Sony has acquired a 2.5% stake in Elden Ring publisher Bandai Namco.
Sony said the 16 million-share acquisition forms part of a broader “strategic partnership” with Bandai Namco and “will focus on expanding the fan community for IP such as anime and manga around the world and strengthening engagement.”
Sony said it has “historically collaborated on various projects in the fields such as games, anime, and music” with Bandai Namco, and plans to extend this collaboration “to a broader range of areas.”
“The two companies intend to implement initiatives including the expansion of works as well as products and services based on IP developed by Bandai Namco, leveraging Sony’s strengths in areas such as the production and distribution of anime and other video content, as well as merchandising,” Sony said in a press release.
“Through this partnership, we aim to co-create an array of content and experiences that exceed expectations and deliver Kando (emotion) to even more fans, alongside Bandai Namco Group, with its outstanding capacity for multidirectional expansion of diverse IP and deep connections with fans at real touchpoints, both domestically and internationally,” said Sony’s chief strategy officer, Toshimoto Mitomo.
While we’re talking about Elden Ring: In case it wasn’t clear, yes, Elden Ring movie director Alex Garland cares about FromSoft’s game as much as you do. He’s currently on his seventh playthrough of the epic fantasy RPG, and recently revealed the boss he found the toughest to take down.
“It’s Malenia who’s the tough one”, Garland told IGN last month. “I’m now on my seventh playthrough of that game. I’ve leveled up, I’ve got lots of juice, and a cool sword, and stuff like that, and I just throw myself at them again, and again, and again, and again.”
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.
Battlefield 6 is looking at an October release date and an $80 price tag.
That’s according to a noted leaker, Dealabs’ Billbil-kun, who claims rumors of an October 10, 2025, release are correct, and that Battlefield 6 will release on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S with both a standard edition ($79.99) and a special Phantom edition ($109.99). The PC release, however, will reportedly be $10 cheaper.
With pre-orders expected to go live in a week’s time on July 31, we’ll reportedly learn later today that there’ll be no early access, no matter what edition you buy — which deviates somewhat from usual industry practice these days — and standard edition owners can upgrade to the Phantom version at any time for $29.99.
An open beta is finally on the way, too — something confirmed directly by the Battlefield team itself. In a post on social media, the official Battlefield account asked if players preferred open weapons or closed weapons, and then suggested: “why not both?”
“Starting at Open Beta, players can choose official playlists with Signature Weapons locked to class, or not. More to come.”
EA is finally ready to fully reveal its next Battlefield game in just a few hours. Its official title is Battlefield 6, and we’re getting a first trailer later today, July 24, at 8am PT.
Ahead of EA’s full Battlefield 6 reveal, a brief teaser for the game’s campaign was posted online yesterday, revealing a major conflict. Set in the near future, Battlefield 6’s campaign will see NATO under attack. Its base in Georgia is hit, the British territory of Gibraltar is invaded, and NATO’s secretary general is assassinated inside the organisation’s Brussels headquarters by an organisation named Pax Armata.
It’s been a long wait for Battlefield 6. It was first announced way, way back in 2021, sort of, mostly just as EA confirming it was still working on more Battlefield games after Battlefield 2042. Since then, we’ve seen an early piece of concept art and had it confirmed that the game would take place in a modern setting. Since then, however, everything we’ve seen has come from leaky NDAs and excited fans participating in closed Battlefield Labs testing.
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.
Hot on the heels of Ghost of Yotei’s very own State of Play showcase, we sat down for a chat with creative directors Nate Fox and Jason Connell to talk about what we saw of Sucker Punch’s upcoming PlayStation 5 exclusive — and what we were left wondering about. Read on for answers!
IGN: The backdrop of Ghost of Tsushima was a real-life invasion by Mongol forces on the island of Tsushima. With Ghost of Yotei, what’s the historical setting of what’s going on in Japan at this time and how will that play into Atsu’s journey?
Nate Fox: The game takes place in the year 1603. Peace has just broken out in Japan after decades and decades of civil war and there are a lot of sellswords that suddenly are out of work. So they travel north to the edge of the Japanese empire, an island called Ezo, modern day Hokkaido. And this place becomes a powder keg. It’s very, very dangerous with all these sellswords walking around trying to make a buck. This moment in history combined with the beauty of Ezo, these lush mountainscapes and forests and rivers, creates a dynamite combination for an open world game, and it’s where we wanted to set Atsu’s quest for vengeance.
IGN: During your presentation at the State of Play, you mentioned that Ghost of Yotei focuses on more freedom than any game Sucker Punch has ever made. That’s a large claim considering the amount of freedom that was already offered in Ghost of Tsushima, I can definitely attest to that. Can you elaborate on some of the ways in which you’ve enhanced the feeling of freedom compared to what the player could already do in Ghost of Tsushima?
Jason Connell: When we started to think about what the next game would be for us at Sucker Punch, we really had to take stock of what we loved and what our fans really loved, and how we saw people play Ghost of Tsushima. And one of the aspects of Tsushima that we wanted to carry forward was the sense of exploration. We saw people play very wide in their experience. We saw some people drop 80, 90 hours and just exploring and using modes like photo mode just to soak in the nature and the beauty of the world.
That really resonated with us. We’re big wide players as well, so when we set out to make Yotei, especially once we decided that it was going to take place in Hokkaido — back then it was called Ezo, this vast, vast landscape that just frankly had a nice overlap with us having a desire to have a more open game design because it’s such a vast place — led us to a whole host of features, ranging from simple utility features like spyglass, being able to pull your spyglass up really quickly and look around the environment really is the way that I think Nate and I both really love to play, just see something on the horizon and go to it, to traversal features. We have flower streams that are just woven into the environment and help you get across vast landscapes. If you follow those flowers you’ll get a little bit of a speed boost because they’re joyful for Atsu to ride in, but they also might lead you to something. Or developing features like our clue system, or camping features, which just really celebrate the wilds of Ezo.
IGN: One of the coolest moments at the State of Play was the seamless switch from present day to Atsu’s past when she was looking around the remnants of her childhood home, and then you actually saw her reliving those memories in the past with just the press of a button. I wondered where this idea came from, and is it the kind of thing where it’ll be tied to specific spots throughout the game world, so there’ll be an area where it’s clearly time to switch back to the past? Or is it up to the player to discover those for themselves?
Nate Fox: In Ghost of Yotei there are a number of places in the world that Atsu visits in which she has a lot of memories from her youth. And at the touch of a button, you can go back into the past and you control Atsu as a child, you get to play as her interacting with her brother and her parents and other people in Ezo.
We wanted you to be able to really control her as a kid so that you would feel like you knew what her life was like, you could experience that, and of course because this shows you what she lost. It’s a feature we really love because the player is in command, they can hit the button to go back and see what it used to be like and then hit it again and see what it’s like now, comparing and contrasting for instance, what her own homestead looked like in her youth to what it looks like now after it’s been run down by weather and lack of use, it’s become a ruin. So you get to see the before and after of her experience in the landscape.
IGN: So was it from day-one work on the sequel? Did you know that you were starting fresh with a brand new character, or were there ever some initial ideas for maybe continuing Jin’s story on after the events of Ghost of Tsushima?
Jason Connell: For us at Sucker Punch, one of the things that, especially if you look back on our catalog of games, we have a deep love for making origin stories. It’s something we have a lot of passion for. We like coming up with those stories, those arcs, the characterizations, how they might come through in the game experience, what type of features it might sort of spark as we create this new character. And so really from the beginning we knew that we were going to be charting on new territory here.
And then once we pretty quickly started looking at Hokkaido and this region and this time period and just how vast and stunning and big and filled with wilderness, and you combine that with this idea of doing a tale of vengeance where Atsu is hunting someone inside of that landscape, it was just such a great match.
It’s not hunting for somebody in a safe environment. This is a massive landscape that she’ll be going under quite an undertaking hunting them here. We felt like that was an exciting connection. I’ll say also the story of the folk legend of the onryō, this Japanese folk legend of tale of vengeance, often women who’ve been wronged in life and now they’ve come back to seek vengeance, we got really excited about that folk legend and decided that we were going to inject that pretty heavily into our version of a Ghost story.
IGN: One of the other new features involving campfires you mentioned was a system that allowed members of your wolf pack to visit you at night. You sort of hinted that you don’t have to leave where you’re exploring, the game comes to you. Can you tell us a little bit more about that?
Jason Connell: First and foremost any feature that makes it into the game has to be tonally celebrating the land of Ezo. And as I mentioned earlier, this vast landscape, there’s nothing better than celebrating the camping aspects of it. That is something we felt was really important.
Now secondly, I must say we’re always looking for ways to make the game feel approachable. And I mentioned it a little bit in the State of Play, is that, open world in big games, managing resources is kind of challenging. In our game you can fast travel. In our last game, you could fast travel anywhere. If you want to go upgrade your bow, you could fast travel over here and upgrade your bow, that’s fine and you can do that again in this game.
But after you meet people and your wolf pack grows, we show this screen briefly, you can go into those wolf pack screens and see what people have to offer for you. Say you like that bow here, if they have an upgrade available to you, you might be able to pull them into your campsite. So if you’re exploring a region of the game, it sometimes can be really discordant to just like stop there, go warp to another area, upgrade, and then come back to where you’re exploring. This is what we mean. You can actually just stay here, set up camp, briefly engage with this person, this bow, your person comes over, you get your upgrade and then you go back on your way all while celebrating the wilds of Ezo. And that’s where camping has been an iteration and evolution of the Ghost game.
IGN: Ghost of Tsushima Legends was objectively awesome. How happy were you with that mode as a team and is there a possibility to see something like it again for Ghost of Yotei, either at launch or maybe in the far off distant future?
Nate Fox: We were extremely happy with Ghost of Tsushima Legends and allowing players to connect with friends and use their skills fighting with the katana against a variety of enemies. We loved it. Right now we are very focused on completing Ghost of Yotei to the highest quality possible and putting it in players’ hands very soon on October 2. That is our absolute focus right now.
IGN: Masterfully answered! What has it been like developing combat based around a whole arsenal of weapons this time as opposed to just a katana and the variety of different stances?
Nate Fox: In Tsushima, we really loved our stance system where the player could choose one of four ways to hold the weapon to combat a particular type of enemy. In Ghost of Yotei we took that system and we expanded it. Instead of four stances, there are now five. Instead of stances with one weapon, we took that same system and we said, okay, instead of stances it’s new melee weapons. Functionally it’s the same as stances but it’s more. For instance, if you use a spear, you can use that weapon to knock enemies backwards in space. So if you’re standing near a cliff fighting them, you can knock them off the cliff into the abyss. Works just like stances, but there are extra abilities attached to each of these weapons to give the player more options.
IGN: So should the player be expecting to juggle weapons and learn which is going to work against which type of enemy, perhaps what weapon they’re using? Or is it more a case of unlocking the right skills for the right weapons?
Nate Fox: The game definitely would like players best to learn how to switch weapons when it is appropriate. It is the most efficient way to play. Let’s face it, people sometimes want to play in the way that makes them feel the coolest and the game will not hurt you if you do that. If you want to play with just two swords in each hand because it looks cool, you can play through the whole game that way. It’s A-okay.
IGN: Can you mention any of your favorite skills that you’re able to unlock or moves you’re able to do with any of the weapons?
Nate Fox: I love the kusarigama because while it’s really good for taking down people with shields, it also allows you to do an area of effect attack by spinning that chain above your head. If you’re surrounded by enemies, you can hit them all. This is something we never had in Tsushima, but in Yotei it’s absolutely there for you. It is a moment where you’re kind of improvising, and these weapons allow you to do a broader selection of abilities that give you more choice and more freedom in how you deal tactically with the enemies around you.
IGN: Jason, do you have one as well?
Jason Connell: I think my favorite when it comes to combat is the dual wielding. It really rewards the feeling of being really fast, and when she hits with those two swords you can kind of get into a flurry and get into a groove where it just keeps going. You’re like, this is going to stop, but it just keeps going. There’s speed there, it feels really lethal. It doesn’t feel like you’re swinging a lot and doing little damage. It feels like you’re actually really hurting them. I like dual wielding… that’s my fantasy melee weapon set up for me. That might be different for other people, but that’s why there’s five of ’em. Everybody’s going to try something new and different.
IGN: So Jason, in a New York Times interview, you mentioned that you were left in awe by the sight of Mount Yotei reflected across Lake Tōya during a research trip. Was that the site that inspired the setting of Ghost of Yotei, or were there ever any other locations or historical settings that could have perhaps been the home for Atsu?
Jason Connell: By the time we had gone on the research trip, we definitely knew that we were making a game up there. We had seen enough images. We had embraced the idea that this is where our game was going to take place, and it was about just getting immersed in the culture up there because it’s quite different than Honshu mainland Japan. A number of us, it was our first time.
So really opening the door to all of the unknowns that we could take home and be inspired by and develop new relationships for new advisors. That’s the real reason to go. But that Lake Tōya moment where — and I bet Nate had a very similar experience — certainly was some of the birthplaces of thinking about what the actual name of the game would be, because it was just such a majestic moment where the mountain is sort of towering over you. It was a nice middle point of the trip for us, and really symbolized a lot of what we learned and felt while we were there.
And then there were a bunch of natural decisions and some implicit decisions that were made over the course of the game that suddenly, our home is at the foot of Mount Yōtei, this massive mountain that’s casting this shadow over and we were naming things based off of it. It really felt like it was the geographical heart of the experience, and the story was spiraling out from there. It felt like just a great moment for us as we were getting towards the early parts of making the game, and it ended up transforming into the actual name.
IGN: And I know this is going to be hard, but Nate, starting with you, I’d love to know one thing you’re super excited for players to be able to see and play with when the game comes out in October?
Nate Fox: Oh, I’m very excited for players to get out into the wilds, the dangerous lawless wilds of Ezo and hopefully they’re really entranced by Atu’s quest. The wind’s blowing them towards a mission start, but what’s that over there? They see something on the horizon that stokes their curiosity and they say, you know what? I’m going to go check it out. And they ride to that thing and they’re going to find something worth discovering, whether it’s a story or some piece of valuable treasure, you name it. We wanted to make sure in this game that we honored players’ curiosity, that we would reward exploration. And to me that’s the magic of Yotei. It’s those spaces in between missions when players just find themselves propelled by the smallest little puff of curiosity and it takes them on an adventure they hadn’t anticipated doing.
IGN: What I’m hearing from that is I’m going to be having a lot of late nights, way later than intended. Jason?
Jason Connell: I actually want to say something we haven’t talked about much, which is Atsu’s shamisen, which is the instrument that she carries, which is her mother’s shamisen. Just like in Ghost of Tsushima, we had features in that game, I think it was called the Traveler’s Attire in the last game… it would help you find content nearby, you could use it almost like a completion tool or a navigation tool in order to get through the world.
I love that the shamisen exists and there’s actually songs that you can learn inside of the open world, and those songs can then guide you to certain types of things. So you want to collect some of these songs because they’ll guide you. The Song of Vanity might guide you to cosmetics, and we know how people love dressing up in the game and putting on cool outfits. So I’m really excited about showing more of that and for players to get an opportunity to use that.
Interview conducted by Rachel Weber.
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.
Double Fine Productions has made heavy metal video game Brütal Legend free for 666 minutes only to honor heavy metal legend Ozzy Osbourne, who died this week aged 76.
The Black Sabbath frontman passed away on July 22 just a few weeks after he performed at the Back to the Beginning farewell concert.
Osbourne voiced the character The Guardian of Metal in Brütal Legend. The character’s appearance and personality was based on Osbourne himself.
In a post on social media, the Microsoft-owned Double Fine said it had made Brütal Legend free on Itch.io. “But this incredible deal will only last for 666 minutes, as the prophecy foretold,” the studio continued. “So get yourself clicking, before it disappears like a demon in the night…”
Brütal Legend is Double Fine’s 2009 heavy metal-themed action adventure real-time strategy hybrid, which stars Jack Black as roadie Eddie Riggs. Brütal Legend was published by EA after Activision dropped the game, and Double Fine and Activision ended up in a legal battle over the publishing issues.
Ozzy Osbourne starred in the game itself alongside fellow metal icons Lemmy Kilmister, Rob Halford, and Lita Ford. Double Fine boss Tim Schafer selected over 100 metal songs to be included in the game.
Double Fine, which is busy developing Keeper for PC and Xbox, announced the deal at 4pm PT, which means it ends at 3am on Thursday, July 24.
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.
Back in March we got to reveal Magic: The Gathering’s very first Spider-man cards as part of a special Scene Box outside of the main set. Well today, as part of San Diego Comic-Con 2025, we’re back with an exclusive look at some of the first cards that will actually be a part of that Standard-legal set – and this cast of five spideys will surely look familiar to any Spider-Verse fans out there.
Flip through the slideshow below to see all five Spider-Man cards, as well as an alternate comic book art style for the titular webslinger himself.
Magic: The Gathering developer Wizards of the Coast previously told IGN that it wasn’t limiting this set to a single comic run, and that’s made quite clear with this early look. All five cards are different versions of Spider-Man depicted as legendary creatures: at Uncommon you have Spider-Man Noir and the robotic SP//dr piloted by Peni Parker, at Rare are Spider-Man 2099 and the delightfully goofy Spider-Ham, and finally at Mythic Rare is the man himself, Peter Parker, who flips over to become the Amazing Spider-Man.
That last card is especially interesting as it is double-sided. The front is simply Peter Parker, while the back is his Amazing Spider-Man alter ego, and you have some flexibility in how to cast him. Magic has had what are called “modal double-faced cards” before that allow you to cast either side from your hand, but this is the first I know of that also allows you to pay a cost to flip it while the front side is already in play – in this case, you can play Peter Parker for two mana, and then pay four more on a later turn to have him transform.
If you do, you get access to his very flavorful ability called web-slinging, which allows you to pay just three mana to cast Legendary spells if you also return a tapped creature to your hand. This card is sure to be a popular leader in Magic’s most popular format, Commander, as it will let you cheat all sorts of big and expensive legendary creatures into play far earlier than expected. And because this card will also be legal across Magic’s regular competitive formats, giant dinosaurs and terrifying demons alike could be swinging onto the table.
The rest of the cast here is a clear nod to Sony’s excellent Into the Spider-Verse animated films, only missing a take on Peter B. Parker and Spider-Gwen to complete the first movie’s main cast (though there’s plenty of time for those to potentially be revealed themselves before the set launches in September). But before you get too excited, this was almost definitely just a nod to their reveal as part of this year’s Comic-Con, as these cards and this set in general are not actually tied to that series in any direct way.
And while we may not have a second version of Peter to show here, we do have an alternate art treatment for this one – one that is sure to excite any comic book fans out there. This secondary version shows off what’s called the “Iconic Moments” Booster Fun treatment for this set, and all of the cards that use it will feature art from the pages of Spider-Man’s adventures. This first one is taken straight from the cover of 1963’s The Amazing Spider-Man #1, complete with artist credits for Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko.
If you happen to be in the San Diego area yourself, Wizards of the Coast is hosting a Spider-Man event at the Hard Rock Hotel where fans will be able to go hands-on with the set’s Welcome Decks – smaller preconstructed decks themed around Spider-man that are meant to be an intro point for new players as they learn the ropes. WOTC has previously stated that its Universes Beyond crossovers have brought a huge amount of new players through the door, and just today Hasbro revealed that the recent Final Fantasy set made a whopping $200 million on its first day.
Tom Marks is IGN’s Executive Reviews Editor. He loves card games, puzzles, platformers, puzzle-platformers, and lots more.
Bethesda has broken its silence on the future of Starfield, insisting it’s still working on updates and will share details on the “exciting things” it has planned in the coming months.
The Starfield community had hoped Bethesda would announce something to do with the game at its show, but while The Elder Scrolls Online and Fallout 76 both got their moment in the spotlight, Starfield skipped proceedings entirely. No DLC, no expansion, no PlayStation 5 release… nothing.
Now, ahead of Gamescom in August, Bethesda has piped up with a statement on Steam that is as brief as it is vague, but at least addresses Starfield’s future and promises more content is in the works.
“Looking ahead, we’re continuing work on future updates and will share more about the exciting things we have planned for Starfield in the coming months,” Bethesda said in a post accompanying Starfield Update 1.15.222, which is in beta form on Steam. Patch notes are below.
Starfield players are hoping this means the promised second Starfield expansion is still coming, and that Starfield may follow the likes of Forza Horizon 5 and make the jump to PlayStation 5.
Starfield launched in September 2023 as Bethesda’s first brand new IP in 25 years, but it was not as well received as the studio’s previous games in the Fallout and The Elder Scrolls franchises, and the Shattered Space expansion, released a year later in September 2024, has a ‘mostly negative’ user review rating on Steam.
Starfield went on to reach 15 million players, but the question of whether Bethesda might walk away from the game to focus on its other franchises has been a running theme since release. In June 2024, Bethesda insisted it remained committed to supporting Starfield, and confirmed at least one other story expansion would release following Shattered Space. And in an interview with YouTube channel MrMattyPlays, Bethesda Game Studios’ Todd Howard said the developer was aiming to release an annual story expansion for “hopefully a very long time.”
Minor improvements to format and display in Creations menus.
Addressed an issue that could cause that Extreme Temperature gear to appear incorrectly.
Minor improvements to sorting in the Missions Menu.
General crash and stability fixes.
This update is currently in Steam Beta. If you would like to opt in to the Starfield Beta update, please follow these instructions:
Open your Steam Library and navigate to Starfield
Right click on “Starfield” and select “Properties”
In the new properties pop-up window, select “Betas”
In the beta drop down to opt into, select “[beta]”
Wait for app to download new build and launch
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.
While we have put together lists recommending the best DC board games and Marvel board games on the market, there are still plenty of great titles out there that don’t fall under either of those banners and instead highlight the “superhero” motif itself. These are games that pit players against one another as heroes and villains, and those that let you work together to stop some dastardly villains. This list takes a look at some of those games that will appeal to fans of capes and spandex, regardless of publisher.
TL;DR – These are the best superhero board games
If you don’t have time to peruse the blurbs, you can see all the items on this list in the catalog above. But if you want more info about any of these superhero board games, read on for the info.
Kapow!
With art that looks like it was pulled straight out of a comic book, Kapow! from Wise Wizard Games has players filling the role of either heroes or villains as they duke it out in this dice-battling game, players roll a set of dice and then, by locking in different combinations of faces, trigger their respective hero or villain’s signature skills and attacks. While on the surface this may sound similar to Dice Throne, one of the coolest features of Kapow! is its dice crafting mechanic, where you can create unique dice by inserting different symbols into the dice faces, helping to increase the odds of getting those rolls you want. Currently, there are two volumes of Kapow!, each containing six characters – three heroes and three villains – that can be mixed and matched together.
Sentinels of the Multiverse: Definitive Edition
Sentinels of the Multiverse is a cooperative board game where teams of heroes struggle against a villain in an effort to thwart their dastardly plan of the week. Both the heroes and villains come with unique 40-card decks that show off the characters’ various skills and play styles. One of the things that sets Sentinels apart is how the game also factors in the environment, with each environment also coming with its own deck and effects that further expand the game’s replayability. To keep things manageable, players will only have to worry about their own hero’s deck, with the “game” handling the villain and environment decks. With characters like Citizen Dead or the one-man-army, Militia, Sentinels of the Multiverse feels like a relic of early ’90s comics, in all of the best ways.
Massive-Verse Fighting Card Game
Featuring characters from various Image Comics series including Radiant Black, the Massive-verse Fighting Card Game is a fast-paced 1v1 card game where two players choose from a roster of heroes, each with their own unique deck, and then proceed to attack, block, and hurl large ultimates at one another until only one is standing. Built on the backbone of Solis Game Studios’ Pocket Paragon system, gameplay feels like a mix of the classic War card game and rock-paper-scissors, where both players play down their cards for the turn and then reveal them simultaneously, with some card types being able to counter others. The Massive-verse FCG is a great little game to keep in your car or bag to bust out when you have a few minutes of downtime and are in the mood for a quick brawl. If you want a bit more variety or to play with up to two more players, you can snag the game’s Team Up Expansion, which introduces four new character decks and 30 special team-up cards for 2v2 games.
Invincible: The Hero-Building Game
Invincible: The Hero-Building Game puts players in the superhero boots of the characters from the hit comic and animated series, Invincible. You can play as Atom Eve, Rex Splode, or Robot, and you and your friends are tasked with rescuing civilians, beating up minions, and stopping the big-bad of the day. Featuring a handful of scenarios, each with different goals to complete, this is a deck and bag-building game where you can level up and improve your hero as the game progresses. There’s a push-your-luck aspect that comes into play by letting you fire off more of your powers – but draw too many black cubes, and you crash out and end your turn. The included scenarios can be played either as standalone games or strung together in order as a sort of campaign game. And if you’re looking for additional challenge, you can pick from three difficulty levels – Easy, Normal, or Hardcore.
Astro Knights
Take up arms as an Astro Knight to defend your home planet in this cooperative deck-builder that has a unique twist – you don’t shuffle your deck. More of a Guardians of the Galaxy approach to superheroes than Spider-Man or Superman, Astro Knights has a science fiction aesthetic, as you and your fellow knights build your decks, playing and equipping cards as you fight against the boss you are going up against. For fans of Aeon’s End, this game will feel familiar, as it is a reimplementation of that game’s systems.
Hellboy: The Board Game
Hellboy: The Board Game is a dungeon-crawling adventure where you and your friends move detailed minis of members of the BRPD like Hellboy, Abe Sapien, or Roger, as you work to solve different cases, taking down any bosses and enemies that get in your way. Each playable character comes with a set of skills and attacks that are unique to them, which you will need to use if you have any hope of succeeding in the game’s included scenarios. Besides simply navigating around the modular board that you set up before each game, players also need to adjust on the fly as the Deck of Doom throws wrenches in your way at every turn, helping keep things exciting. This game can be played both as one-off sessions or as a strung-together campaign, and with a bunch of expansions released, there is plenty of Hellboy goodness out there for fans of the Dark Horse Comics series.
Scott White is a freelance contributor to IGN, assisting with tabletop games and guide coverage. Follow him on X/Twitter or Bluesky.
“Here be monsters,” says the legend on so many antique maps, firing the imagination with thoughts of kraken, chimeras, or worse. But what if it were true? What if Lewis and Clarke, setting out on their expedition across the American interior, encountered buffalo-headed minotaurs and man-eating plants.
That’s the premise of the Corps of Discovery comic and now of this board game adaptation. The game comes from the same designers as the superb Mind MGMT, although, save for the comic book connection, this is a very different kind of game.
What’s in the Box
Most box-openings start with a board, and Corps of Discovery is no exception, but the nature of the board itself is rather surprising. Instead of the usual fold-out affair, you get a cardboard sandwich: two layers of card stuck together, with room in between to slip in a sheet of paper. The top layer is punctuated by a regular grid of circular holes, and the box contains an equally unusual supply of thick cardboard sun tokens with wide “pegs” that fit loosely into the grid’s holes.
There are two folders of paper maps that slide into the sandwich, one for each of the two scenarios included in the game. There’s also a second board which is used for tracking the current game state, with spaces for three challenge cards, backpack items and water: this doubles as a handy reminder of the flow of each game day. There are tokens for the various resources that go in your backpack and for your water supply. There are also several card decks, not only the challenge cards that’ll outline the obstacles you must overcome each day, but also characters to play, items for them to use and so on.
As a scenario-based game, there are also additional cards and tokens applicable to particular scenarios. One thing to note is that, as a game based on a comic book series, all the components are furnished with excellent art from the original comics. While it might not be to everyone’s tastes, it does a fantastic job of bringing the game’s dangerous world to life, especially if you’re familiar with the source material.
Rules and How It Plays
Understanding how the game is set up is, unusually, an integral part of understanding how it plays. First, your group chooses one of the two scenarios to play (plus a training mission), and one of the 10 map sheets included for that scenario, covering it with a blank sheet so you can’t see what’s on it. You slip this, cover and all, into the cardboard-sandwich board then cover all the holes with the sun tokens. Then you slip out the blank sheet. The result is a game map that you know nothing about, ripe for exploration and discovery.
This is a cooperative game where you’re working together to map the wilderness and survive. On your individual turn, you simply remove a sun token, revealing an icon underneath, and take a matching resource to add to your collective backpack. There’s no piece to mark where you are on the map. Instead, movement is abstracted away under the presumption that it’s easy to move through already explored territory. The next player just removes a sun token next to any already-revealed space, although there are some mountainous areas on each map that you can’t traverse.
Exploration, however, is far from a random walk in the park. Each scenario has a set of rules about where and how the various different icons are laid out. In the Fauna scenario, for example, there’s always one wood icon per row and column, and there will always be a water icon orthogonally adjacent to each wood. Each mud icon will be next to a water and a stone, while forts always form an L-shape series with a water and a skull. There are more rules – and icons – but you get the idea.
This allows you to make predictions and deductions about what you’re going to encounter on the map. Sometimes you can figure it out with complete certainty, but more often it’s a bit of a gamble, where you can narrow down the odds without being sure. Exploration is thus both a fun puzzle where you can aim for specific resources, and an exercise loaded with tension. The rules are complex enough to make it a good group discussion, ensuring there’s a dynamic sense of cooperation, and something you can master with practice.
The rules are complex enough to make it a good group discussion, ensuring there’s a dynamic sense of cooperation, and something you can master with practice.
Each time you remove a sun token from the board you place it on one of three challenge cards dealt at the start of the game day. These cards have a resource requirement that you must spend in order to pass the challenge and a consequence for passing or failing, the latter of which usually means losing even more, different resources. You have to face these consequences once the card accumulates a certain number of suns, often only two or three. Considering many challenges require more than two or three resources to pass, this immediately puts your game under massive pressure to find the right icons on every turn.
If you run out of water tokens, you die. If you end the day – timing out the three challenge cards for that die – without any food tokens, you die. Monsters generally don’t kill you outright but sap these precious, precious resource tokens until you die. Even when you’re on top of the resource-mapping system, most games will go down to the wire of you gaining your objective with a few measly drops of water left in your canteen. The last few turns ramp up the tension to crushing levels, until it almost feels like you’re struggling through a real wilderness, desperately following signs of water in the hope of surviving just one more day.
As if this wasn’t enough, on top of surviving you also have a goal to complete. This depends on the scenario. In Fauna, for instance, you’ll meet those buffalo-headed minotaurs who’ll make it harder to traverse rows and columns until you find a fort, learn a recipe for killing one, and sacrifice the necessary resources, all of which you were probably hoping to save to pass a challenge card. These kinds of trade-offs are part of the game’s strategy: identifying times when failing a daily challenge can be a useful step in the wider goal of passing the winning objectives.
Other aspects of your decision-making come down to the characters in play and the gear you choose at the outset, all of which offer you special abilities to piece together and increase your chance of survival. You can plan ahead with these since you pick them yourself, look for combos, and build a strategy around them. But there are also destiny cards, random helpful bonuses that you can sometimes replenish by achieving in-game goals, and for these you’ll have to roll with whatever fate gives you, adjusting your tactics accordingly.
With practice and luck you will, eventually, manage to beat Fauna and, in time, the game’s second scenario, Flora, which involves a giant carnivorous plant. Corps of Discovery goes out of its way to make these scenarios replayable by offering such a huge range of map sheets – you can also download and print out more – that memorising the layouts is essentially impossible. Variety, however, cannot fully undermine human psychology: there’s an innate tendency to treat a mission as “done” once it’s been won. This is exacerbated by the game’s high difficulty level and lack of narrative detail. Although it does a great job of conjuring up the spectre of starving in the wilderness, the challenge cards feel pretty mechanical, so repeated tries at a scenario can feel a little same-y.
This isn’t quite the limiting factor it may sound like as it’ll take you repeated attempts to win both the scenarios, and there are expansions available which further the story and build considerably on the core mechanics – all four are included in the deluxe edition, which we used for the photos accompanying this review. But it still would have felt like a more complete experience if more of these elements had been included in the base game. As it stands, the game’s high toughness is the major motivation for a replay, and it’s almost enough by itself: winning against the odds, in a land where almost everything you encounter is out to kill you, is a hugely satisfying moment.
Ahead of EA’s full Battlefield 6 reveal tomorrow, a brief teaser for the game’s campaign has been posted online, revealing a major conflict.
Set in the near future, Battlefield 6’s campaign will see NATO under attack. Its base in Georgia is hit, the British territory of Gibraltar is invaded, and NATO’s secretary general is assassinated inside the organisation’s Brussels headquarters. The perpetrator? An organisation named Pax Armata.
A number of countries, including France, are then confirmed to have left NATO to form a new coalition, as in-universe news headlines question whether NATO itself is now a “thing of the past”. Hmm…
The teaser then concludes with Battlefield’s trademark theme — you know the one, that ‘dun dun dun dun dun’ drumbeat — and a reminder that the game’s full reveal will take place tomorrow, July 24, at 8am Pacific / 4pm UK time.
Eagle-eyed viewers will spot the logo for “BF Studios” on the end of the teaser — this is the coalition of developers that EA has pulled together to work on the game, including franchise founder DICE, Los Angeles-based sister studio Ripple Effect, Montreal-based Dead Space Remake developer Motive, and British Need for Speed studio Criterion.
There’s also the note that “no weapon, military vehicle or gear manufacturer is affiliated with or has sponsored or endorsed this game.”
Pax Armata rises as NATO cracks. Their motto? “Our protection, your peace.”
“Pax Armata rises as NATO cracks,” a message posted on Battlefield’s X / Twitter account reads. “Their motto? ‘Our protection, your peace.’ But who’s pulling the strings and to what end?” Presumably we’ll find out more tomorrow.
Battlefield 6 is currently slated to launch sometime during the current fiscal year, before March 2026. It seems likely we’ll see that window narrowed considerably when the game is fully unveiled.
Tom Phillips is IGN’s News Editor. You can reach Tom at tom_phillips@ign.com or find him on Bluesky @tomphillipseg.bsky.social
If you bought a Nintendo Switch 2 in June, the odds are good you also bought Mario Kart World. In fact, according to Circana, 82% of Nintendo Switch 2 purchasers also picked up Mario Kart World.
That comes from Circana’s June report, which shared that the Nintendo Switch 2 is officially the fastest-selling video game console in the U.S. In total, the Nintendo Switch sold 1.6 million units in the U.S. in June, beating out the PlayStation 4’s previous record of 1.1 million units in November of 2012.
Of those 1.6 million unit sales, 82% either purchased the Nintendo Switch 2 + Mario Kart World bundle, or bought the game standalone. This helped propel Mario Kart World to become the third best-selling game of the month in Circana’s rankings, though it’s possible it could have ranked even higher due to the exclusion of Nintendo’s digital data from the sales charts.
As a comparison point, when the Nintendo Switch 1 launched, over 100% of new console owners that month also purchased its launch game, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, worldwide. Yes, the game sold more copies on Switch than Nintendo did Switch systems. “This may be attributed to people who purchased both a limited edition of the game to collect and a second version to play,” Nintendo suggested at the time. So Mario Kart World isn’t quite beating those numbers.
Additionally, we learned from Circana this morning that 32% of Nintendo Switch 2 purchasers in June also bought a Nintendo Switch 2 Pro Controller, helping make it the best-selling accessory of the month in the U.S. by dollar sales.
Unshockingly, one of the reasons people are buying Mario Kart World is because it’s pretty dang good. We gave the game an 8/10, saying that it “may not make the most convincing case that going open-world was the boost the series needed, but excellent multiplayer racing, incredible polish, and the thrilling new Knockout Tour mode still more than live up to its legacy.”
Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. You can find her posting on BlueSky @duckvalentine.bsky.social. Got a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.
