There’s plenty going on in Crimson Desert’s open world. From puzzles to castle sieges to blowing up enemies with a battle robot, there’s a wide range of activities to get stuck into. But from what we’ve seen so far, the real show stoppers are the boss battles. As part of this month’s IGN First, we’ve already shown you two new ones: the Golden Star mechanical dragon, and Fortain, The Cursed Knight. But there’s still more to see. Today, we’re showcasing three brand new bosses: Muskan, Walter Lanford, and Kearush the Slayer. You can see protagonist Kliff duke it out with all three in the video above.
The trio demonstrates a chunk of Crimson Desert’s enemy scale – Walter Lanford and Muskan are both human, but the former is pretty regular in size, while the latter is an eight-foot powerhouse. And then there’s Kearush, a massive, gorilla-like beast who’s actually one of Crimson Desert’s smaller monsters.
Those “weight categories” help distinguish each boss, but each is defined by their ability set. Muskan is a fierce pugilist, only providing you a few seconds of reprieve while he charges up his powerful punches and dive kicks. He’s not afraid to fight a little dirty, with sweeping kicks knocking your legs from under you, and choke slams sending you sputtering to the floor. When his fury meter maxes out, he’s able to unleash a chain of blows that repeatedly launch you into the air, so learning how to avoid his lighting-fast fists is the name of the game.
Walter Landford may be no bigger than you are, but he’s arguably the most sophisticated of the three bosses we’re showing today. Armed with a shotgun, he’s able to fight effectively at range. Dodging the wide-spread projectiles is key, but get your timing right and you can actually deflect his blasts back at him. Should your reflexes not be quite that sharp, you can spin up a magic barrier that collects incoming bullets and fires them back where they came from. Walter’s weak to grapples, so getting in close is vital – thankfully you can use the “deflect light” skill, typically used to find hidden items, to temporarily blind him and close the distance. You’ll need to act fast, though, as Walter’s armed with smoke grenades that can help conceal his rapid getaways.
Finally, Kearush the Slayer is a monster with no less than three health bars – a fight-extending trick that multiple foes across Crimson Desert’s campaign can pull. There’s a Hulk-like intensity to this fight, with Kearush being able to climb the walls and unleash clumsy-but-destructive leaps in his attempt to turn every bone in your body to dust. As a larger creature, you’re able to clamber onto his back and stab away, Dragon’s Dogma-style, but be careful – he’s more than happy to fall back-first from a great height, so let go of those shoulders before you’re forced to cushion his landing.
All three of these fights only reinforce my feeling that the bosses are going to be the real stars of the show in Crimson Desert. Every one I’ve faced so far across multiple hands-on opportunities has had a unique twist, a clever mechanic, or simply an exciting moveset that kept me on my toes. I’ve fought a powerful knight who I crushed with fallen masonry columns. I’ve faced off against an antlered snow beast who could cause avalanches that froze me in my tracks. And I’ve clambered up the side of a giant walking mountain, Shadow of the Colossus-style, seeking out its weak points in a battle of endurance. And I hope these are only just the start. I can’t wait to see what Crimson Desert’s most ambitious showdowns are made of.
Matt Purslow is IGN’s Executive Editor of Features.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned from the Jurassic Park movies, it’s that running a dinosaur theme park isn’t easy. It’s a constant balancing act of keeping your employees satisfied, making your park profitable, and meeting your guests’ needs, whether that means having enough bathrooms or just not getting eaten by a velociraptor. Jurassic World Evolution 3 once again puts you in the role of park manager, giving you a chance to do what the John Hammonds and Simon Masranis of the world could not: run a thriving, lucrative theme park with attention-grabbing dinosaur attractions and minimal violent deaths. With a complex set of management and customization tools, Evolution 3 gives you more control over your park than ever before. The result is an incredibly engaging management sim that’s a high point in an already satisfying series.
Like the first two, Jurassic World Evolution 3 shares a lot of DNA with other theme park sims. You’re responsible for laying down paths and electrical infrastructure, building amenities that appeal to your clientele, and creating experiences that get more guests through your gates. Rather than roller coasters and haunted houses, though, the attractions are all about the dinosaurs. Just about any species will garner business, but having a variety is the key to long-term success — and thankfully, you’ll have a wealth of different dino types to choose from. There’s always a bit of a thrill in seeing these legendary creatures come to life, especially when you unlock the more recognizable species from the films.
Of course, when you go to Disneyland, there’s almost no chance that Mickey and the princesses will escape their enclosures and maul the park-goers. That adds an extra layer of danger to Evolution 3, and park managers will have to maintain a high safety rating to continue to pull in money. Think of it as a chill, cozy management sim punctuated by moments of panic and terror. You’ll have to keep your dinosaurs happy by meeting their food, environmental, and cohabitation needs. Some need room to roam or prefer to live in packs, while others can thrive in small areas with only a bit of pasture to nibble on. Carnivores require either fresh meat or live prey, while herbivores need greenery, fruit, and nuts. Flying and swimming dinosaurs need special enclosures, since fencing in a pteranodon is about as useful as hiding from a T-Rex in a bathroom stall. It’s really satisfying to get into a loop of researching dig sites, sending expeditions to those sites, extracting DNA, and finally, finding the perfect spot to incubate your newly discovered species.
If that seems like a lot to manage, it is — but the campaign does a great job of walking you through the increasingly complex mechanics. Head of PR Cabot Finch, who you might remember from the previous Jurassic World Evolution games, returns as your guide as you visit existing parks in progress around the world and restore them to greatness. In a nod to the original Jurassic Park, the campaign begins in the Montana badlands and eventually takes you to Las Vegas, Hawaii, and throughout Europe and Asia, adding a lot of variety to the local scenery. Finch is accompanied by a team of scientists and dinosaur experts, but the real star is Jeff Goldblum’s Ian Malcolm pops up from time to time to remind everyone that trying to control nature inevitably leads to disaster.
Think of it as a cozy management sim punctuated by moments of terror.
Even if you’re already familiar with the series, the campaign mode is an effective way of familiarizing yourself with Evolution 3’s new features. The biggest addition is the introduction of in-park breeding. Previously, you could only synthesize dinosaurs based on how much of their DNA you extracted from fossils found on expeditions. Now, once you’ve synthesized compatible males and females of the same species, you can set up a cozy nesting area and wait for them to get busy.
This mechanic adds a few interesting new wrinkles to the tried-and-true Jurassic World Evolution formula. You can work with your scientists to create a breeding plan, or preferably just wait and see if nature takes its course. Who knew it would be so fun to play matchmaker to a bunch of prehistoric creatures? Once the next generation hatches, juveniles might have different needs than their parents. For example, while grown carnivores prefer to hunt their own prey, baby raptors and T-rexes will need stores of prepared meat in their pens. The tallest dinosaurs can reach the foliage on treetops, but their offspring will need nourishment closer to the ground. If you let breeding go on unchecked, pens can get overcrowded, which leads to breakouts and general panic among your guests.
While you’re managing these dinosaur family units, you’ll also have to curry favor with the entertainment, security, and conservation factions, another new feature. You can gain reputation by completing certain contracts, which are basically well-paid side missions, and improving the quality of your parks. Gaining a positive reputation with all three factions becomes very important in the last few chapters of the story, but they don’t necessarily want the same things. Pleasing them becomes yet another balancing act that adds more depth to the gameplay.
The campaign in Jurassic World Evolution 2 felt more like an extended tutorial, but this time around, you have more breathing room to find your own management style. Its objectives serve as a backbone to the overall story in which an activist group called Extinction Now! regularly hacks into your communications and sabotages your parks. As you make your way around the globe, you’ll also need to put a stop to Extinction Now!’s histrionics. The first few parks are heavily guided, but once the map opens up and you go international, you have a lot of welcome freedom to meet your objectives in whatever way you see fit.
Pleasing the new factions is yet another balancing act that adds depth.
Part of the fun of the management sim genre is being able to create something entirely from scratch, which you can do in sandbox mode. This mode has been a staple of the Jurassic World Evolution games, and Evolution 3 offers even more customization options. To start, you can choose any of the locations from the campaign, generate an island with its own unique topography, or use the square maps for a perfectly flat, obstacle-free mass of land.
You have control over almost every aspect in the sandbox, including your starting funds, certain dinosaur behaviors, and beyond. You can make it more challenging for yourself with a shoestring budget or choose unlimited funding to remove all cost barriers to creating the dinosaur theme park of your dreams depending on what you are in the mood for. You can take on contracts to make extra money, but for the most part, sandbox mode is an unguided experience. It’s easy to lose track of time when you’re making sure your paths are perfectly aligned or setting up an unforgettable park tour with maximum dinosaur visibility. And unlike in the campaign, where Cabot, Malcolm, and the rest of the cast are frequently chattering at you, the sandbox is quiet and zen. Well, at least until the indoraptors get loose.
The third gameplay mode, scenarios, was my least favorite of the three. These timed challenges, which can take anywhere from 12 minutes to a couple of hours, have specific objectives and restrictions. In one, you’ll have to take manual control of one of your ranger teams and take photos of wild dinosaurs; in another, you might be barred from editing the existing dinosaur pens regardless of the well-being of those inside. I couldn’t get on board with this time-trial approach to park management; for me, it was antithetical to the zen-like experience I’m looking for in a sim, and the objectives weren’t interesting enough to make them worth the effort. I found myself missing Jurassic World Evolution 2’s Chaos Theory mode, which sadly appears to be extinct.
But even though I didn’t personally vibe with the Scenarios, it’s impressive that Evolution 3 offers options for just about every kind of management sim fan. If you need a story to guide you through the gameplay, the campaign has you covered. If you want to build something that’s entirely your own, you can do so in the sandbox. And if you actually like high-pressure time trials, you’ll probably find Scenario mode more satisfying than I did.
I’m even more impressed with the quality-of-life updates Evolution 3 brings to the series. With the right infrastructure, you can automate maintenance and medical care, saving you from having to manually track down those units every time there’s a crisis. Aspects that were convoluted or confusing in the previous games, like creating park tours, are far more straightforward. There are more tours to choose from beyond the standard Jeep rides and gyroscopes from the movies; you can set up a hot air balloon tour or build a Cretaceous Cruise that allows guests to canoe through rivers and lakes. Boosting your transportation score by setting up monorail stations and tracks throughout the park feels much more intuitive this time around. As you expand, you can easily edit the existing tracks to expand their reach — or just set up an underground hyperloop to make traversing the park even simpler. A lot of rough edges have been smoothed out.
I ran into a few technical issues while playing, though most of them have already been addressed by a patch. Most notably, the “continue” and “load” options were missing from the menu every time I started it up, so I had to begin a new game and load manually from there every time I wanted to get back into my ongoing campaign. This meant more long load screens and hearing the opening voiceover over a dozen times, which isn’t ideal. Again, that thankfully appears to have been fixed, but I also experienced a few crashes when trying to revisit my Indonesia park, which meant going through that same loop of starting a new game and loading all over again.
Another drawback of playing Evolution 3 before release is that I didn’t get to check out the community creations. Because it has so many more customization options than its predecessors, it makes sense that players would want to share their creations with the world. It’s a fun idea on paper, though I can’t say for certain whether it works in execution since there was an extremely limited player pool before launch.
Nintendo has announced the second Kirby Air Riders Direct with director Masahiro Sakurai. It’s set for October 23 at 6am PT / 9am ET / 2pm UK time.
This one’s even longer than the 45-minute Kirby Air Riders Direct we saw in August. Expect roughly 60 minutes of information on the upcoming Nintendo Switch 2 exclusive, Nintendo said.
“You might be asking yourself if it’s basically Mario Kart,” Sakurai said. “You race and battle with familiar characters around courses with different features, or so they say. Ok, so it basically is like Mario Kart. I even mentioned this when I received the request to make the game. I asked them if they still wanted to do it. But as fans of the original know…the appeal of the game is not actually the races!”
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.
PlayStation Plus Extra will lose seven games in November 2025, Sony has confirmed.
As reported by Push Square, the seven games set to exit the subscription tier include 2018’s Battlefield 5, Digimon Survive, and Like a Dragon Ishin. Battlefield 5 leaves PS Plus Extra hot on the heels of Battlefield 6’s record-breaking launch.
The list of titles is expected to make way on November 18, when Sony will release the next PS Plus Extra update. As Push Square points out, it’s worth noting that games in PS Plus Extra can no longer be played once they’re rotated out of the catalog, even if you continue to subscribe. So make the most of these games while you still can.
The games set to leave PlayStation Plus Extra in November 2025:
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.
Halo co-creator Marcus Lehto has expressed his disappointment that former staff of the now shuttered Ridgeline Games were not “properly” credited in Battlefield 6, despite building the “foundation” of the game.
Fast forward to Battlefield 6’s record-breaking release, and Lehto has taken to LinkedIn to recognize the work done by his former staff at Ridgeline on the game.
“I’m disappointed to see that many of my former teammates from Ridgeline Games were not properly credited in the recent release of Battlefield 6,” he said in a post that included a list of names under the Ridgeline Games banner.
“These talented developers worked tirelessly for 1 to 2.5 years, building the foundation of the game, before I left voluntarily and the studio was subsequently shuttered. Despite their significant contributions, most who were laid off were relegated to a ‘Special Thanks’ section at the very end of the credits — and several were omitted entirely, including myself.
“Out of respect for my colleagues and the awesome work they poured into this project, I want to take a moment to properly recognize them — listing their names and roles as I would have preferred them to appear in the credits.
“Game development is a team effort, and every contributor deserves fair acknowledgment.”
IGN has asked EA for comment.
In an internal note issued at the time of Ridgeline’s closure, EA Entertainment president Laura Miele said that Criterion producer Danny Isaac and studio head of creative Darren White would replace Lehto to continue work on the planned narrative campaign, with some members of Ridgeline Games joining Ripple Effect to continue working on Battlefield.
EA would go on to announce Battlefield Studios, the four-strong developer collective working on the mega-publisher’s Battlefield franchise. It currently includes DICE, Ripple Effect, Motive, and Criterion.
Lehto is a Bungie veteran whose portfolio includes serving as creative director on Halo: Reach. He joined EA in the wake of criticism over Battlefield 2042’s lack of a single-player narrative campaign.
While Battlefield 6 has enjoyed enormous sales success and won plaudits for its multiplayer, the campaign was poorly received. IGN’s Battlefield 6 campaign review returned a 5/10. We said: “A safe, dull reimagining of what Battlefield once was, rather than a bold reinvention of what it could be.”
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.
Silent Hill series producer Motoi Okamoto has opened up on why Konami revealed three new Silent Hill games after a full decade of silence, saying the publisher was keen to stress to old fans and new that it was “serious” about resurrecting the flailing horror series.
“Three years ago, in 2022, we announced three titles: Silent Hill 2, Silent Hill f, and Silent Hill: Townfall,” Okamoto explained on Twitter / X, as transcribed by Automaton. “We didn’t want to just announce a single remake to ‘test the waters.’
“We wanted people to feel how serious we were about reviving the series. Developing a remake and a new title simultaneously naturally involves risks, but we wanted to convey our commitment first and foremost. Only when a new game is announced can the future of a series be seen. Users won’t feel motivated to engage with an IP unless they can sense it has a future. If the company takes a wait-and-see approach, so will the players. The company needs to show how serious it is so that users can get genuinely excited. I think that’s only fair.”
Silent Hill 2 Remake has sold 2.5 million worldwide, which pushes sales of the franchise overall to 10 million. Silent Hill f has sold 1 million copies. IGN’s Silent Hill 2 Remake review returned an 8/10. We said: “Silent Hill 2 is a great way to visit – or revisit – one of the most dread-inducing destinations in the history of survival horror.” Our Silent Hill f review also returned a 7/10. We said: “Silent Hill f presents a fresh new setting to explore and a fascinatingly dark story to unravel, but its melee-focussed combat takes a big swing that doesn’t quite land.”
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.
In so many ways, Ninja Gaiden 4 is exactly what I wanted it to be. It’s a collaborative effort between Team Ninja and Platinum Games, two of my all time favorite developers; it builds off the combat from Ninja Gaiden 2, which has the best action of the series in my eyes; and it comes packed with small touches that make it a bit more approachable without sacrificing the tough-as-nails difficulty that longtime fans like me expect. But while I’d even go so far as to say this combat system is among the very best I’ve ever seen, Ninja Gaiden 4 stumbles in many other areas – from its bland new lead character, to its uninspired level design, to its predictable story that falls completely flat. The action is still so good that a lot of those shortcomings get deflected like bullets against Ryu Hayabusa’s sword, but others slip through that defense and wound what is otherwise an incredible revival for the Master Ninja.
Story has never been a selling point of the Ninja Gaiden series, so it didn’t come as a surprise to me that Ninja Gaiden 4’s plot was one of its weakest elements. It introduces us to our new protagonist, Yakumo, a skilled ninja of the Raven Clan whose initial goal to kill a priestess of the Dark Dragon instead quickly turns into a mission to escort her to a handful of magic seals in an effort to really for realsies kill the Dark Dragon for good this time.
What follows is an extremely predictable 10-hour campaign with attempts at big emotional moments that fall flat because the legwork to make you care about these characters is never done. There is some banter that happens between Yakumo, his handler, and the other members of his little Raven Clan squad, but it’s never charming or endearing, and certainly never develops to a point where I ever got a real sense that these characters were actually close. Yakumo primarily communicates with grunts, growls, acknowledgements of the mission objectives, and angry threats, and as a result just comes off as a lame edgelord most of the time.
You do get to play a couple of chapters as Ryu toward the end, and while these are a welcome reprieve, they also feel like a huge missed opportunity. His levels have him retracing Yakumo’s steps, fighting through the same environments, mostly the same enemies, and the same bosses, but this time with fewer combat options since Ryu only has access to one weapon, a far less interesting Gleam Form to replace Yakumo’s Bloodraven Form, and just four returning Ninpo super attacks. Imagine Dante’s missions from Devil May Cry 4, except he doesn’t get any new weapons, his playstyle is almost exactly the same as Nero, and there’s none of the cool Dante trash talk.
Ninja Gaiden 4’s combat isn’t just good, it’s phenomenal.
I am willing to forgive an action game for a lot if the action itself is good, and fortunately Ninja Gaiden 4’s combat isn’t just good, it’s phenomenal. It’s incredibly fast, the enemies are intelligent and won’t let you do the same thing over and over again, there’s a great deal of flexibility that allows you to change up your approach to each fight, it looks slick as hell, and it has that trademark Team Ninja fluidity mixed with the over-the-top craziness that Platinum Games is renowned for. It just checks every single box.
The secret sauce here is enemy aggression. Enemies are absolutely ruthless in Ninja Gaiden 4. They don’t politely wait their turn as they attack from off screen, hit you with unblockables, grab you if you try to turtle up, armor through your regular attacks, and overwhelm you with sheer numbers. It’s a style of combat that is totally unique to this series, and that suffocating pressure from enemies is what makes every combat encounter such a thrilling fight for survival.
All of that may sound brutal, but Yakumo’s own toolset is extremely powerful as well. You have the iconic Flying Swallow technique that allows you to zip towards an enemy, potentially slicing their head off in just a single hit; the Izuna Drop air combo that ends in a flying piledriver that will instantly kill most enemies in a single blow; the plethora of powerful unlockable attacks for each weapon; and most importantly, ultimate techniques that let you absorb essence from defeated enemies to charge up a flashy combo that is completely invulnerable, can hit multiple enemies, and does extremely high damage.
None of this is new to Ninja Gaiden 4, and in fact is just a basic overview of what’s always been great about the combat in this series. But it’s important to talk about because my biggest concern coming into Ninja Gaiden 4 was that it would feel less like Ninja Gaiden and more like a Platinum Games game – not that there’s anything wrong with that, it’s just not what I’d want out of a return I’ve been waiting 13 years for. Fortunately, that’s not the case. This is a Ninja Gaiden game through and through with a light touch of Platinum flavor to enhance it even further.
This is Ninja Gaiden through and through with a light touch of Platinum flavor.
That flavor mostly comes in the form of one big addition to the combat system: Yakumo’s Bloodraven Form. By holding down the left trigger, Yakumo will transform his weapon into a slower, more extravagant version with a completely new set of moves and the ability to break an enemy’s guard or interrupt their super attacks. These attacks are sick as hell, and definitely bring to mind some of Bayonetta’s Wicked Weave heavy attacks, especially the Rapier that turns into a huge drill, or the staff that turns into a giant hammer.
But more than being cool to look at, they add a new dimension to combat that forces you to be reactive to how the enemies are dealing with your offense. If you go into autopilot and spam light attacks, enemies will block your strikes and deliver a damaging counter of their own. But if you notice that they’re flashing white and shrugging off your attacks, you can hit them with a Bloodraven Form attack to not only deal big damage, but also open them up to even more punishment after breaking their guard.
Bloodraven Form moves are tied to a meter that drains pretty quickly, adding an extra layer of resource management I enjoyed. These blood infused attacks are also generally pretty slow, which makes them a bit risky to try and interrupt a faster armored attack. So you need to decide whether to risk wasting your meter by pre-emptively using a blood attack to try and catch an armored move during its initial animation, whether to risk your health by trying to wait and react to one of their slower and more telegraphed armored moves, or or whether to use the meter defensively instead to try and perfectly block otherwise unblockable techniques. Whatever the case, having multiple different options to deal with a challenging combat encounter is crucial in a game like this, and Ninja Gaiden 4 is stacked with options to play around with.
One departure from previous games is that instead of individually upgrading your weapons and having each improvement come with new moves and increased power, this time around you must buy all of your upgrades a la carte. Universal upgrades that affect every weapon cost Ninja Coin, which is a currency gained primarily from completing side missions, optional Purgatory challenges, and as a reward for completing a chapter. Weapon specific techniques on the other hand must be purchased with Weapon EXP, which is gained simply by fighting enemies. The better you perform, the more Weapon EXP you get. I enjoyed always having something new to unlock the whole way through, even though I do think Ninja Gaiden 4 is a little stingy with your starting set of upgrades.
You’re not even able to absorb essence to instantly charge your ultimate technique, quickly charge it after landing from a jump, or even charge it up to level two by default. All of those techniques have to be purchased, along with staples like the aforementioned Flying Swallow and Izuna Drop. And that same currency is also used to purchase consumable items, leading to a brutal economy in the early going. Especially if you didn’t purchase the Deluxe Edition, which gifts players with a whopping 50,000 Ninja Coins right from the start. That’s enough to buy virtually every starting upgrade and fill up your inventory. If you only have the standard edition, the first couple of hours can be pretty rough as you slowly build up the arsenal of techniques that bring Ninja Gaiden 4’s combat to life.
The final new combat wrinkle is the addition of a Berserk Meter that fills up as you deal or take damage, as well as when you defeat delimbed enemies with Obliteration Techniques. When the Berserk Meter is full, your charged-up Bloodraven Form attacks will trigger Bloodbath Kills, which are basically cinematic one-hit kills. It’s another fun element of resource management that gave me a way to satisfyingly clear a whole screen of tough enemies in just a few seconds, if I managed to survive long enough to be able to build up the meter.
The Berserk Meter adds another fun element of resource management.
Platinum also injects a healthy dose of style and creative expression into the combat by giving Yakumo the ability to hot swap between his weapons with just the press of a button. So you can do cool things like launch an enemy with the dual swords, hit them twice in the air, switch to another weapon, hit them twice again, switch to a third weapon, max out that air combo, and then send them crashing down with an Izuna Drop. We’re not talking Devil May Cry levels of potential for combo creativity, but there’s still a lot of fancy stuff you can do between the many techniques that you’ll unlock for each weapon, and there’s even a training mode so you can practice optimizing your damage and stylish combos. Variety like this goes a long way for me in terms of making combat feel fresh and exciting throughout the entire campaign.
I did my first playthrough of Ninja Gaiden 4 on Hard, and while that was the sweet spot in terms of difficulty for me, it’s worth noting that you can change this setting at any point (except in Master Ninja mode), which is a great feature for anyone struggling with its demanding challenges. Hero mode has been added as well which allows you to enable auto-block and auto-dodge at low health, along with an auto-assist that allows you to do damaging combos with just single button presses. It’s not for me, but I appreciate its inclusion nonetheless as a way to let more people enjoy the spectacle and action of the Ninja Gaiden series.
While the action is pristine and the combat arenas themselves have some great interactable elements that give you the freedom to zip around from point to point, cutting up enemies along the way, the actual level design is pretty uninspired. There are occasional splashes of interesting architecture across the futuristic version of Tokyo that’s been twisted by the evil power of the Dark Dragon’s husk, but far more often you’ll just be wandering around very bland rooftops, identical looking corridors, and boring city streets. It doesn’t get much better once you’re out of Tokyo, either. You just trade those drab streets for foggy cliffsides, ugly sewers, and samey looking military bases.
There are a couple of fun travel sequences that break up all of the limb liberating sword slashing, like Sonic-esque rail grinding sections, bits where you have to glide on wind currents to soar over a mountain range, and some sewer surfing, but they’re repeated throughout the campaign with little to no variation or evolution. As a result, they end up feeling more like filler than anything else.
While the action is pristine, the actual level design is pretty uninspired.
There’s a new sidequest system that allows you to gain some extra currency by completing optional tasks, like finding and defeating secret minibosses, capturing hidden collectible monsters called Gourdies, or just simply defeating a certain number of enemies in a specific area. It’s a nice addition that gives extra incentive to be thorough and not just run past optional fights, even though the drab and exceptionally linear level design doesn’t make it very exciting to actually explore.
My favorite thing to find hidden in a level though are the Purgatory Gates. These are optional challenge rooms with the cool twist of letting you decide how much health you want to attempt them with. The greater the health handicap, the greater the reward. These fights are by far the most intense and most fun challenges available, and I loved pushing myself to try and get through the hardest difficulty and then being handsomely rewarded for the effort.
Bosses have never been a strong suit for the Ninja Gaiden series but, funny enough, have always been a strength of Platinum Games. The mixture of the two seems to have gone about how you would expect, as the bosses in Ninja Gaiden 4 vary wildly in quality. There are a couple of truly great scraps against tough enemies with adrenaline pumping soundtracks that brought to mind some of Metal Gear Rising’s best fights. Meanwhile, others are just underwhelming battles against giant monsters with too much health and some frustrating gimmicks – from bosses that obnoxiously teleport around a large arena whenever you get close, to giant fiends that spawn annoying fodder enemies to distract from their own extremely dangerous attacks.
After beating the campaign, you unlock the Master Ninja difficulty, the ability to replay any stage, boss, or unlocked Purgatory Gate as either Yakumo or Ryu, and most substantially, 18 combat trials that feature unique modifiers and even a few enemies that I never encountered in the main game. These combat trials might have you clearing waves of enemies without using your Bloodraven Form or cause your health to tick down continuously, forcing you to balance using your ultimate technique to clear out enemies while also making sure to occasionally pick up the life-restoring orbs that are used to quickly charge it – or a trial might just prevent you from healing all together. I haven’t beaten all of these yet, but I am having a blast going through each of them and look forward to challenging my friends to top my scores on the leaderboards.
Battlefield 6 is giving fans some of the most cinematic FPS action they’ve seen in years, but one of its hard-to-reach Recon skins has the community in stitches.
Die-hard fans of military shooters like Call of Duty and Battlefield have spent the last few years arguing about what place — if any — goofy skins have in their favorite video games. Although EA and Battlefield Studios’ latest has largely dodged the conflict with its commitment to a more grounded approach to cosmetics, it’s not managed to emerge from the wreckage completely unscathed.
Discussion about one questionable launch skin kicked off when Reddit user BOSS_Clan_Intl shared an image of what appears to be the Recon class’ Dead Sight skin. It’s one outfit for the sniper-heavy class that could likely require dozens — if not hundreds — of hours of playtime, requiring players to not only complete all three standard Recon Assignment challenges but also several Recon Specialist challenges.
Battlefield 6 players know all too well how demanding some of its many challenges can be, making Dead Sight an especially tough get for anyone looking to collect every infantry skin. The main problem here, though, is that, at least in the image shared here, Dead Sight makes you look at bit like a traffic cone.
On what appears to be one of Battlefield 6’s sunnier maps (of which there are many), the Recon skin practically glows, mixing orange and black colors that look more Black Ops than Battlefield. When nearly every other skin sticks to muted tones and traditional military camouflage, Dead Sight sticks out like a sore thumb. Making matters worse is the fact the skin is designed for Recon players, ditching something more practical, like a ghillie suit, for an outfit that an enemy may be able to point out as easily as a far-off flare.
Looking at Dead Sight in the Battlefield 6 in-game gallery of class skins reveals that the suit is really more of a brown color instead of orange. The exact environment the above image was captured in remains unclear, but on a bright map with these settings, the contrast with the rest of the costumes is hard to ignore.
Of course, one bright Battlefield skin is a far cry from the superhero, celebrity, and sci-fi skins that have divided Call of Duty fans, but that doesn’t mean Battlefield players aren’t taking the opportunity to poke fun at the Dead Sight skin.
“If you’ve mastered the class you’re too good for camo,” one Reddit user joked. “It’s not for sneaking, it’s an open challenge to the lobby,” one person added. “Gotta say, for a mastery skin for the ‘stealth’ class, this is absurd lmao,” another joked.
Under the right circumstances, Dead Sight may be the most colorful skin — but that doesn’t mean it’s the only one that pops. Before Battlefield 6 launched for PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X and S on October 10, players caught wind of the Assault class’ System Override skin, which features bright green patterns and is only available via a special promotion with gaming tech company Razer. There’s also the Get Loud skin, which swaps out green marks for orange ones on the legs and face mask.
Dead Sight’s time in the sun has spawned laughs among the Battlefield 6 community, but not everyone thinks the outfit is something to joke about. Some have commented on the original post, saying the skin looks “horrible,” while others swear off using it even after it’s unlocked. Then, there are those who fear EA and BF Studios will only introduce more goofy skins as post-launch development progresses.
Meanwhile, the developers suggest they have no plans to change course any time soon. During an interview with IGN in September, Ripple Effect technical director Christian Buhl and senior console combat designer Matthew Nickerson touched on fears that goofy skins could infiltrate Battlefield 6. At the time, they confirmed the team is “really happy with where we are.”
“We want to be a gritty, realistic shooter,” Buhl said. “Other games can and should be whatever they want to be, right? [laughs] Like we’re not, I don’t know… Fortnite is pretty goofy, and that game is pretty good. So, I think where we end up is we’re pretty happy with where we are. We are a gritty, grounded, realistic shooter. That’s what we intend to be, and that’s what the game is going to look like for a while.”
Michael Cripe is a freelance writer with IGN. He’s best known for his work at sites like The Pitch, The Escapist, and OnlySP. Be sure to give him a follow on Bluesky (@mikecripe.bsky.social) and Twitter (@MikeCripe).
The Nintendo Switch-era has been a frustrating one for Pokemon fans. The evolutionary line from Sword and Shield, to Pokemon Legends: Arceus, to Scarlet and Violet was one of slow but steady progress as Game Freak refined its ideas for how capturing, exploring, and battling should look in a fully 3D world. But this era has also played host to a major downhill slide in terms of overall polish, appearance, and performance across those three games. Pokemon Legends: Z-A, I’m happy to report, puts an end to that slide on basically all counts. It continues to successfully experiment with Pokemon’s gameplay by translating its carefully cultivated turn-based battle system into an action-based one. And it does so while scaling back its ambitions for a massive world to a more manageable size, resulting in a tighter, more polished, and far more fun Pokemon than we’ve seen in several years.
Pokemon Legends: Z-A takes place entirely within the bounds of Lumiose City, a Paris-inspired metropolis that I fondly remember from Pokemon X and Y, the events of which took place five years prior to this new story. A sudden rash of Wild Pokemon invading its city limits has resulted in conflicts between them and the people that live there, and necessitates “Wild Zones” within the city to keep them separate. It’s into this tense environment that you show up via train: a young adult (For real! Not a ten-year-old child! Your peers talk about getting jobs and paying rent! Holy Sharpedo!) with seemingly no agenda or reason to be in Lumiose beyond casual tourism. You’re immediately adopted by a group that refers to itself as Team MZ, which is dedicated to protecting the city by day, and becoming strong enough to do so effectively by climbing the ranks of a local competition every night: the Z-A Royale.
Never before has a Pokemon game’s setting been so integral to its story and themes. The way its characters and story focused so tightly on Lumiose as a place and a community reminded me in many ways of the Yakuza/Like a Dragon series. By not asking you to cross vast distances on a fairly abstract badge-collecting journey all by yourself, Z-A is able to tell the stories of more characters in more detail. You have a crew of pals who hang out at a hotel with you, and who constantly show up in the city to help you out in battle or with whatever else you need. Unlike rivals in past games, they’re given more space to develop as characters and actually have a relationship with you beyond throwaway lines about type alignments.
Z-A is also stuffed with side quests that give you ample opportunity to get to know the inhabitants of Lumiose. Delightfully, most of them aren’t Pokemon trainers. You’ll help a Furfrou groomer teach her Scyther styling techniques, and a perfume maker sample Pokemon odors for her wares. A cafe worker needs you to lure Trubbish away from her cafe, and an electrical worker needs you to chase off Pokemon messing with his elevator (er, “Holovator”). To keep the comparisons to Yakuza going, the vast majority of these side quests are, frankly, pretty silly. They often feature creative or weird scenarios that are resolved by your character, like Kiryu, inexplicably being far and away the toughest person in the room. There are over 100 of these side quests, and they involve all sorts of tasks, such as battles, catching certain Pokemon, teaching Pokemon specific moves, trading, evolving, acquiring certain items, doing parkour, and a lot more. It took me 35 hours to roll credits while mostly staying on top of side quests as they gradually popped up during the campaign, but I still haven’t managed to finish every single one in the post-game.
Never has a Pokemon game’s setting been so integral to its story and themes.
Also like the Yakuza games (this is the last comparison, I swear), Z-A’s plot is civic-minded. Rather than just being about becoming stronger or filling up a monster encyclopedia, your goal is centered around training to protect the city you now call home. As you grow, you encounter a cast of characters with different ideas about what Lumiose City needs to thrive, some of whom clash with one another. Z-A wrestles with some actual, real-world ideas as it questions what it means when multiple groups of people (or, I guess, creatures) inhabit the same space but have very different needs, and who should be prioritized when those needs conflict. Z-A doesn’t come away with easy answers, but it does provide some pretty interesting metaphors for real-world issues both civic and environmental, and above all else, emphasizes compassion for others in trying to solve them.
(Also there’s a literal benevolent Japanese mafia faction in this game. Okay, now I’m done for real, I promise.)
One sour note in all this is the lack of voice acting. I’ll be honest, I’ve played Pokemon games so often and for so long without it that Z-A not having voice acting didn’t really bother me during all the time I spent running around, doing sidequests, and reading main quest text boxes. Where it did become a problem, however, was during the major story cutscenes, where characters dramatically move their mouths and flail their arms around while absolutely no sound comes out. This wacky pantomime was jarring and immersion-breaking. I don’t know what Game Freak was thinking here. It’s long past time Pokemon caught up to every other story-heavy game and hired some dang voice actors, at least for major cutscenes.
Speaking of Game Freak needing to play catch-up, take a deep breath with me, because we gotta talk about performance.
It’s… fine? It’s fine. It’s actually fine.
On the Nintendo Switch 2, Z-A runs at a smooth and consistent 60 FPS. NPCs and objects do still pop in rather suddenly and a bit too close for comfort, but it’s substantially better than the wonky phasing in and out at spitting distance we saw in Scarlet and Violet. I didn’t see any character animations move at agonizingly slow framerates. I didn’t personally run into any game breaking bugs. None of my Pokemon got stuck in the floor or the wall. The loading screens are almost too fast to read the tips shown on them. Taken all together, I was able to play through the entire game barely thinking about performance, which is so much more than I could say for Z-A’s two predecessors.
That doesn’t mean Z-A looks great, though. One major, oft-pointed-out problem with Z-A is that it takes place entirely in a plain, unattractive city. Most of the time, you will be looking at the same five or six building exteriors, all of which are flat, ugly images with no detail or depth: just some windows and balconies painted onto a wall, Looney Tunes-style. There’s some variety in town, like a Wild Zone that gets covered in snow, a graveyard, and a sandy area, but for the most part, Lumiose is made up of a lot of the same parks, the same cafes, and the same paving stones again and again and again. You can’t go inside most buildings.
But not all of Z-A is aesthetically disagreeable. The building interiors you do get to see are detailed, colorful, cozy-looking, and not repetitive. Character models are more expressive than before, too, and there’s a wider visual variety in NPC designs than ever before thanks to small, long overdue touches like distinct facial features and differently colored outfits within trainer classes. Your own character’s face customization capabilities continue to improve from past games as well. Outfit customization is pretty good, with lots of options to choose from, no gender-locked clothing, and the ability to mix and match colors of jackets, shirts, belts, and other items in certain cases for a wider variety of looks.
Lumiose is visually uninteresting, but that doesn’t mean it’s uninteresting to explore.
While I’ve dinged Lumiose for being visually uninteresting, that’s not synonymous with it being uninteresting to explore. Z-A mostly solves one of the biggest issues I had with both Arceus and Scarlet/Violet: they were both big, empty worlds devoid of real reasons to explore beyond the surface. Those two predecessors tried to capture the vast scale of the Pokemon world, but the actual open areas lacked real detail. Much of their maps consisted of enormous fields full of the same Pokemon and meaningless items sort of scattered randomly around. Their caves were empty tunnels, their mountaintops often barren, and their landmarks rarely offered an interesting reward for visiting. Why even have a giant world if you’re going to make it so boring? Z-A isn’t like that.
By shrinking the world down to a manageable size, Game Freak was able to find the time, or ideas, or whatever it was that was lacking before to fill it with thoughtfully placed rewards. Sometimes those are items such as TMs or collectible Colorful Screws that wait at the end of Z-A’s rather amusingly cumbersome platforming segments. But more often those rewards are rare Pokemon. You see, while most Pokemon are confined to Wild Zones, some monsters do still lurk in the city streets, and they’re genuinely exciting to find. At first, you’ll only see common Pokemon: Pidgeys and Fletchlings pecking around in parks, Kakuna dangling out of trees, maybe a Trubbish munching on some garbage. But explore enough, and you’ll start to find alleyways, courtyards, and rooftops hiding rarer monsters: an Ariados dropping suddenly from a sewer ceiling, Gastly leaping out from a dark corner at night, a single Eevee trotting down a narrow backroad. I squealed once when I saw a single, rare Dratini on a rooftop I’d worked painstakingly hard to reach. It’s moments like these that really flesh out Lumiose and make it such a delight to explore.
In fact, there’s so much to see that I’ve somehow gotten this far into my review without digging into Z-A’s most revelatory change yet: the battle system. Pokemon is an action game now! They threw the last of the turn-based elements out the window! It’s great!
It’s genuinely impressive how well Game Freak managed to translate a familiar system of monsters, moves, status effects, items, and types into a completely different genre. Instead of taking turns, you move your character around the battlefield while the monsters are fighting. Your Pokemon will follow you by default, giving you an indirect and interesting way to control their positioning somewhat and even dodge your opponent’s moves. If you hold down ZL, your Pokemon will instead square up with its opponent and you can select and use moves. If you’re in a battle against a wild Pokemon, you’ll need to do all this while also moving your character out of danger, as they can damage and even knock you out, adding an interesting new layer of strategy to how you position yourself, and thus your monster, for optimal offense and defense.
It’s impressive how well Game Freak managed to translate combat into a completely different genre.
I was concerned, based on early trailers, that all this would amount to just smashing the same offensive moves into opponents with little actual strategy, but that’s far from the case. The indirect movement system, while a little clunky to get used to, introduces an interesting strategic layer of positioning as you play with the flow of dodging and attacking. The moves themselves are delightfully complex in both their variety and the ways Game Freak has changed them to fit the action genre while keeping their spirit alive. Short-range moves, for instance, can be used very quickly, but put you in danger of being hit. Long-range moves take a bit of time to wind up, but you stay at a distance while you do them. Moves like Protect and Detect have been reconfigured to be used almost like a parry. Fire Spin and Sand Trap form areas-of-effect on the ground you can try and lure enemies to stand in, while Spikes throws a bunch of hazards all over the place.
Status effects have been overhauled, too: paralysis slows you down significantly, while confusion sometimes causes your Pokemon to wander off in weird directions. Mega Evolutions also got a revamp that adds even more complex layers including a meter to fill, the ability to Mega Evolve multiple different Pokemon in the same battle, and Plus Moves, which are essentially moves with the power of a Mega Evolved Pokemon but usable by any monster on your team under the right conditions.
One of the best parts of this system is how it still rewards past Pokemon knowledge even in this entirely new framing, with everything working roughly how you’d guess it might. While I hope Pokemon doesn’t fully abandon turn-based battles, I would love it if the Legends spin-off series adopts this action system going forward and continues to refine it – Arceus introduced a revolutionary new system for catching Pokemon, so it feels like a fitting that Z-A has revolutionized the other key half of the series. Besides, I cannot wait to watch the competitive community get its hooks into this and see what meta develops.
Until then, we have the campaign’s own challenges to overcome. Even casual players are likely to breeze through some of it – the Z-A Royale, for instance, has you collecting points by defeating trainers until you get enough to instigate a Promotion Match and move up a rank. These battles are a joke. The Battle Zones you fight through to collect points try to shake things up by allowing you to sneak up on enemy trainers for an advantage attack, or be snuck up on yourself. But it’s trivially easy to sneak up on opponents and knock out their first monster in a single blow, then thrash their second immediately after.
To an extent, that may be intended, as you can increase monetary rewards from Battle Zones by beating as many trainers as possible before daybreak, so you’re encouraged to just Rapidash your way through battles. But the Z-A Royale’s relative ease nonetheless mutes the accomplishment of ranking up, particularly in light of the fact that the story actually forces you to jump a whopping 17 ranks at once at one point. Would the story have been an agonizing 100 hours long instead of a normal 30 hours if Z-A had not done this? Yes. Does it still feel real silly when it happens and make the Royale into a bit of a joke? Also yes.
But it’s not all a walk in the PokePark. You’ll still find challenge in other places, such as Wild Areas, where a powerful Alpha Pokemon can summon a gang of smaller guys to overwhelm you if you’re not careful. Most difficult, and most fun, are the story battles against Rogue Mega Evolved Pokemon. These monsters are big and mean, deliberately going directly after your trainer a lot of the time and forcing you to carefully balance dodging attacks yourself and positioning your Pokemon well to slowly whittle down a big health bar. Some of the Rogue Mega Evolutions have devastating second phase attacks, such as turning the entire arena into a bullet hell, making copies of themselves, or spontaneously popping up behind you for a painful swipe attack. Game Freak really goes out of its way to ensure all its new Mega Evolutions get their moment to shine through these encounters. Just wait until you see Mega Starmie!
An impressive new mod for The Simpsons Hit & Run has rebuilt the game to instead feature Futurama, catching the attention of the cult classic’s original lead designer.
Futurama Hit & Run, as the mod is called, is available now in demo form as a free download — you’ll just need a copy of the original Simpsons game on PC in order to play.
The Simpsons Hit & Run originally launched for PC, PlayStation 2, GameCube and Xbox back in 2003, and was heavily inspired by the Grand Theft Auto games of the era. Gameplay for this Futurama mod also feels familiar, as you run around as Fry and complete missions for characters such as Bender, Professor Farnsworth and Dr. Zoidberg.
ANNONCE 📣 🎮 : La démo de Futurama Hit & Run, sera disponible le 19 octobre ! Une idée juste parfaite ! 🚀 pic.twitter.com/cy8WBhoLYL
There’s driving too, of course — with Fry able to zoom around a section of New New York in a hover car. One particular mission has Fry escorting Bender back to the Planet Express headquarters while avoiding police in hover cop cars. But there’s no sign yet of actual flying — perhaps in future.
Currently, the demo includes four story missions, plus a set of street races, vehicles, costumes and other Easter eggs to find and unlock. The demo also comes with an acknowledgement that it currently uses AI-generated dialogue as a “temporary placeholder.” The mod team states: “Professional voice artists are already engaged, and their recordings will replace the placeholder content in a future update.”
Response to the demo has been positive, not least from Joe McGinn, who worked on the original The Simpsons: Hit & Run over two decades ago. “As the lead designer of the original game, I can only say… this looks awesome!” McGinn wrote in a comment on the mod’s trailer. “I want to play it.”
