I play a lot of competitive shooters – and I mean a lot of competitive shooters. Whether it’s being an unfortunate son in Grey Zone Warfare, flipping cards in FragPunk, or smashing and grabbing in The Finals, this has been my default “gaming night with the friends” genre since I was in school many, many (many) years ago. And even after many thousands of hours spread across Destiny, Call of Duty, Halo Infinite, and Valorant, there is something about the action on the Rainbow Six series that stands out and just feels right. Now that Rainbow Six Siege is celebrating its tenth year with a massive new update in the form of Rainbow Six Siege X, it seems like a perfect time to reevaluate how this popular tactical shooter stands among its peers after a decade of tweaks, updates, and additions.
The fundamentals of Siege are as strong as ever, which is great to see. Bomb is the headliner mode: Two teams take turns on offense and defense trying to either fortify position and protect a bomb, or battle their way in to defuse it. That setup has been around for decades (and is also the core mode of games like Counter-Strike) but Siege’s distinctive entrenchment and destruction mechanics make its version stand out, and both sides of that coin are extremely fun. I love throwing down a bunch of temporary walls, setting up razor wire or other boobie traps, and getting ready to ambush attackers. And it’s just as satisfying on offense, knowing the other team has set up similar defenses, and blowing a wall open with some thermite to bypass all of it and get the drop on the enemy. The fast time-to-kill rewards position over twitch skill, and I appreciate the way the relatively slow aim-down-sites animation forces you to decide before a fight how you want to engage. This is a thinking man’s shooter, through and through.
The cast of playable characters is an impressive 75 Operators. Each has a different loadout and slightly unique playstyle, with half reserved for Attackers and the other playable only when you are on Defense. They do a great job catering to different playstyles, whether you want to smash through walls with your big hammer as Sledge, or dash around at high speed as Oryx. It is surprising that the Siege X update didn’t add anyone new to the roster, though we did get Rauora just a few months ago.
Dual Front mode hasn’t yet grown on me in the time I’ve spent with it so far.
In addition to Bomb, Siege X adds a new 6v6 mode called Dual Front, but that one hasn’t yet grown on me in the time I’ve spent with it so far. Here, both teams have an area to attack and another to defend simultaneously. There are no restrictions on what type of character you can use, though only 37 of the 75 operators are eligible selections. The single available map is enormous, which, combined with the fast time-to-kill of Siege, means you tend to spend just a very small fraction of the match duration involved in actual action. Unlike in Bomb you can respawn after you die, which seems like it would make this a good mode for onboarding new players, but so far I feel like it really just takes away the pulse-pounding stakes that make Siege what it is.
Siege X is built around a limited free-to-play model. I say limited because, while you can absolutely play Siege X for free, it locks some key modes, like Ranked and Siege Cup, behind a paywall. You’ll need to spend around $20 USD if you want access to those. That seems like an odd choice for something that already has a robust shop and battle pass system for generating money, particularly when other popular games, like Marvel Rivals, don’t do any such segmentation between paid and unpaid players. The community has long been a bit weary of how slow progression and a protracted Operator unlock pace push people towards the paid battle pass, but with the revamps in Siege X I still need to spend more time unlocking things to get a feel for how much better or worse that has gotten.
One of the hallmarks of Siege has always been the way you can punch through walls.
One of the hallmarks of Siege has always been the way you can punch through walls, breach barriers, or come crashing down through the ceiling into your assault, but that feels like it could’ve used an update for this relaunch. For all the walls you can Kool-Aid Man through, there are still a surprising amount of invincible barriers, like thick walls, certain window coverings, and any sort of furniture that make its destruction system less flexible than a more modern game might be. This is especially true on rooftop maps, which limit your options for a vertical breach to the small number of predetermined access points. Those limitations really stand out when other games that’ve come along since Siege first paved the way let you smash through almost anything. I’m not saying Siege needs to let you literally bring down the house, but the fact that I can’t throw some thermite under the bomb and drop it through the floor like I can with the bank in The Finals really sticks out.
A decent audio system, especially headphones, has always been an advantage in Siege thanks to its outstanding sound design, and Siege X has noticeably improved it. Explosions and gunfire sound as great as ever, but it’s the ability to locate the general direction of sounds really impresses me. It’s always been handy for finding enemies trying to get the drop on you, but the revamped soundscape now feeds a lot more detail into it. The most significant difference I’ve heard is in footsteps above and below you – once you learn to recognize the difference between the boomy noise above versus the more hollowed-out sounds below you can start to close your eyes and pinpoint exactly where threats will come from, which is such a cool gameplay-based reward for paying attention to the details.
There are a few other extremely situational upgrades I quite like. Rappelling is one of the most fun offensive options in Siege X: Hanging upside down like a tactical Spider-Man and getting the drop on enemies watching stairways and doors is supremely satisfying, though until now the actual usefulness in combat has always been somewhat limited. That’s because the rope has tended to leave you a sitting duck – or a pinata – if the enemy sees you. But new options to sprint along the wall or jump around corners means getting spotted isn’t instant death, and I’ve found myself using it a lot more as a result. On top of that, new destructible objects like gas pipes and fire extinguishers can be shot to create jets of flame or smoke. It’s extremely rare for that to matter in a fight, but it does have a very cool cinematic flair with just a touch of area control that I really appreciate.
All that said, I’m still early enough in my return to Siege that I’m not quite ready to render a final verdict on its new iteration. I can certainly say that Siege X is a lot of fun to play, and mastering every Operator will be enough to keep me busy for the long haul. I’m a big fan of most of the new additions like the improved sound design, more mobile rappelling, and destructible elements, though at this point I don’t know if Dual Front will be a destination mode – I need to give it more time to gel before I write it off. Overall, I think this a solid step forward that I’m eager to keep playing and evaluating, so stay tuned for the full review next week.
The 2021 relaunch of Splitgate solidified that Valve-style portals and old-school arena shooters are two great tastes that taste great together. Splitgate 2 carries that same great melding of run-and-gun action and tactical trickery that helped the original plant its flag in the genre, so it’s starting from a good place. However, even though the addition of character classes and a wider range of weapons help bring Splitgate 2 through a new threshold of promise, some of the other shots it takes through the looking glass come back to bite it and have made me a bit less optimistic about the time I’ve spent with this free-to-play followup so far.
Visually, quite a bit has changed relative to the original. Gone is the muted, more industrial look of the battle venues, replaced by lots of vibrant colors and brighter lighting, making it look less distinctive and more like the many games trying to catch the eye of Fortnite players. In the trade up from the grubby metal walls to the cleaner, sleeker surfaces, Splitgate 2 is also absent of the more interesting features that made the original’s maps interesting and memorable. Features like deserts and trees that would be smack-dab in the middle of a map (like in one of my favorites, Oasis) are now relegated to background decorations, and every surface you’ll actually run and gun across feels samey across the 15 map options.
The returning map creator mode, now called The Lab, is powerful enough that it’s already filled with dozens and dozens of fan-made recreations of famous PvP maps from bigger games, alongside some more interesting and original user creations that serve as great side shows to the main action. But they are often too gimmicky to be considered good replacements for the developer-made maps as far as having consistent and competitive rounds of the standard modes (to the extent that’s possible considering there’s no ranked mode currently available). I had a pretty hard time getting strangers to queue for some of the wackier-looking options, often sitting in lobbies alone for long periods of time in hopes some other curious Splitgaters would stumble in. I was often disappointed.
Splitgate 2’s biggest win, though, is in gameplay tweaks that have a huge impact on pacing from match to match. The signature portals are still the X-factor, allowing you to create paths between two points on the map on the fly. They are the perfect tools for setting up ambushes, tricky getaways, and even manipulating physics to slingshot you across the map. I mostly use them here like I did in 2021, pulling off one-man flanks on jerks attempting to take my team’s objectives. This time, though, it only takes one button to create both ends of your personal wormhole when shot in succession, making them much more convenient to use. It comes at a slight cost, in that opening one of your portals on top of an enemy’s is the only way to close theirs, and that can force you to close off your own routes. But after logging 10 hours this week, I much prefer this minor drawback over the anti-portal grenades of yesteryear.
It only takes one button to create both ends of your portal, making them much more convenient to use.
Movement always felt smooth, quick, and controlled in Splitgate thanks to its fast (but not too fast) sprinting and the limited jetpacks. In Splitgate 2, both of these things combine with a new slide mechanic to make getting around the maps feel like I remember my best rounds of Titanfall. The jetpack seems more powerful, with more lift before cooldown than the original’s version. Being able to stay aloft for longer means firefights more often begin or end in the air, adding a level of dynamism that makes every skirmish a challenge at every angle.
The arsenal isn’t much different than the original, though, which is a shame because it’s not very imaginative. Most weapons have slick futuristic curves and color schemes but function exactly like the assault rifles, SMGs, and carbines you’ve wielded in other games, and I wasn’t motivated to do much exploration of the options or customization of loadout presets because of it. They really just make me want to sprint to grab power weapons, which spawn with some fanfare on neutral points during matches, as soon as possible. These returning super guns have gotten a couple of notable additions to their lineup, including my favorite: a pair of machine pistols that can be combined to form a longer machine gun when aiming down the sights. These are all awesome, game-changing weapons that are worth the effort to secure every time they’re available.
Mechanically, the biggest change to the way Splitgate 2 plays is the addition of three character classes, avatars of competing corporate entities who settle their differences in this futuristic sport of gun-toting portal slipping. Sabrask, Meridian, and Aeros all have their own unique active abilities, like Sabrask’s Smart Wall, which plops a one-way bullet shield that protects anyone standing behind it while being free to shoot through it at the enemy (much like non-portable version of Reinhardt’s shield in Overwatch). They each also have passive effects that they can grant their whole team simply by being present, incentivizing teams to have at least one of each in play. That means actives are more obviously impactful than the passives, largely because I’ve yet to play a game where every team involved wasn’t receiving boosted health regen from Meridian and faster ability and equipment recharges from Aeros and Sabrask, respectively. Is it really a “boost” if it’s basically the standard?
I think there’s an argument to be made that the choice to forgo class-based, hero shooter-y design was a keystone of the monument to the past’s simpler shooters that the original Splitgate was building. It meant every player started from the same base capabilities and had to earn every advantage during a match. I am sympathetic to this old-school Halo-style mentality, but I’ve come to prefer the diversity of these three new classes, which add just enough tactical expression to give old people like me a chance against fast-twitch no-scoping youth so long as I can out-think them.
It’s a bummer that these new modes rely on isolatingly large spaces.
Matches, regardless of which of the suite of returning modes you’re playing, are almost always more fun on smaller maps, which may not be as interesting as they were in Splitgate but at least are built to take the most advantage of portaling in a way that ensures you’re never too far from the action. Larger maps, like the ones found in the new three team, 24-player Onslaught game types that supersize Team Deathmatch and Hotzone, can feel almost lonely because you have to run a fair distance to find some other players exchanging fire before plotting your portal game. It’s a bummer then that all of these new modes rely on increasingly isolatingly large play spaces.
Across the board, it strikes me as odd that maps seem to deemphasize the advantage that using portals would have – so many objectives sit in places completely hidden from a portal wall, and it felt much more difficult to use portals for aggressive pushes. Fortunately for me, someone who mostly uses portals to set traps and for escapes, and I felt like Splitgate 2’s layouts firmly establish that my more passive approach is the right way to play. Firstly, thank you so much 1047 Games, but secondly, this means that offensive strikes on objectives, especially the ones you have to hunker down on like in Firecracker or Domination, happen with the kinds of jetpack assaults and high-energy flanks that you could do anywhere else. Even modes that require lots of movement or rotating objectives, like Splitball and Hotzone, don’t afford many more opportunities to use the feature in a way that couldn’t be done without it. The most damning realization of this came when I was playing one of the No Portals limited-time playlist maps and realizing my games didn’t feel all that different without them.
Finally, the big new marquee feature of Splitgate 2 is the battle royale mode, which at the time of this writing, I haven’t spent too much time with (hence why this review is still in progress). But from what I have played, it operates mostly as expected: many teams of four drop into a semi-random zone on the map and fight each other to be the last squad standing. The wrinkle it adds to the genre (besides portals) is that the greater map is made up of four smaller maps connected to one another by jump paths and tunnels. Splitgate 2’s version of the storm closing in around you is shutting down one of these regions, forcing all surviving squads toward each other in a shrinking set of rooms. These maps are styled as different environments – there’s a snowy zone and a lava zone, for instance – so it’s easy to communicate which one you’re talking about when planning with your team. I haven’t noticed if these zones have too many differences from one another outside of how they look, though. Does the lava burn you? Does the ice make you slide uncontrollably? I’ll report back when I wrap up this review next week.
Tons of Magic: The Gathering sealed products are on sale at Amazon right now. From commander decks and bundles to booster boxes and prerelease kits, if you’re a MTG player you should definitely check out this sale. Aetherdrift, one of the latest expansions from 2025, is one of the main focuses of the sale, but you can pick up some other sets like the Tarkir: Dragonstorm Jeskai Striker Commander deck.
Be sure to also check out our MTG Father’s Day gift guide for the best gifts and accessories for that special Magic player in your life.
Magic: The Gathering Sealed Product Is On Sale
Here’s how these products break down, like what’s included and how much they cost:
Booster boxes are the perfect way to start and bolster your collection. The contents of a single collector booster pack vary by set, but here you can find exclusive foils, Japan Showcase cards, or a special serialized card. The booster box comes with 12 packs each with 15 cards inside and two foil box toppers (special art foil cards).
Aetherdrift Bundle $29.99 (44% off)
Bundles are a more affordabale way to jumpstart your collection. These typically include nine booster packs, a promotional or alternate art card, 40 extra basic land cards (20 foil, 20 regular), and a spindown life counter die. You can also use this as a card storage box.
Aetherdrift Finish Line Bundle $62.50 (22% off)
Aetherdrift’s Finish Line bundle is similar to the regular bundle but is a bit more premium. It includes six booster packs, three extended art cards, two foil box toppers, 20 foil basic lands, and special spindown life counter die.
Aetherdrift Prerelease Kit $22.95 (23% off)
Prerelease kits are usually sold the week before a set’s wide release and contain a certain color or archetype that ties into the set’s mechanic. There are often leftover kits for you to purchase after a prerelease event which contains a spindown life counter die, six booster packs, a foil premium stamped card, and one special promo card.
Aetherdrift Commander Deck – Living Energy $28.99 (36% off)
Commander is easily the most popular casual format among both new and old players. Whenever a new set is released, commander decks (100 card single-copy format) are released alongside it. The Living Energy Commander deck is one of these, which includes the full 100-card deck, two foil borderless Commander creatures, and a deck box.
Magic: The Gathering – Final Fantasy Cards Are Also Available
There are many terrifying foes in Elden Ring Nightreign, from standard enemies all the way up to the imposing Nightlords. But one in particular seems to give many Nightfarers pause, or even cause them to turn and flee. It’s the Bell Bearing Hunter.
Now, if you’ve only started Elden Ring Nightreign, this could be confusing. The standard boss version of the Bell Bearing Hunter is someone you can potentially fight early on, at the conclusion of the first night while hunting the Nightlord Tricephalos. He’s also a returning fight from Elden Ring proper, so you’d assume returning players would have him figured out.
But in Elden Ring Nightreign, bosses can spawn both at night’s end and in the field, and pack more punch than they previously did in Elden Ring. And this version of Bell Bearing Hunter seems to be doing some real damage.
Players have been putting in hundreds upon hundreds of runs since Elden Ring Nightreign came out, and while there’s certainly been discussion over which bosses are the best or most difficult, the Bell Bearing Hunter comes up pretty often. Specifically, when he’s in the castle. As one post notes, he seems more powerful when he has a roof over his head? Maybe he got a good night’s rest.
Different variants can also cause problems, and the Bell Bearing Hunter can also sometimes appear in other locations, too. The boss is already fairly intimidating, with a sword that he can swing in close range or wield, seemingly telekinetically, at long ranges. But in the castle? He’s got some aura.
Not all hope is lost, though. One Redditor has discovered some new tech that most have probably never thought to try, that could thwart the Bell Bearing Hunter in his tracks. Or at least keep him walking in place long enough to wail on him. This user seems to have put the Bell Bearing Hunter into a permanent walk cycle by just, uh, walking at him and guarding. So taunting him into defeat, with some ranged help, might actually work?
If you know anything about gaming, you probably know the name ‘Mario Kart.’ Since 1992, the series has been a pillar of Nintendo’s output and a quintessential example of the company’s “easy to pick up, difficult to master” philosophy. The series has now become so popular that it’s arguably eclipsed the Mario platformers as the principal arena from which people know the red-capped Italian plumber.
The series began back on the SNES with Super Mario Kart, which introduced a formula that fans fawn over to this day. But while the core of that first game has remained intact over the years, many of the components have been completely reinvented with the series’ latest title, Mario Kart World for the Switch 2. With that new game now out in the wild, it’s a great time to look back on each game in the series to see how they iterate on the formula, how they reflect the state of Nintendo at the time of their release, and whether or not they hold up to this day. Here’s every Mario Kart game, ranked.
11. Mario Kart: Super Circuit
Despite being one of the handheld’s best-selling games, Super Circuit goes down as one of the least replayable Game Boy Advance titles. Considering the series had gone 3D five years earlier with Mario Kart 64, Super Circuit feels like a significant step backward. The character models and backgrounds have a bit more depth than what’s showcased in the original SNES Mario Kart game, but the courses themselves are tarnished by flat, ugly textures that fall short of the handsome results the GBA proved itself capable of elsewhere.
What Super Circuit did have going for it at the time was being the first handheld game in the series. Its bare-bones approach to character selection and game modes reflects its jump-in/jump-out philosophy, which trades expansiveness for approachability – something that came in clutch when an hour needed to be killed on a car ride. Super Circuit had its place back in 2001 and was never supposed to be in significant competition with the console versions, but that means there’s no real reason to return to it today.
10. Mario Kart Tour
It’s easy to discredit Mario Kart Tour for being a mobile game, but this micro version of the classic formula has genuine merits. Chief amongst them is the visual flare the game boasts, with some simply gorgeous course designs. Being so close to the screen allows you to fully appreciate the details on each unlockable kart, character, and race track, which makes even the slow 50cc races that bit more engaging.
Additionally, the return of character-specific items is very welcome and something fans had been wanting to see in the console games since the days of the GameCube. What Tour misses out on is the feel of the console Mario Kart games. Sliding your finger across the screen is nowhere near as satisfying as pressing physical buttons, even if Mario Kart is just pressing A, R and L most of the time.
9. Super Mario Kart
It’s hard not to appreciate what a winning formula 1992’s Super Mario Kart introduced. Over 33 years later, the core of the game remains intact. Grand Prix and Battle Mode aren’t in every subsequent Kart entry for the sake of tradition – they just never stopped being entertaining. The fact that this game not only launched the franchise but also an entire genre of games is nothing to be sniffed at.
However, most of the praise you can heap on Super Mario Kart is because of its legacy rather than its ability to hold up in the modern age. Looking back, it’s difficult to get over the simplistic graphics and lack of mechanical depth, even if you can appreciate how cutting edge it was at the time. Still, it provided a platform for one of the biggest brands in gaming, and who knows what Nintendo would look like today without it.
8. Mario Kart 64
The second game in the Mario Kart franchise feels instantly more dynamic than its predecessor. The 3D graphics allow for more interesting course design, shifting camera angles, and an enhanced sense of speed, especially thanks to the boost you can get from drifting. The extra detail in the character animation also goes a long way to immersing you in these races, which feel more like grand and intense sporting events than simple video game laps.
In the modern day, Mario Kart 64 suffers from issues similar to what Super Circuit and Super Mario Kart do; this same thing has simply been done better by subsequent games, and there aren’t enough unique qualities about this one to routinely go back to it (which is perhaps the key issue with a series that remains so faithful to its core – the new one with its minor improvements is so frequently the best). Still, MK 64’s transition to 3D and its capacity for 4-player co-op means it’s cemented in the hearts of many fans, and often nostalgia is worth more than technical progress.
7. Mario Kart 7
Coming in at number seven is — you guessed it — Mario Kart 7. While it may not hold up as a standout today, it did introduce elements that are now difficult to imagine the series without. Hang gliders feel so core to the flow of MK8, as does the ability to drive underwater and customise your kart, but those features all arrived on the 3DS first with Mario Kart 7. The underwater sequences, in particular, are a visual treat that really hammer home the generational gap between the DS and 3DS. Meanwhile, kart customisation adds a level of strategy to a series that revels in chaos, perhaps in response to the outrageous unpredictability of Mario Kart Wii.
However, going back to the game in a post-MK8 Deluxe world makes all these elements less impressive. When a handheld game with better graphics, many of the same gameplay mechanics, and 64 more courses is readily available, the reasons to play Mario Kart 7 in 2025 are few. It’s a vital part of any 3DS library, though, even if it does lose points for not having Waluigi in the game. What was Nintendo thinking??
6. Mario Kart Wii
Mario Kart Wii cemented this franchise as a household name. The Wii, of course, vastly expanded the gaming population and Mario Kart had one of the lowest barriers to entry, coming with the Wii Wheel to further accommodate the new motion-controlled gameplay. Though not the preferred way of driving in subsequent entries for a lot of players, there’s a reason why tilt controls are still an option in Mario Kart 8 Deluxe and MK World – so many players had their first Nintendo karting experience this way.
Mario Kart Wii has always stood out for being more loose and chaotic than other games in the series, gaining a reputation for rampant blue shells taking out players seconds away from finishing first. But MK Wii has other unique flavours; it includes the series’ first truly robust online play system, improving on MK DS’s slim first iteration, and adds bikes to the list of vehicles. The latter has less concrete impact than the former but does add to the iconic status of the game. It’s impossible to imagine Princess Peach using anything else now.
5. Mario Kart 8
Nintendo’s philosophy during the Wii U era was wrought with overwhelming tones of vanilla, and the company’s most successful franchise was a victim of it. Mario Kart transitioned to HD well, with MK8’s graphics being absolutely gorgeous, and the series’ core gameplay held intact, making for a game that you could never call bad.
But the original version of Mario Kart 8 is, dare we say it, dull. It is too safe. The best Mario Karts put a unique spin on the formula, but MK8’s introduction of anti-gravity is barely noticeable. Instead, the big hitters are the hang gliding and underwater sections, which means it all feels a bit too much like Mario Kart 7, but in HD.
Additionally, Battle Mode is stripped down to almost nothing, which robs gamers of a beloved way to play. All this meant that MK8 didn’t really have its own identity until the improved Deluxe version hit the Switch three years later in 2017. But that Deluxe package would be nothing without a truly solid foundation, and that’s what you get in Mario Kart 8.
4. Mario Kart DS
The Mario Kart formula has existed for 33 years, so any game that alters it in any significant way is going to stand out. Mario Kart DS may offer the classic Kart gameplay in Grand Prix Mode, but it experiments wildly in the unique and brilliant Mission Mode. These objective-based activities range from simple time trials to genuine boss battles, and each asks you to master a whole new set of skills beyond just flying through courses and understanding shortcuts. As a result, Mario Kart DS is more enduring than many of its peers as a purely single-player experience.
Mission Mode is just one of the things that helped Mario Kart DS achieve its iconic status, though. Its integration with DS Download Play introduced a social element unseen on a handheld prior, allowing multiple DS consoles to join a race using just one copy of the game. And in addition to introducing original courses like Waluigi Pinball and Peach Gardens, MK DS is the first in the series to feature retro tracks, an idea now at the core of what people look forward to with any new Mario Kart. It was a triumph back in 2005 and Mission Mode makes it a unique and highly replayable entry in the series to this day.
3. Mario Kart World
Despite being the newest entry on this list—like, it’s a week old—Mario Kart World successfully covers a lot of new terrain for a franchise that’s over thirty years old. First off, it is undeniably the best-looking game in the series and an immediate contender for the most graphically impressive game Nintendo has ever developed. Playing on handheld and taking in every detail of MK World’s vast, interconnected courses is a dream. It’s a magical experience when you’re driving along and can spot the outline of a familiar track out in the distance.
But it’s what World introduces mechanically that sees it rise so high on our list. The ability to drive on walls and grind on rails feel like what MK8’s anti-gravity should have been: new skills that take a lot of practice to be fully mastered. It’s something that you cannot say for new mechanics introduced in almost any previous entry. These skills add great texture to the new modes, such as Free Roam and Knockout Tour, which are great additions that will hopefully remain important cornerstones of future games. The last-one-standing Knockout Tour ramps up the chaos that we’ve always loved from Mario Kart games, while Free Roam’s open world adds a completely new exploration flavour to the series. There’s also some of MK DS’ Mission Mode to be found in the snackable (and often fiendishly difficult) P-Switch challenges. Throw in all the familiar modes we know and love, as well as an instant classic of a soundtrack, and you have one of the ultimate Mario Kart experiences.
2. Mario Kart: Double Dash!!
Mario Kart: Double Dash!! is packed full of personality in a way the majority of the games in the series are not. Having not one, but two exclamation marks in the title makes that clear. The principle feature of having two racers per kart is a stroke of genius, and it’s sort of unbelievable that it’s not been a mode in every Mario Kart since. The double driver system, and the unique items each driver is assigned, allows for so many new styles of play and strategy that prove far more interesting than customising the vehicle you’re using – for example, Mario’s special items provide a speed boost that helps balance out the heavier characters who have more destructive items unique to them. The imagery of it all is also so goofy and fun… maybe a little too much fun for Nintendo to have fully committed to it in the games since.
Even with different characters, Mario Kart gameplay can eventually feel a little too similar after several hours of play, and so having Bowser’s giant shells rampage across the tracks definitely helps with that. Mario Kart needs more risk takers and rule benders like Double Dash!! – let’s hope the formula-breaking Mario Kart World is a sign of things to come.
1. Mario Kart 8 Deluxe
Mario Kart 8 Deluxe showcases Nintendo’s ability to take a decent game and turn it into a cultural juggernaut. Fixing the original version’s anaemic Battle Mode and allowing players to hold an extra item were easy wins, but nobody could have expected just how much the game’s scope would increase. When launched alongside the Switch in 2017, there were fun additions to the character roster like King Boo, Bowser Jr. and the Inklings from Splatoon, but it was the Booster Course DLC that would really cement MK8 Deluxe’s superiority amongst other games in the series.
Now boasting 42 characters and an eye-watering 96 courses, MK8 Deluxe has become a fan favourite through sheer variety. If there was a course you loved from Mario Kart past, chances are it’s been given a new lease on life in HD. Not every course is a winner, and the mechanics don’t reinvent the wheel in any significant way (again, this is essentially a bigger and better MK7), but 68 million copies sold more than shows the fan appreciation for this brilliant iteration.
Ryan Gaur is a freelance writer who has worked with the likes of RollingStone, Empire, Polygon, IndieWire, Skwigly, CartoonBrew, OkayPlayer, Animation Mag and more.
FromSoftware has cryptically teased “enhanced fights” against the big bosses of Elden Ring Nightreign, due to arrive sometime this month. But one modder has found some already real building blocks for the new fights, and made their fights playable in the process.
On June 3, the official Elden Ring account confirmed that, alongside Nightreign’s DLC (arriving later this year) and the upcoming Duo Expeditions option, Nightreign would be getting “enhanced fights against existing Nightlords” starting this month. No more details were shared, but it clearly acted as a Bat-signal for people to start digging.
Modder TerraMag (as spotted by PC Gamer) managed to find the boss content currently in the game, and built a mod to make it accessible. Importantly, these are unfinished versions based off the enhanced sets already found in the files.
Notably, what TerraMag found (and documented so far in YouTube videos) seems to be third phases for a number of the Nightlords, including those like Adel, Libra, and Caligo. These can introduce new moves, new models for the bosses, and any number of new ways to annihilate Nightfarers.
Of course, these are unfinished and not officially implemented, so it’s only a glimpse at what could be when the enhanced fights arrive sometime this month. For those already getting weary of the existing boss runs, though, this might make for a decent challenge, and a reason to dive back into some more runs in the ever-shifting Lands.
After scoring a major win with the critically-lauded Silent Hill 2 remake, Bloober is ready to show the world what they can do next – with a slight change of pace – in an action-oriented horror game called Cronos: The New Dawn. I got a chance to sit down with Bloober’s time-hopping latest and find out what makes the world of Cronos so compelling.
Cronos puts you in control of a character called The Traveler, a woman tasked with going into areas ravaged by a human-eliminating virus that is rapidly transforming them into monsters. The Traveler’s goal is to not only log her observations and find human survivors, but also to lay a path for Travelers that come after her – just as those who came before her did. But that task is easier said than done.
“The theme of this game is merging and changing into something new,” co-director Wojciech Piejko explains, before adding, “Hey, this is not a good way to actually play this game, but watch this.”
Piejko proceeds to wake up a sleeping enemy with a stomp that can only be described as Dead Space-esque. Upon waking, the enemy noticed that the corpses of other monsters were littered around, and quickly went to consume one. Then another. Then a third. By the time the infected human had finished feasting (uninterrupted by Piejko), it had “merged” several times, essentially leveling up its monster type. In doing so, it became stronger, harder to kill, more aggressive, and had access to new abilities to take The Traveler out, such as spitting toxic bile at her. After a fair amount of ammo, it finally goes down.
“This is the core of Cronos,” Piejko says. “Manage your resources, take risks when appropriate, and survive.”
The only way The Traveler could have prevented this happening is to kill the monster before it has a chance to feast or rid the area of corpses using fire, a precious resource that can’t be used capriciously. That said, bigger monsters mean bigger rewards, so it is sometimes a good choice to burn some resources for a bigger payday of crafting materials.
“This is the core of Cronos,” Piejko says. “Manage your resources, take risks when appropriate, and survive.”
Just because a monster does not awaken does not mean The Traveler is safe, however. Anyone that tries to hoard resources will soon discover when backtracking through areas that enemies have a tendency to pick inopportune moments to pop up and start merging with other corpses on the ground. Not being aware of your environment can be a deadly mistake in Cronos, but wasting resources may be even worse.
The demo I participated in takes place in Nowa Huta, an eastern district in Krakow, Poland that was once an industrial hub of the former Soviet Union. In the future, it has been torn apart by the monster-plague infecting the world. It is the Traveler’s duty to identify important people that live or lived in the city and employ time-travel to rescue them from the pre-plague age of the 1980s. Since only The Traveler can hop through time, rescuing them involves digitizing their souls to carry around with her to take back into the present.
The Traveler is limited in how many souls she can carry with her, which leaves the choice up to the player to decide who gets saved and who does not. This can affect Cronos’s narrative, as different people will have different reactions to things The Traveler encounters and places she goes. As an example, The Traveler can rescue someone in the past and bring them to the future, wherein she visits that person’s apartment decades later and the former tenant describes their life before it all went to hell.
The Traveler is limited in how many souls she can carry with her, which leaves the choice up to the player to decide who gets saved and who does not.
In another example given, two of the souls in possession have a history and go back and forth with each other.
Bloober says that Cronos will contain an emphasis on the studio’s trademark psychological horror despite the action bent. After Silent Hill 2 released, which was developed in parallel with Cronos, the Cronos team absorbed their colleagues (or “merged,” to keep it thematically on-brand) to help finish the game out.
Oh, and throughout Nowa Huta, The Traveler will come across some less conversational survivors: cats. Kitties are locked away safely in various rooms throughout the game and, upon being rescued, help with resources for The Traveler. All the cats in the game are based on the pets of the developers at Bloober.
“We had so many submissions we had to start casting for them to decide who would get in,” Piejko says.
As part of their 1-2 punch with Silent Hill 2, Bloober is hoping Cronos proves the studio’s mettle as an industry-leading horror game developer. The New Dawn’s premise and designs are helping it start off on an interesting foot as part of Bloober’s journey there.
Warhammer 40,000 video games have been on a great run lately, with the likes of Space Marine 2 leading the charge of well-received, successful titles. The recently released Space Marine – Master Crafted Edition, however, may be Warhammer 40,000’s first video game misstep in some time.
Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine – Master Crafted Edition is a re-release of Relic Entertainment’s 2011 action game, Space Marine. Both Games Workshop and publisher Sega are not calling this a remaster. Instead they point to quality-of-life and graphical improvements “that take the Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine experience to the next level.”
These include higher fidelity and improved textures, 4k resolution, “improved” character models, a modernized control scheme and interface overhaul, and remastered audio.
Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine – Master Crafted Edition launched on June 10 across Xbox Series X and S and PC, and straight into Game Pass (there’s no word on a PS5 version). It’s going down better on Game Pass, where gaming is often more disposable and subscribers are free to try games out and discard them on a whim if they don’t like what they see. On Steam, however, where Space Marine – Master Crafted Edition costs $39.99 / £34.99, it’s getting destroyed.
Space Marine – Master Crafted Edition currently has a ‘mostly negative’ user review rating on Valve’s platform. Complaints revolve around the high price of the game relative to the changes it makes over the Anniversary Edition, and, on those changes, bemusement in response to what many believe is worse usability.
This, coupled with struggles to find others to play with online, has caused some to call Space Marine – Master Crafted Edition a “cash grab.”
“I was very excited for the idea of this being updated but honestly? I prefer the older version,” reads one negative Steam user review. “It feels better and looks better. Why couldn’t this just be an update or something? And for the price tag it just feels very meh. And this is one of my all time favourite games too. Just gonna install the older version and play through that.”
“Too bad, I really wanted to play this game,” reads another. “No players in PvP multiplayer. No players in co-op Exterminatus horde mode. FOV problem, aiming down sight makes 1000000x zoom. No option to change FOV. Maybe get it on sale after upgrades and updates and working enabled crossplay matchmaking. Refunded, sadly.”
“I bought and get refund” said one disgruntled customer. “Buy the Anniversary Edition, it’s almost the same but it isn’t a cash grab (around 7€ for a key).”
“Look how they massacred my boy,” declared another.
It’s a similar sentiment across social media, Discords, and subreddits. “Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine Master Crafted Edition is a mess,” said redditor KitsuneLynx, highlighting problems even on Xbox.
“This game came out a few days ago and has shown itself to be an absolute mess and disappointment. When I heard this remake was coming out, I was so hyped, I was curious what they’d do and was excited to play it on Xbox after having played it on PC a while back. I was disappointed to say the least.
“This game is a buggy, janky mess that didn’t bother to fix anything and instead made a worse UI, odd visual changes, etc. Why make the Orks all Goffs now? The colors helped recognize each unit, now they all blend together to the point it’s hard to decipher which is which. WHERE ARE THE DEDICATED SERVERS? Not to mention the NEW jank and bugs that came with this release that weren’t present in the previous remaster. It didn’t bother to fix the jank or make the game feel revitalized, this IS the definition of a lazy cash grab. Charging this game for 40+ USD is criminal.
“Crossplay is off by default which just leads to the game shooting itself in the foot when it comes to vacant servers. My wife also just experienced a bug which is more common than it should be where when you boot up the game, there is a chance for your save file to corrupt and reset ALL OF YOUR PROGRESS. Why hasn’t this game received a patch yet? I can’t imagine all the other bugs I haven’t seen yet.
“If you’re planning on playing this game, either get it on Game Pass or wait for a sale and mega patch, otherwise stay on Space Marine 2 or play the remaster on PC.”
It’s worth noting that there are players who are having a reasonable time with the game, although anecdotally most of them appear to be on Game Pass. Similarly, those who have never played Space Marine before seem to be enjoying experiencing the events that lead into last year’s blockbuster hit, Space Marine 2. Steam, then, appears to be the focal point of the backlash.
The hope is that Sega will announce incoming improvements sooner rather than later, as Space Marine is generally remembered fondly by those who played it back in the day. In 2025, with Warhammer 40,000 at the peak of its popularity and with a flood of newcomers sparked by the success of Space Marine 2, it’s important Space Marine gets it right. The Inquisition, after all, is always watching.
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.
All the while, MindsEye’s troubled launch saw the developer cancel sponsored streams, and reports of players securing refunds, even from the normally stubborn Sony.
Hotfix #1 is out now on PC (5.7GB) and PS5 (2GB), with Xbox Series X and S (4GB) to follow, Build A Rocket Boy said in a post on Discord that also included patch notes.
“Today we’ve deployed Hotfix #1 tasked on an expedited timeline as the first in a series of patches aimed at addressing your feedback and enhancing the game experience,” it said.
Across all platforms, the hotfix aims to implement CPU and GPU performance improvements and memory optimizations. It also reduces the difficulty for the CPR mini-game, adds a new setting to disable or modify Depth of Field, and fixes missing controls in the MineHunter and Run Dungeon mini-games.
On PC, there are new pop-up warnings for PCs that have Hardware Accelerated GPU Scheduling disabled, and PCs with CPUs that have potential crash issues.
Build A Rocket Boy said this patch also fixes the memory leak issue that had been causing most crashes reported by players. “Performance optimisation is our number one focus and an ongoing commitment that will take further time,” it added.
“We will continue to provide frequent and transparent updates. Our team is committed to do everything possible to urgently action your feedback,” Build A Rocket Boy said.
Build A Rocket Boy has said that by the end of June, players can expect ongoing performance and stability improvements, a rebalanced ‘hard’ difficulty setting, animation fixes, and AI improvements.
The question is whether the developer, which was founded by former Rockstar North chief Leslie Benzies, can turn MindsEye around. On Steam, which does not paint the whole picture of MindsEye’s current popularity, the game hit a peak concurrent player count of 3,302 on launch, but had a 24-hour peak of just 786 players. At the time of this article’s publication, 435 people were playing on Steam, with a ‘mixed’ user review rating.
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.
MindsEye may look like an exciting, GTA-adjacent action-adventure in short clips and GIFs, but actually playing it through to the end of its story has revealed an unfinished, overly ambitious project that’s plagued with performance problems, makes precious little use of its open world, and is crippled by unconvincing combat and dull mission design.
While it’s natural to draw comparisons with GTA, in basic terms MindsEye is more akin to the Mafia series. That is, it’s a tightly linear, single-player story where the open world largely exists as a backdrop for you to drive from mission to mission. That doesn’t end up serving it very well. Mafia is great. MindsEye is not.
You are Jacob Diaz, a former soldier and drone operator who has been railroaded out of the military after a botched mission, albeit with an extremely rare piece of tech still embedded in his neck. He’s a pretty thinly drawn amnesiac hero overall, with no especially memorable characteristics beyond his ability to follow instructions. After securing a security job at mega-company Silva Corp in the Las Vegas-inspired city of Redrock, Diaz is quickly embroiled in an AI-gone-bad, robots-gone-wild adventure that starts slow, gets a little more intriguing a few hours in, and then ends like someone’s yanked the plug out of the wall.
MindsEye does have style, and its near-future setting is accomplished and credible.
Credit where it’s due, MindsEye does have style, and its near-future setting is accomplished and credible. It fuses locations like normal homes and strip malls that wouldn’t look out of place in the present day with the proliferation of high-tech robotics and drones. The result is a world that appears appropriately futuristic, but doesn’t feel alien or unrecognisable. From an aesthetic perspective, it really does appear a few years from now in a well-executed way.
It also includes a genuinely impressive fleet of vehicles – and there’s a practicality to them that makes them look like real cars from, say, five to 10 years in the future. It basically takes modern trends – like today’s massive, chunkily-accented pick-up trucks, teardrop-shaped electric sedans, and battery-powered retromods – and successfully projects a decade of tweaks onto them. More importantly, the handling is actually genuinely good in a way open-world action games rarely manage. The cars you actually get to drive are weighty and really love to be whipped into high-speed handbrake turns through the realistically thick traffic. There’s none of that stickiness that’s typical of GTA clones like Sleeping Dogs (which I love regardless) or Saints Row (which I do not). You know, the kind of superficial handling that feels like you’re turning the world under the car, rather than the car itself.
Unfortunately, this is largely where the praise stops.
Mind Over Matter
The very first mission is a short drive into the desert to shoot four robots who barely have the vigour to fire back, and the second requires you to track a slow-moving thief by monitoring a security console and… switching cameras. It’s not exactly an explosive opening stanza, but things don’t get that much better when the bullets really start flying. It’s around 10 hours of the most boringly straightforward missions from the past decades of open-world action games.
Combat against the handful of bot types and human soldiers is mostly just plain, and dud enemy AI doesn’t make for particularly satisfying shootouts. Humans are the least sensible. Sometimes they take cover; sometimes they just walk towards you waiting to get shot. Run out to meet them and they’re confusingly slow to react (not that this is a particularly strong tactic, as there is no melee attack).
Dud enemy AI doesn’t make for particularly satisfying shootouts.
It’s just janky. On the one hand, you can actually shoot individual pieces – including weapons – off the bots. That’s nice. On the other, put a round into a human standing behind some scenery and they’ll often blink back into cover with no linking animation whatsoever. That’s shoddy.
It’s not due to a lack of firepower, because MindsEye does feature plenty of guns, although it mostly just chucks them into your arsenal with so little fanfare I usually didn’t notice. I’d just spot something new in my weapon wheel, like another assault rifle, or some kind of energy blaster. It’s rarely clear about what you should be using at any given moment, and it doesn’t seem to matter much.
The action does improve towards the back end of the story, as Diaz gets access to all his partner drone’s special perks. The ability to zap an enemy robot and turn it into an instant ally gives the action some zest that it absolutely lacks out of the gate. Your drone’s grenade ability is also neat for a while, but it’s probably a bit too effective at clearing out enemies ahead. I spent most of the late game missions as my drone, dropping endless grenades on soldiers and robots from high above. It made what turned out to be the penultimate battle into one of the easiest because the bad guys just have no defense against this.
The primary problem I had with MindsEye, though, was its drastically uneven performance on my high-end PC (RTX 4080, Intel Core Ultra 9 185H). While the auto settings placed the bulk of the configurable options at ‘High’ – and capped the frame rate at 60fps – my playthrough was rife with issues. It’s regularly blurry and choppy when panning, and the frame rate would flutter and sometimes hang. During one car chase performance chugged to a crawl and was only barely playable. Sometimes even the cutscenes would stutter and display ghosting. Experimenting with lowering the settings hasn’t yielded much in the way of positive results. It’s in really rough shape technically.
To be fair, there are definitely moments in MindsEye when it looks quite stunning. Explosions are excellent. The sunlight piercing through Redrock’s glitzy hotels is seriously snazzy. I liked the sheer scale and complexity of the Silva factory’s rocket loader, and at one point the metallic sheen of a parked jet in the desert glare stopped me in my tracks. When it runs well and looks good, it looks very good. But six months ago I played through Indiana Jones and the Great Circle on this machine and it performed fabulously. MindsEye does not. It’s like Steven Seagal circa 1990: Looks cool – just doesn’t know how to run properly.
It’s like Steven Seagal circa 1990: Looks cool – just doesn’t know how to run properly.
Performance optimisation won’t solve MindsEye’s myriad other issues, though. A lot of these are really just baked into how it’s designed. Too often, the missions are simply restrictive and dull. All you can do is drive a pre-assigned vehicle to a marker. That triggers a cutscene. Then you shoot everything. Then drive somewhere else. It’s all so rigid and leaves no room for the kind of goofing around or antics you can get into in comparable games, and there’s certainly none of the emergent fun you constantly get in something like GTA. MindsEye rarely trusts us to even park at a mission marker; it generally just splutters into a cutscene when you get close enough.
It doesn’t help that there are no radio stations or songs to listen to as you’re commuting between missions. Travel time from A to B mostly seems to exist to feed you phone calls to prod the story along a little further. Exploration is actively disencouraged, and you’ll be constantly scolded for not heading directly to your destination, or failed out. There’s no reason to explore anyhow, as it isn’t the sort of living world you might have expected. Police don’t even respond to Diaz’s crimes, so what’s even the point?
And there’s not really anything out there to find. Hunting for a cool vehicle to use? Don’t bother. Other vehicles are off-limits. Wreck the car you were assigned? That’s a mission fail. You won’t even be able to get out of it if it’s burning. It’s a baffling choice for a game like this – the entire genre is built around stealing cars.
MindsEye has some good ideas. An effective stealth mission mid-way is a positive change of pace, and there are some unexpected puzzles late in the piece that gave me a break from blasting. But it relegates the rest of them to its roughly two hours of cutscenes and wastes their potential. At one point a squad of robots are set sprinting after my car at highway speeds. While I was preparing myself for a potentially thrilling chase, the robots caught the car and destroyed it before the cinematic finished. This kind of thing is a real rug pull in a game that, a few hours earlier, made me play through a frustrating, one-off CPR minigame that could’ve just been a cutscene.
Even apparent bosses die in cutscenes. And in an unforgivable transgression, if there’s a way to skip them (even when replaying missions and watching them a second time), I couldn’t find it.
Bots on Your Mind
The kicker is, even if you get swept up in the sunk-cost fallacy of finishing this 10-hour campaign just to see how the story pans out, the ending itself is a colossal anticlimax. I’ll obviously refrain from spilling the specifics of the final moment, but it’s impossible to complete any assessment of MindsEye’s defects without explaining how deeply and desperately unsatisfying I found it. Story threads are left dangling and reams of questions remain unanswered. It’s not an artistic cliffhanger; it’s just vague and unearned. It’s an ending that feels like the writer was out of fresh paper and this was the only thing that would fit on the last line of the script’s final page. Picture Ghostbusters crashing to credits a few seconds after they cross the streams and you’re about there. There’s a PS after the unskippable credits, but it only makes things worse.
Well, until what happens after the finale, that is. After the story wrapped I was simply tossed back into the open world as… some random weirdo in a crop top. He has some kind of… base? With things in it I can interact with that do… nothing? There’s no explanation of how anything works, no direction, and no purpose.
Confused, I left the building in search of a vehicle, but even here you can’t carjack civilians, and you can’t steal parked cars. I got in the only one that would allow me to enter and drove to an icon that looked like the Hamburglar stealing a car. There was another car there, glowing, but I couldn’t enter it. I shot at the bystanders, and I shot at the soldiers. The soldiers popped out of their 4X4s like waffles from an overzealous toaster. Nothing else happened. No armed response.
I got back in the small hatchback I arrived in, which remained the only vehicle I could interact with. I drove to an icon that looked like a chess piece. The performance took another significant nosedive as I arrived. There were some soldiers there, spread throughout a multi-story parking lot. I shot at them until I got bored, which happened almost instantly because the action is restricted to basic third-person blasting. Chubby crop top man has none of the entertaining drone attacks that Diaz has.
This, it appears, is MindsEye’s free-roaming mode. It’s separate from the main campaign, but I have no idea what we’re intended to do in it. It’s pointless, scrappy, and a complete waste of time in this state. It just isn’t remotely close to finished.
