prepares to launch Season 2 Phase 2: Nightfall on March 17, there’s one thing Wiebe said he wanted fans to know: “We’re listening, and we’re reacting, and it’s going to continue that way for a very long time.”
“We’re getting amazing feedback from the community, and we’re constantly trying to strive to make the best game possible,” Wiebe said when talking about BF Studio’s efforts to communicate with fans. “So we appreciate the community’s time that they take to share the details of what’s working and what’s not working for them, and we take it very seriously.”
Reactions to Season 1 and the Season 2 delay left Battlefield 6 in a rough spot, but it didn’t start that way. In fact, the latest installment in the classic EA FPS franchise eventually became the best-selling game of 2025 after launching for PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X/S last October. We gave its multiplayer an 8/10 at the time, with the entry managing to receive strong reviews from both critics and fans in the weeks following its release. Where it’s run into trouble is everything that’s come after, with fans bombarding social media feeds with calls for bigger maps, progression and gameplay adjustments,grounded cosmetics, and more in the months since.
As concerns and critiques have mounted, we asked Wiebe if BF Studios has felt the need to shift its post-launch strategy to give players’ feedback more weight. Although there’s no doubt the community has played an important role both after and before the launch of Battlefield 6, he says the answer isn’t so simple.
Anything can change based on what is going on with the community, what is going on with the feedback, and what we’re seeing from the game.
For him, including testing done with the pre-launch Battlefield Labs program, the project at launch is the dev team’s vision. After that, it becomes something more.
“So, for me, once we’ve launched the game, it’s in the community’s hands to give us feedback. It becomes our game now. All feedback is important, and we weigh the community feedback, but also, like I said, we look at the data of what’s actually going on in telemetry. Sometimes it can be a perception problem. Sometimes it’s actually like, no, both sources of information are saying, ‘This is a big problem, and therefore we need to stop the plans we were going to do and redirect and start focusing on the things that we’re seeing identified.’”
He continued: “That’s the main thing to take away here: It’s not like, ‘Hey, we crafted this massive plan, and we’re going to hold to it.’ It’s like, no. Anything can change based on what is going on with the community, what is going on with the feedback, and what we’re seeing from the game.”
Battlefield 6 and the BF Studios team will continue when the Nightfall update adds night modes, the new Hagental Base map, weapons, and more next week. A third phase for Season 2, Hunter/Prey, will then add more content come April 14. There’s no word yet regarding Season 3 or when it may launch.
For more, you can read our full interview with Wiebe. You can also read up on our other interview with more members of Ripple Effect from shortly after Battlefield 6’s launch. Be sure to also check out how the BF Studios team responded to fan feedback regarding cosmetics like stickers and infantry skins in the past.
Michael Cripe is a freelance writer with IGN. He’s best known for his work at sites like The Pitch, The Escapist, and OnlySP. Be sure to give him a follow on Bluesky (@mikecripe.bsky.social) and Twitter (@MikeCripe).
It’s been a busy 24 hours for Yoshi fans. Yesterday, Nintendo confirmed Community and Star Wars actor Donald Glover would provide the voice for its elastic-tongued dinosaur in the upcoming Super Mario Galaxy Movie. Now, we know when Yoshi’s next game will release.
Nintendo made the announcement today initially via its Nintendo Today app and then across social media, in celebration of this being Mario Day (because March 10 looks a bit like Mar10). There’s also a new trailer to watch, which offers our best look yet at gameplay.
Today’s trailer introduces us to Mr. E, a talking encyclopedia, whose pages are full of odd creatures. Diving into the pages from the book will see an adorable inky Yoshi leap in and observe the animals for himself. And by observe, of course, we mean swallow.
Thankfully for the frog found in today’s trailer, Yoshi soon decides the animal isn’t particularly tasty. After spitting it out, the frog will gamely blow bubbles for Yoshi to hop into and ride, allowing for some quick platforming. By feeding the frogs different foods, you can create different kinds of bubbles, and unlock further discoveries about the species. You can also name the species yourself (which we’re sure players will be completely normal with).
As you progress further through the game, new environments and many more creatures will be unlocked for Yoshi to research. And at the end of the trailer… there’s a reveal that Bowser Jr. will somehow be involved in the proceedings too.
Yesterday’s Super Mario Galaxy Movie-focused Nintendo Direct confirmed Glover as Yoshi, plus Wednesday star Luis Guzmán as Wart, and Issa Rae as Honey Hive Galaxy’s Honey Queen. We also got to see a good chunk of new footage from the film, as Bowser Jr. begins his own diminuitive reign of terror. For more, check out our roundup of everything announced in the Super Mario Galaxy Movie Nintendo Direct.
Tom Phillips is IGN’s News Editor. You can reach Tom at tom_phillips@ign.com or find him on Bluesky @tomphillipseg.bsky.social
Featuring a character dressed like Link and a creature that looks like Pikachu, upcoming Steam game Pickmon isn’t afraid to hide the games it’s clearly, er, inspired by.
A initial trailer for Pickmon, below, begins with Link, or whoever the main character is supposed to be, leaping from a clifftop that’s clearly a riff on Breath of the Wild’s Great Plateau, while familiar-sounding piano notes tinkle away in the background.
Not-Link deploys his glider, and is shown to have a not-Pikachu clinging onto his shoulder. A dragon-like creature definitely not based on Rayquaza then also drifts past — and this is all in the trailer’s first two seconds.
PickMon | Summer Game Fest 2026 Trailer | Pockegame This is the official account of PickMon. #PickMon is a brand new multiplayer monster-collecting game with open-world survival elements! 🧭Open world survival crafting game for up to 32 players! 🔫Gather your weapons and go on… pic.twitter.com/IdR6byINRk
The next few minutes of Pickmon footage offer much more of the same, with creatures familiar to both Pokémon and the gun-toting Pals of Palworld (the previous Pokémon-like game to land on Steam, which is also still the subject of a Pokémon Company lawsuit), as well as some rudimentary base-building and farming mechanics.
The trailer concludes with a prompt to go wishlist Pickmon on Steam now, and to look out for a future release that’s rather ambitiously “planned for Nintendo Switch and PlayStation.”
Let’s be honest here, everything about this trailer looks set to spark obvious comparisons to Nintendo properties. Even the name of the game’s developer, Pokegame, seems part of the bit. For an indie developer looking to launch its first game, it’s a safe way to grab attention — and if Nintendo was to start legal action, well, that’s even more publicity guaranteed. And already, a Pokémon player has claimed Pickman copied one of their designs for a Pokémon fan design, too.
Of course, it remains to be seen whether Nintendo will bother getting involved. While the comparisons between Pickmon and Pokémon are far from subtle, Nintendo currently seems to have gotten bogged down in its previous Palworld lawsuit, which has dragged on for over a year while Palworld itself remains on sale, albeit with a few minor gameplay tweaks.
Perhaps notably, Pickmon does not seem to include the same catch mechanic as Pokémon, which Palworld initially contained at launch, before tweaking. Instead of creatures being caught and unleashed from a ball, Pickmon seems to have them being summoned forth from magic cards.
“What if we take Palworld, and take its designs EVEN CLOSER to the original Pokémon designs were inspired and even dare promising a release on Switch?” wrote one fan after seeing Pickmon in action. “This is the smash bros ‘everyone is here’ trailer of plagerism [sic],” said another. “We have Pikachu at home ass trailer,” said a third.
But despite the criticism, it’s hard to imagine Pickmon’s developer is upset about all the attention. Whether it will now also gain the attention of Nintendo, however, remains to be seen.
Tom Phillips is IGN’s News Editor. You can reach Tom at tom_phillips@ign.com or find him on Bluesky @tomphillipseg.bsky.social
Boring filler quests, often of the “fetch” variety, used to be derided – but in extraction shooters nobody seems to mind that they’re rampant. Go here, scan this terminal, collect ten wotsits, find five doodads, spin around three times and return to base.
Of course, extraction shooters don’t stand on the strength of their quests, and these objectives are welcome excuses to explore the map. I don’t mind trekking to reach a quest marker if I find something surprising on the way, or an enemy team to fight when I arrive. But these quests cannot get in the way of the looting and shooting.
Not only are Bungie’s quests, called “contracts”, boring and fiddly, but they’re at the heart of the game. Completing contracts is your progress. You cannot mostly ignore them and do your own thing, as I have for my 250 hours in Arc Raiders – you need to finish them to unlock new skills and better gear.
Let me be a bit more specific about their failures.
First, some of these contracts have multiple fiddly steps. An early quest on Perimeter, the starting map, commands you to visit North Relay, South Relay, and Overflow, scanning objects in the first two and downloading an “agricultural report” – try not to explode with excitement – at the third. You could not pick three locations more spread out if you tried.
Remember, every player in a squad will have their own contracts, likely in entirely different areas. Before you know it you’ve got six target locations: even if you meet friendly players who want to help, that’s an impossible task.
These contracts are the only thing that could stop me loading in for run after run after run
At least for that particular quest, you can finish it across multiple runs. Some contracts demand completion in one round. A single distraction – a boss fight, running into a squad of runners, a teammate leading your squad to a different location – can spoil the run. I’ve died before because I couldn’t convince my teammates to accompany me to the final step of a contract that would’ve reset if I’d extracted.
Marathon’s UI doesn’t help. On the Perimeter quest I mentioned above, I wasted five minutes searching for two Sparkleaf Bioprinters in North Relay and by the time I found one, it was time to extract. I know now, of course, that you can open your map and hover over a contract objective for more detailed instructions, such as the specific building to search. But why make players menu dive? Why not just put the exact locations front and centre on your map, or simply flag it on your screen as you enter a point of interest?
The tip about hovering over an objective does, apparently, appear in early hints but it’s clearly eluded many players by (I’ve had multiple teammates asking for help finding those damn bioprinters).
My final gripe is linked to the penalty for leaving a match early after you die. In Marathon, your teammates can revive you even after you’ve been downed, finished, and stripped of your loot, and Bungie therefore wants players to hang around in case they’re brought back from the dead. To encourage this, leaving while a teammate is alive incurs strict penalties – including losing any progress towards quests.
Fine on paper but oh-so-frustrating when, as happened to me yesterday, your remaining teammate is AFK. I was forced to watch a static screen for 15 minutes or repeat my contract in a different run. The same goes for teammates who, often rightfully, opt to flee the scene rather than revive you when a full squad is picking over your corpse: you can watch their round play out, or lose your contract progress.
I know this sounds like a big moan. Let me be clear: I’m still loving Marathon and its quirky heroes that set it apart from other extraction shooters. My annoyance with contracts isn’t enough to put me off yet, and the fact Bungie plans to make objective markers clearer on your HUD in a future patch is promising.
But more invasive surgery is required. These contracts, which are the heart of Marathon, are the only thing that could stop me loading in for run after run after run.
Resident Evil Requiem director Koshi Nakanishi has confirmed plans to launch a major story expansion for the game, following other additions planned over the coming months.
In a video posted to social media this morning, Nakanishi thanked fans once again for Requiem’s huge success so far, with 5 million copies already sold as of last week.
Clearly, Capcom now has much more in store for the game, too — including a story expansion, the addition of a “mini game” in May, and the upcoming arrival of a photo mode, too.
Pokémon Pokopia players are speaking out to save others a whole lot of time and bother — because no, you don’t actually need to water every single square of the game’s world.
When you first start playing Pokopia, your character wakes up in an arid wasteland that was once a lush Pokémon utopia. There are no humans anymore, the world is in ruins, and other Pokémon are few and far between.
On top of that, you’ve likely seen screenshots and trailers showing the possibilities in store when you do revive Pokopia’s world — and so when you gain the ability to water the ground and bring back its green hues, many players’ first instinct (including my own) is to do so everywhere. For hours. Every. Last. Square.
Well, it turns out you don’t need to do that. As many players are now taking to social media to point out (and also, very mildly spoil) there will soon come a time when all of this is handled for you. And if you’d prefer not to read more about what happens next, well, take this as your cue to stop reading — but also stop watering, too.
Nobody ask me if Pokopia has a story, I’ve been watering grass for 4 hours before I let myself progress pic.twitter.com/WP6EKIql85
Thank you because that was starting to feel like such a huge task and I haven’t been focusing on the main quests as much because the dry and withered look BOTHERS me 😭
Yes, eventually your world will experience rain, something that will sort out all those areas of dry ground for you, and immediately make the game look a lot more like those screenshots and trailers. Until then, you really only need to water the plants and trees that you need to create habitats or farm resources such as fruit.
How do you kickstart Pokopia’s rain, you may ask? It’s as simple as crafting the Rain Dance Site item and then activating it using a Water-type Pokémon. This is something that you’ll complete as part of the game’s main storyline when rebuilding the Pokémon Center in Pokopia’s starting area, so you can’t miss it. And for a more detailed walkthrough on increasing your world’s humidity, IGN has you covered.
For now, though, relax and put away your Water Gun. Rain’s comin’.
IGN’s Pokémon Pokopia review returned a 9/10 score, and dubbed the game as “an enjoyable building and town simulator that capitalizes on the charming personalities of its monsters in a way that appeals to both the creative and collector alike.”
