Magic: The Gathering has had plenty of Secret Lair crossovers this year, from SpongeBob to Deadpool, and one more is speeding onto the scene next month. Sonic the Hedgehog is getting three individual Secret Lair drops, and we’ve got the exclusive first look at one that’s all about artifacts.
Flip through the gallery below to see all 7 cards in the Turbo Gear Secret Lair drop:
Unlike the recent Final Fantasy crossover, which is an entire draftable Magic set alongside four pre-constructed Commander decks, this Sonic crossover follows the blueprint of similar tie-ins by being limited to three Secret Lair drops. Secret Lair is what Magic calls its series of timed releases that contain just a handful of specific cards with special art, and they are all sold direct by Wizards of the Coast rather than in randomized packs.
In this case, the Turbo Gear drop has six exisiting Magic cards redone with new Sonic-themed art and names, as well as one token card. That includes a few fitting staples of Magic’s most popular format, Commander, like Swiftfoot Boots and Lighting Greaves – because of course Sonic’s shoes deserve their own cards. Also of note, a legendary vehicle called the Weatherlight is here as Tornado, Sonic’s Biplane, and thanks to a recent rules change, you could actually have that be your Commander if you are so inclined.
WOTC says this drop is designed to complement the cards in another one of the drops that focuses on Sonic’s characters themselves. While we don’t have those to reveal, an example given in Turbo Gear’s store description is equipping The Reaver Cleaver, reimagined here as Knuckles’s Gloves, to Knuckles himself. This idea goes hand-in-hand with other crossover drops, like 2023’s Tomb Raider, where the reprinted cards are meant to fit nicely with the new Legendary creatures, almost like a little “build your own Commander deck” starter kit.
The Turbo Gear Secret Lair drop (as well as the other two) will go on sale on July 14 at 9am PT on the official Secret Lair website, and will cost $29.99 for the non-foil version or $39.99 for foil. You better get there on time, too, because they will only be available in a limited quantity – and if other recent crossovers are any indication, they will likely sell out fast.
Tom Marks is IGN’s Executive Reviews Editor. He loves card games, puzzles, platformers, puzzle-platformers, and lots more.
Details of a developer-only Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 playtest have been accidentally released to all fans on the Call of Duty app. This included details of unannounced multiplayer modes, such as a 20v20 wingsuit option. Whoops.
“An internal, developer-only Black Ops 7 playtest was set to begin this weekend,” explained CharlieIntel on X/Twitter. “[Activision or developers Treyarch/Raven Software] accidentally pushed the message of the day to everyone on Xbox on the Call of Duty app, instead.”
CharlieIntel also attached previously unannounced details about multiplayer modes, Skirmish and Overload.
Skirmish’s description detailed in a screenshot said: “Two teams of 20 fight to compete objectives across a large map. Capture points of interest, destroy payloads, and transmit valuable data to score. Use your wingsuit to flank and reach objectives before your enemy. The first team to reach the score limit wins.”
There’s also Overload, which is described as “two teams of six players each fight to control a neutral EMP device that must be delivered to the enemy HQ for score. Reach the score limit and claim victory by delivering multiple EMP devices.”
An internal, developer only Black Ops 7 play test was set to begin this weekend. They accidentally pushed the message of the day to everyone on Xbox on the Call of Duty app, instead.
Developed by Treyarch and Raven Software, Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 — which was announced at the Xbox Games Showcase 2025 earlier this month — is the first ever consecutive release within the Black Ops sub-series. Matt Cox, General Manager of Call of Duty, insisted that “as a team, our vision from the start was to create a back-to-back series experience for our players that embraced the uniqueness of the Black Ops sub-franchise.”
Black Ops 7 is set to star Milo Ventimiglia, Kiernan Shipka, and Michael Rooker, with Ventimiglia portraying David Mason, Shipka as new character Emma Kagen, and Rooker reprising his Black Ops 2 role of Mike Harper.
Earlier this month, Activision pulled controversial adverts placed inside Black Ops 6 and Warzone loadouts, insisting they were a “feature test” published “in error.” It’s worth remembering that Black Ops 6 is a premium, $70 game, and this year’s Black Ops 7 is expected to jump to $80 after Microsoft said that gamers will see Xbox charging $79.99 for new, first-party games around the holiday season.
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.
Remedy’s Control spin-off shooter, FBC: Firebreak, has topped one million players. While the game is free-to-play for Xbox Game Pass and PS Plus subscribers, the studio called it a “significant milestone,” despite acknowledging “there is still a lot of work ahead of us.”
“As of last night, we have surpassed 1 million players in FBC: Firebreak. This is a significant milestone, so thank you for playing from all of us at Remedy,” the studio said in a post on social media.
“We know there is still a lot of work ahead of us, and we are super-motivated about it. We have a lot of exciting things cooking for Firebreak players! More about that soon.”
Last week, the team identified a problem with “the first hour experience,” saying that FBC: Firebreak’s opening gameplay was not “a great experience due to a combination of things,” including issues with onboarding, poorly explained systems and tools, and “a lack of clarity as to what to do in the Jobs and how to do the work effectively.” The developer also said: “the power fantasy isn’t great in the first hours of the game as starting weapons feel weak, and unlocking higher-tier weapons requires a bit too much grinding.”
“Right now, despite how sparse the story can seem in moments, there’s a lot of fun to be had wrangling erratic monsters in Remedy’s spectacularly absurd bureaucratic setting,” we wrote in IGN’s FBC: Firebreak review in progress. “I’ll be playing more this week and wrap up this review as soon as I’ve tested the limits of Remedy’s chaotic cooperative job simulator.”
Remedy also recently confirmed its plans for ongoing support post-launch, including two new Jobs (missions) coming in 2025. More updates will arrive in 2026, the developer said. All playable content released post launch, such as Jobs, will be free to all players. Players have the option to buy cosmetics, but none of these items will affect gameplay, and there will be no limited-time rotations or daily log-ins, Remedy insisted.
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.
After half a dozen hours in the earliest moments of the upcoming pirate RPG Sea of Remnants, I was left with tons of questions about how this one will ultimately turn out, whether it was the currently barebones turn-based combat system, the convoluted labyrinth of vendors and upgrade paths that reminded me a bit of an MMO, or the story and dialogue that were sometimes difficult to follow given this early build’s lack of English voice acting or reliable subtitles. But one thing that was never in doubt throughout all of that is just how much this colorful, over-the-top adventure is already absolutely dripping with style that’s so unbelievably hard to look away from, it made me eager to see more in spite of those rough edges. Seriously, the cartoonish characters, exaggerated (and often hilarious) animations, and gorgeous menus are some of the coolest I’ve seen since Persona 5, and even when I didn’t understand everything that was happening, I often couldn’t help but smile ear-to-ear. The version I played is so early and unfinished, it’s still pretty hard to tell if this will deliver in plenty of other areas, from gameplay to technical stability, but there’s plenty of time before the unspecific 2026 launch window to iron all that out, and it already has so much unique charm that I’m officially adding this one to my list of games to follow closely.
Before I get into what I liked and didn’t like in my time with Sea of Remnants, it’s worth mentioning again that what I played appeared to be an extremely early build that was quite unfinished and prone to all sorts of bugs and rocky technical performance. I’m used to playing unfinished products months and sometimes years before they see the light of day, but even by that measure, this one felt especially under construction. Menus and dialogue were riddled with placeholder text, crashes and bugs were quite frequent, and the entire thing hadn’t been optimized for non-Mandarin speakers like myself, which often left things lost in translation. For all of these reasons and more, it was more than a little hard to tell how things will pan out, both from a technical perspective and where gameplay is concerned, since many ideas were clearly extremely unbaked. Keep that in mind as you watch this video.
What I do know about Sea of Remnants is that it’s playing in a lot of the same space as Sea of Thieves, with open-world high seas to explore as a pirate crew and islands to visit, filled with loot waiting to be plundered. But it also distinguishes itself with unexpected elements, like the turn-based combat that happens when you’re ashore, or the RPG/MMO mechanics that accompany it – to the point where I’m not even sure what odd blend of genres the final product is shooting for, and every 30 minutes came with another surprise that added to that confusion, like how, late in the demo, I learned there were hundreds of recruitable companions I could take with me on voyages and build bonds with. And this is all without having been able to see any of the planned multiplayer components in action, as this will all apparently be taking place in an online world where you can interact with other pirate captains.
I’m not even sure what odd blend of genres the final product is shooting for.
Unfortunately, a lot of the ideas Sea of Remnants threw at me were pretty hard to get a sense for in this build, like the turn-based combat, where my buccaneer crew and I crossed swords and blunderbusses with rival skallywags and local fauna. While beautifully animated, the bits I played were also extremely oversimplified, either due to the section I played being pretty early on in the adventure, or just because it was quite clearly still a work in progress. As a big fan of turn-based battles, I’m hopeful they can flesh out some of the mechanics here to reach the heights of some of my recent favorites like Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 or Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth, but for now it mostly reminded me of a very stripped-down version of Persona 5.
The good news is that, no matter how unfinished any aspect of Sea of Remnants was, it was consistently and without exception one of the most interesting games I’ve played in a long time. The humanoid characters (all of which are puppets for some reason) have a ton of personality despite their wooden faces, and their exaggerated animations really cracked me up. And despite having Sea of Thieves pirate vibes, I rarely felt like I knew what was going to happen next, like how after beating a giant ape boss on an island and getting back on my boat to go home, I suddenly found myself under attack by that same monkey out for revenge, who now captained his own vessel and blasted me with cannon fire. Then, even though I sent him to Davy Jones’ locker, my ship was sunk moments later anyway in the most silly cutscene imaginable. I still feel like I don’t really understand what it will feel like to play the final product, as it swings so wildly between juggling an inventory of loot, blasting cannons on a boat, and choosing between very confusing dialogue options with various party members, but even though playing through that confusion was often a little unintuitive, I certainly can’t say it wasn’t interesting – quite the opposite.
It was also really nice to see such a unique setting, because although there’s a lot of typical piracy shenanigans you might expect, there are also really strange concepts peppered throughout that kept me on my toes, like how my journey started out with me finding the moon buried beneath the sea (!?), or how the marionette characters apparently lose their memory whenever they’re destroyed on an adventure, but always find themselves back inside the main island of Orbtopia to begin again. There’s also a really distinct punk vibe throughout the entire world, as everything is covered with graffiti and many of the characters act like reckless teenagers who cut class to cosplay as mischievous pirates.
The big question with Sea of Remnants is if its unmistakably cool presentation and interesting hodgepodge of ideas can actually come together into something coherent, and I truly feel no closer to answering that after more than six hours with it. For now, it’s definitely interesting and distinctive enough for me to anxiously wait to see more, but we’ll likely need to wait a fair bit longer before we can get a better feel for how it’s shaping up – especially when it comes to technical performance and the online aspects that were completely absent from this build.
The big question with Sea of Remnants is if its unmistakably cool presentation and interesting hodgepodge of ideas can actually come together into something coherent.
I can definitely see the beginnings of a vision here though, where the punk aesthetic and killer art style play well with over-the-top ship combat and slower, more tactical turn-based battles on foot to create something really special. Plus, we can always use more pirate fantasy in our lives, and I can already tell that this goofy take on the genre will bring a very fresh perspective. Granted, I have no idea how they’ll make online multiplayer, where friends would presumably come along for the ride, work with the turn-based combat and NPC party members. But hey – if they manage to pull it off it sounds like it’d be awesome, and if they don’t at least it’ll be something unique nonetheless.
Capcom has said that Leon S. Kennedy is a “bad match for horror” amid ongoing speculation he is a yet-to-be-revealed second protagonist for Resident Evil Requiem.
Still, his absence was made notable by the fact that Requiem director Koshi Nakanishi offered an umprompted explanation for why Leon, of all past Resident Evil protagonists, had not been picked as this particular game’s star.
“The protagonist this time is an intelligence analyst for the FBI, Grace Ashcroft,” said Nakanishi, explaining that the new character was a good fit for Requiem’s renewed horror focus. “She’s introverted and easily scared, which is a new type of character for the Resident Evil series.”
“We wanted someone that experiences horror from the same perspective as the player,” he continued. “She learns to overcome her fears throughout the course of the story, but she’s also an analyst for the FBI who’s trained with guns, and is able to act with calm deductive reasoning.”
Capcom’s first trailer for Requiem, aired earlier this month, introduced Ashcroft and the game’s returning Raccoon City setting in a manner that only fuelled the flames of fan speculation that Leon would also feature in some capacity. Indeed, fans were quick to spot a number of clues they said pointed to Leon’s presence — including his old truck, still parked outside the ruins of the Raccoon City Police Department.
Is the recent fan speculation around Leon’s presence why Capcom has addressed his apparent absence now? Here’s what Nakanishi said next, on the character’s status in the game:
“We always thought about making Leon the protagonist,” Nakanishi explained, “but making a horror game based around him is difficult. He wouldn’t jump at a bucket falling. No one wants to see Leon scared by every little thing. So he’s actually quite a bad match for horror.”
Is this Capcom ruling Leon out of Requiem? Nakanishi seems clear that the combat-tested Leon would no longer work as the hero of a game focused around horror. But the publisher also stopped short of ruling the character out altogether.
Leon’s status is clearly an important enough talking point that Capcom decided to include discussion of it in tonight’s showing — which still showed only a fragment of the full game. With more than six months still to go, Capcom will of course have more up its sleeve to reveal. Could this all be some kind of ruse, and Leon still be a part of it?
Recent entries in the Resident Evil series have taken different approaches to balancing horror and action — some to better results than others — but it’s worth remembering how popular the Leon-focused, action-heavy Resident Evil 4 remains among fans. Could Capcom still be holding back a look at Requiem’s more action-heavy moments, where Leon would be a better fit? There’s still plenty of time left for the publisher to tell.
Resident Evil Requiem will launch on February 27, 2026 across PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X and S.
Tom Phillips is IGN’s News Editor. You can reach Tom at tom_phillips@ign.com or find him on Bluesky @tomphillipseg.bsky.social
Capcom has revealed our first look at Resident Evil Requiem gameplay in brief snippets shown during a livestream.
During the Capcom Spotlight event, Capcom showed a small portion of first-person gameplay, heavy on the horror and featuring new protagonist FBI Agent Grace Ashcroft. We see the character slowly move around creepy corridors with just a lighter for company. At one point, we see Ashcroft turn around to see a hulking humanoid creature close in on her from the shadows.
In another clip of first-person gameplay we see Ashcroft explore a grand hallway, this time holding a handgun (as an FBI agent Ashcroft is handy with guns). She’s also able to “act with calm, deductive reasoning,” and we see her inspect a toolbox in the classic Resident Evil up close style to demonstrate.
And finally, we get a very brief look at third-person Resident Evil Requiem gameplay where Ashcroft is, once again, exploring creepy corridors and poorly lit rooms. We see that horrible creature again, casually stomping in the shadows.
During the video, Capcom developers explain how the first-person perspective makes for “tense, realistic gameplay,” whereas playing in third-person via the over-the-shoulder camera lets you see “more of the action.” The third-person persepctive is “great for people who enjoy action-heavy gameplay,” Capcom added.
Resident Evil Requiem lets players switch between first- and third-person through the Options menu at any point during the campaign. Check out IGN’s Resident Evil Requiem hands-on preview for more information.
Elsewhere, Capcom confirmed Resident Evil Requiem takes place 30 years after the missile strike on Raccoon City that occurs at the end of Resident Evil 3, which explains the enormous crater we saw in the announcement trailer. Indeed, the name “Requiem” was chosen because, as Capcom explains it: “This game is a requiem, a eulogy to those who came before.”
There was no big Leon Kennedy reveal, as some fans had hoped for — and even expected. If the Resident Evil veteran is playable in the game, perhaps that reveal will come later.
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.
As promised, Capcom kicked off its latest digital presentation just moments ago, leaving fans eager to see everything it has in store for the near future. With some titles recently showing off updateselsewhere, many are expecting today’s Capcom Spotlight to offer a deeper dive into some of the Mega-Man and Devil May Cry publisher’s most exciting upcoming titles.
We know today’s showcase is around 40 minutes long, so expect a closer look at some of the company’s biggest games. We’ll be collecting all of the announcements you need to know about right here, so be sure to stick around to see all of the biggest Capcom Spotlight news.
Developing…
Michael Cripe is a freelance contributor 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).
Bottling the kinetic energy of a first person shooter video game and successfully transferring it to the tabletop is a herculean task. Publisher Glass Cannon Unplugged is up to the challenge, presenting Apex Legends: The Board Game in the form of an overstuffed box that spills cardboard and plastic onto the table like a body lit up by a VK-47 Flatline. This analog translation defies the odds, legitimately capturing some of the visceral action of its namesake with unique and clever design work.
Apex Legends the video game is a hero shooter battle royale. It has a full lineup of protagonists with their own suite of abilities and playstyles. This identity is likewise the heart of the board game adaptation, forming the basis for its team-based skirmish action. Characters such as Bangalore, Mirage, and Bloodhound all make an appearance, with each of their roles expertly captured and adapted to the turn-based setting. Everything is powerful and awe inspiring, and it feels extraordinarily faithful to the property.
The standard format is either two-versus-two, or three-versus-three, with each player fielding a single character. While there are a bevy of miniatures skirmish games on the market, including popular titles such as Kill Team, Infinity, and Star Wars: Shatterpoint, none offer this particular style of team-based small-unit approach. Distinctly, this is not a game of armies or squads – it’s one of personalities and legends. The result is an altogether different tone, one charged with dynamic abilities that form the centerpiece of a violent gunfight on a fully rendered board.
The board is quite the looker. Verticality is a core tenet of gameplay, as players are able to scale and fight from 3D cardstock buildings. Other elements pop off the map, including cardboard trees and boulders, loot containers, and even fully operational ziplines. The environment is active and responsive. It feels every bit a playground, albeit one with shrapnel and taunts whizzing by your dome.
This dedication to elevation fuels the aggressive FPS-style play, but it also is the root of Apex Legends: The Board Game’s primary challenge. I’ve mentioned the game’s bloated componentry, which contributes to a lengthy setup time, but all of these options and details add up to a relatively complex system. The central turn-to-turn action sequence is surprisingly simple and direct. One team activates all of their characters with each committing to two actions.
This board game defies the odds, capturing the visceral action of its namesake with unique and clever design work.
But that streamlined activity fragments into many intricate pieces. Line of sight is a strong example. Measuring from center square to center square and assessing any blockages is standard for this style of game. But when you consider elevation, all of a sudden there are three pages of lengthy examples displaying potential situations. Thankfully, the rulebook’s diagrams do a good job of illustrating what you need to consider, but the downside is that line of sight can be difficult to assess on the fly and it can slow down the pace of play.
It’s also tough to remember the difference between some of the keywords, such as “adjacent” versus “neighboring.” Terrain items and cards use a similar library of tags that must be referenced. There are specific timing windows for reactions and a sub-system for handling abilities and cooldowns. None of these are overly burdensome on their own, but taken together they can become tricky to navigate. It’s important to understand that this is not a board game for beginners. Instead of going for wide appeal with a similar approach to Mass Effect: The Board Game, Apex Legends aims to satisfy hobbyist gamers familiar with sophisticated systems. If a 40-page rulebook scares you, then you’re not going to hack it on this battlefield.
The most interesting element of Apex Legends: The Board Game is also the most convoluted. Instead of a sophisticated physics engine handling the shooting mechanism, this game opts to zoom in on the firefight and simulate multiple factors, including recoil, stability, and rate of fire. Most games opt for a handful of dice and some quick arithmetic, but Apex Legends uses a sideboard and a dedicated set of cards to resolve gunshots.
It’s actually a pretty stellar system. Different guns have various rates of fire. They list a number of cards that are drawn from the shooting deck and placed alongside a track. Each card is placed in a slot representing an individual shot. Cards drawn later in the sequence have more recoil affecting their ballistics, which results in an escalation of penalties. The penalty is applied to the strength of the randomly drawn card, and then compared to the necessary hit value on the weapon.
That’s the quick and dirty explanation. In reality, it’s more nuanced as each drawn card also has a possible icon which can inflict headshots, bonus hits, or cause an automatic miss if the target is behind cover. Weapons that hit exceedingly hard with slower rates of fire – such as a shotgun or sniper rifle – may draw multiple cards to a single shot slot, thus avoiding the recoil penalties the system tries to emulate.
This can be a wonky process to resolve – it’s certainly slow going with new players. Until you get used to it, this is another part of the game that stunts the tempo of action. Obviously this is a cost of modeling the video game with a high level of detail, but it can be an outright turnoff as it highlights the shortcomings of board games and their inability to obfuscate and resolve math.
But this level of detail isn’t all bad. What you sacrifice in momentum, you gain in realism. This system acutely captures the unique qualities of various firearms. Sub-machine guns spray several weak shots. Battle rifles fire tighter groupings and hit with power. Light machine guns spray all over the place but can level a building. Weapon attachments are mixed in with the loot, allowing you to alter a firearm’s properties mid-game. This includes optics, barrels, magazines, and stocks. It’s exceedingly cool and really juices up the impact of scavenging for supplies in the battle royale mode.
The end result is a weapon system that actually boasts gunplay. No other board or miniatures game I’ve played has so meticulously modeled this key feature of first person shooters. It’s a fantastic accomplishment and absolutely the standout feature.
Beyond this wonderful feat, Apex Legends: The Board Game offers several other killer features. Characters are expertly modeled. They have asymmetric tactical abilities and ultimates that affect the battlefield in various ways. You can pop smoke, call in airstrikes, and deploy drones. Each character is also paired with a unique deck of cards that can be played to tweak actions and react to opponents’ maneuvers. This creates a nifty fog of war, although again, at the cost of possibly slowing down the pace of play.
Another crowd pleaser is the variety of modes on offer. The battle royale option is the key offering, including a distillation of the final moments of the video game’s finale. This includes a barrier that closes on the battlefield, forcing combatants into tighter and tighter area. But there are also deathmatch, VIP, and capture the flag options. Each of these is fully realized and not at all an afterthought.
For those sickos who can’t get enough, this game also will be arriving with expansion products for additional characters as well as a new board and environment. Most notably, there is a sophisticated solitaire / co-op addition that adds AI behavior trees to each of the core game’s protagonists. This mode works fairly well, producing mostly logical enemy actions that sometimes surprise and dazzle. Again, much like the rich base game ruleset, it can be a sluggish pace to familiarize yourself with this additional layer of rules, but it certainly settles down once you’ve become comfortable.
As a first-person shooter airdropping to your tabletop, Apex Legends: The Board Game is a solid effort and certainly a success. There are challenges involved and the tempo can really drag as players learn the systems and assess the wide swath of options on their turn. Once familiarity sets in and the game starts collapsing towards that 60-90 minute estimated playtime, the bliss of gunplay coupled with dynamic action and a multi-faceted loot system truly shine.
One of the best days of the year is finally here: the Steam Summer Sale has arrived at last. If you’re unfamiliar, the Steam Summer Sale is one of the two biggest sales available on the platform annually, with the other occurring around the holiday season in December. You can expect to save big on PC games both new and old, which makes the sale a perfect time to buy games in bulk.
This year’s Steam Summer sale is set to run through July 10. Some of the top-reviewed games of 2025 are included as part of this sale, in addition to newer PC ports from publishers like Square Enix or PlayStation. We’ve sorted through the sale and picked out some of the best deals you can find this year. Don’t miss your chance to save as much cash as possible on these PC games.
Steam Summer Sale – The Best Deals Today
One of the best deals I recommend checking out is Final Fantasy VII Rebirth for $41.99. With the main story and side content combined, there is easily over 100 hours of content in this RPG. This game just made its way to PC in late January, and it’s one of the best RPGs to release in the last five years. If you haven’t yet played Final Fantasy VII Remake, you can grab both games together in the Twin Pack for $59.99.
You can also save on three major 2025 indie games: R.E.P.O., Schedule I, and Blue Prince. The latter sits as one of the highest rated games of the year, offering a unique house of puzzles to solve. Schedule 1 puts you in the shoes of a drug dealer, and the game is still one of the most played Steam games of 2025. Finally, R.E.P.O. is a wonderful time with friends that is sure to cause both laughs and headaches. All of these smaller games are generally great to stream to your phone if you want a more mobile experience.
If you’re looking for deep discounts, I recommend Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy, Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy, and Star Wars Battlefront II. Each of these games is 90% off, and you can pick all three for a grand total of $14. Star Wars Battlefront II is an especially good deal, as there has been a major resurgence in online players as of late.
One of the smaller discounts available is for Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. While you’ll only save $5 during the Steam Summer Sale, this is the lowest we’ve seen this game yet. If you’ve been on the fence about picking this one up, it’s not likely to dip much further until late this year, especially since it is one of the highest-rated games of the year.
Amazon Prime Day Arrives at the End of the Steam Sale
While the Steam Summer Sale is ongoing right now, Amazon Prime Day is set to kick off on July 8. This year, Amazon has doubled the length on the sale, making it the longest Prime Day to date. Though PC games are not usually a focus of Prime Day, you can expect to have the opportunity to score a few deals on PC hardware, monitors, accessories, and more. If you’re looking to either enter the PC market for the first time or upgrade your existing setup, keep your eye on Prime Day. This is also when more of the console games will likely go on sale.
Amazon is also currently offering free PC games as part of an early Prime Day promotion. So if you are a Prime member already, it’s worth diving into that and picking up some freebies before they’re gone.
Noah Hunter is a freelance writer and reviewer with a passion for games and technology. He co-founded Final Weapon, an outlet focused on nonsense-free Japanese gaming (in 2019) and has contributed to various publishers writing about the medium.
Elden Ring Nightreign is close to a month old now, and FromSoftware has been rolling out enhanced versions of its bosses. The first one, Gaping Jaw, was an absolute terror. But in the first 24 hours of players facing off with the second Everdark Sovereign, the Darkdrift Knight, they don’t seem quite so overwhelmed.
Fulghor, Champion of the Nightglow is the latest Everdark Sovereign fight. To take on the fight, you’ll have to beat the base-level Darkdrift Knight expedition. He’s available to battle until, presumably, the next Everdark Sovereign rotates in; the hefty centaur replaced the shadow-drop enhanced Gaping Jaw battle, which was no slouch.
As for Fulghor? Players don’t seem to be having as tough a time with the stomping warrior. That’s not to say he’s outright easy; bosses are still, broadly, challenging in Elden Ring Nightreign. But it seems like, compared to the first Everdark Sovereign fight, players aren’t struggling as much with this one.
While Adel, the Gaping Jaw fight, had some big flashy moves and surprise on its side, Fulghor is comparatively chill. He does start the fight with his Venom-like arm appendage out, and his mid-fight transition sees him ascend into the sky and gain a normal arm back, allowing him to unleash a bunch of explosive, shiny attacks.
Still, it’s a bit more subdued than the literal storm and lightning frenzy that Gaping Jaw could whip up. “I feel as though Fulghor is easier but it’s just more fun to do. Chasing a boss for 20 minutes to get a few hits in is boring,” one Reddit user said. “Feel as though Fulghor could have been harder or had flashier moves, but I’m having way more fun repeating runs against him than Adel.”
Conversely, some like the flashiness of Adel compared to the (again, relatively) subdued enhanced Fulghor. “I liked the specific attacks Adel had like the tornado where you have to jump stream into the eye or you take constant damage,” another user said. “This seemed well thought out. The new attacks of Fulgor are pretty easy to understand even the first time youre seeing them.”
A true foe, at least for some players, were the servers. Around the launch of Fulghor, players started reporting disconnect issues, and you can them in other posts and replies.
But unless you’re this player specifically, you might not have as much trouble with the enhanced Darkdrift Knight as you might think. Still, there are more enhanced fights to tackle either way. Per Bandai Namco’s announcement post, there’s still a Sentient Pest Everdark Sovereign on the way. Other bosses are also due to get their enhanced versions over time, too.
