Helldivers 2 is gearing up for some news, and developer Arrowhead Game Studios seems confident it will impress. Or, as Arrowhead’s CEO is framing it, you might want to prepare yourself.
As spotted by VideoGamer, Arrowhead CEO Shams Jorjani was discussing Helldivers 2 in the game’s Discord when a user asked him if he could “offer up anything, however small, of what’s coming down the pipe.” His response?
“You’ll shit your pants.”
While not specific about what’s in store, it does at least give us an idea of the impact of what’s in store. And the possible consequences to our britches, too.
Jorjani took a few other questions, with some notable mentions of wanting to add more bladed weapons and some thoughtful responses to worries about content droughts. There’s some open transparency about the technical debt of something like Helldivers 2, and how the team handles it over time, that’s really cool to see alongside funny quotes about distressing your jeans.
There’s already been some tease about what’s to come, involving a flag with both a pointy end and a grippy section. Currently, Arrowhead said it is aiming for May 8 to announce its next Warbond, and there will be “more exciting news to come not long after.”
In a recent interview with IGN, Arrowhead’s production director Alex Bolle said the studio wants to be around for “years and years and years to come,” and that it’s continuing to work on developing Helldivers 2 while staying true to what the team wants to do.
“The more we figure out how to thrive in a live environment, and we still have a way to go to figure out a lot of things around that, the more we can let creativity loose on new systems that we would’ve never thought about a year ago when we released,” Bolle told IGN. “I’ve worked on live games before and it’s where you feel like you have something you can figure out: what if I would do this cool thing I’ve seen in other games and adapt it to our sauce, that still makes it true to ourselves? I’m looking forward to this moment.”
We’ll start to find out what cool things Arrowhead has in store for Helldivers 2 next week. You might want to bring some extra pants.
Amazon UK is back with one of the only means that general Pokémon TCG fans can get packs from the Scarlet & Violet Prismatic Evolutions and 151 sets: an invite system.
After doing this ourselves, we got an email notification for both right away stating that the invitation requests were received. If you end up being picked within the next 12 months to purchase either collection, you will then be emailed a link that’s valid for 72 hours, of which you can use to buy your new cards and accessories.
Within those 12 months, you won’t need to request an invite again whenever Amazon UK makes any restocks, as yours will still be connected to each collection’s product page. Essentially, it’s a lottery where a decent amount of luck is required in order to grab one for yourself.
In return, however, you’ll have the chance to buy a collection that’s actually at a fair price compared to the higher prices for Prismatic Evolutions and 151 collectors have been having to deal with over the recent months, in light of their low supply vs demand.
The Prismatic Evolutions Accessory Pouch Special Collection includes both five booster packs and an Eevee accessory pouch for just £29.99. With Amazon’s current price of £16.49 for just one Prismastic Evolutions booster — on open, no-invite-required listings — you would need to pay £82.45 for five packs individually.
The same goes for the 151 Blooming Waters Collection. Charging you £79.99, you’ll get 12 booster packs, individual foil cards; Squirtle, Bulbasaur, Blastoise ex, and Venusaur ex; and an oversized Blastoise ex card for display as well.
Even when only taking the packs into account, individual boosters for 151 cost a massive £19.49 at Amazon UK — meaning you would have to put up £233.88 just to buy 12 without getting an invite.
Pokemon TCG’s major supply issues around sets like 151 and Prismatic Evolutions don’t seem like they’ll be letting up anytime soon. With that, keeping an eye out for invitation listings like these is one of the best ways to get new cards from them without needing to refresh retailer pages 24 hours a day, or applying for a bank loan.
With other new sets like Destined Rivals or Journey Together selling out almost instantly to scalpers as soon as they’re in stock, we wouldn’t be surprised if other retailers didn’t start applying an invite system as well, to give everyone a fair chance.
Ben Williams – IGN freelance contributor with over 10 years of experience covering gaming, tech, film, TV, and anime. Follow him on Twitter/X @BenLevelTen.
Bethesda games are known for their sometimes lengthy loading screens. At a time when developers are aiming for as little loading as possible, it remains a big part of the Bethesda game experience. Just look at Starfield, Bethesda’s first brand new IP in years, and of course the recently released The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered, which is going down very well with fans.
With the advent of SSDs and improvements in technology, spending a lot of time waiting for a loading screen to do its business in a video game can feel archaic in 2025. But one former Bethesda developer has cautioned that they will probably always be a part of Bethesda games because of the way Bethesda games are designed.
As fans of the studio’s work will know, Bethesda games are open-world RPGs that involve opening lots and lots of doors. Want to go into that house over there? You’ll probably need to trigger a loading screen to open the door. Fast travel is always a loading screen, although it can be made faster with more powerful hardware. Sometimes just leaving one area and going to another area in a Bethesda game triggers loading.
Bruce Nesmith, who worked at Bethesda on everything from Oblivion to Starfield, told VideoGamer that segmentation is an important part of Bethesda game design, and so using zone loading is too.
A totally seamless open-world isn’t feasible for the type of RPGs Bethesda makes, Nesmith continued, because segmented areas backed by loading lets the games keep track of item placement and physics states after the player leaves an area, which helps create the sense of leaving a permanent mark on the virtual world.
“Everybody who complains about them assumes that it’s done because we’re lazy or we don’t want to follow the modern thinking on stuff,” Nesmith said. “The reality is the Bethesda games are so detailed and so graphics intensive… you just can’t have both present at the same time.”
“I can’t have the interiors of all these places loaded at the same time as the exteriors,” Nesmith continued. “That’s just not an option. And all the fancy tricks for streaming and loading and all that, you end up with hitching. So you’re actually better off stopping the game briefly, doing a loading screen and then continuing on.
“If you make a game that has less going on, it’s a tighter experience and not a [true] open-world experience. So it’s just one of those necessary evils, as it were, it’s not that anybody at Bethesda ever wanted to do it. We just didn’t have a choice, really, if the game was going to have the experience we wanted it to have.”
Nesmith said the use of loading screens in Bethesda’s RPGs have been “a necessary bane of the existence of Bethesda since time immemorial.”
Despite this, when Starfield launched in 2023, fans were surprised by just how often you’d trigger loading, from on-foot traversal to simply heading into city buildings. Players said Starfield’s loading broke immersion and added frustrating pauses to gameplay, and modders worked to remove as much of it as possible in the years since.
The city of Neon was a focus of the loading complaints. This cyberpunk-style urban area would often trigger a loading screen just for opening doors, some near to each other, which made questing annoying.
“It could have existed without those [loading zones],” Purkeypile said. “Like, some of those were not there when I had been working on it and so it was a surprise to me that there was as many as there were.”
So, why did Starfield launch with so many loading screens? Purkeypile said part of the segmentation of the game has to do with the way the Creation Engine, which Bethesda uses to make its games, works, and that has a lot to do with performance.
“A lot of it is gating stuff off for performance in Neon,” Purkeypile confirmed.
“I think it’ll come as no surprise, given our previous games, what we go for,” Howard said at the time. “Always these huge, open worlds, fully dynamic, hyper detail where anything can happen. And we do want to do that. It’s 4K in the X. It’s 1440 on the S. We do lock it at 30, because we want that fidelity, we want all that stuff. We don’t want to sacrifice any of it.
“Fortunately in this one, we’ve got it running great. It’s often running way above that. Sometimes it’s 60. But on the consoles, we do lock it because we prefer the consistency, where you’re not even thinking about it.
“And we don’t ever want to sacrifice that experience that makes our games feel really, really special. So it feels great. We’re really happy with how it feels even in the heat of battle. And we need that headroom because in our games, really anything can happen.”
The question will be whether Bethesda can make meaningful improvements to loading screens for The Elder Scrolls VI, which fans hope will mark a significant level up for the studio’s technology.
Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.
It’s rare that a developer becomes synonymous with a single genre, but Bethesda has its signature style so locked down it’s a wonder we don’t just call the entire field of first-person open-world Western RPGs “Skyrimlikes” or “Oblivionvanias.” In the three decades since The Elder Scrolls: Arena debuted, Bethesda Game Studios has emerged as a juggernaut in the triple-A space, earning a rabid fanbase, massive sales, and a $7.5 billion acquisition from Microsoft, solely on the strength of its tried and true design principles.
Bethesda’s been responsible for some big hits and even bigger misses over the years, and since the shocking (but not really) release of The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion Remaster has us all rethinking our long-calcified tier-lists, we thought it was time to take a fresh look at ranking the studio’s output. It’s gonna be a long, long time before The Elder Scrolls VI is anything more than a dramatically and perhaps prematurely revealed logo, and while that’s a bummer for everyone dying to play it, at least it means this list won’t be obsolete anytime soon.
Before we start, we should clarify that we’re strictly talking about Bethesda’s trademark RPGs on this list. The extremely mid Elder Scrolls spinoffs, like the co-op focused Battlespire and swashbuckling action-adventure Redguard, need not apply here. Nor do mobile games like The Elder Scrolls Blades and Fallout Shelter, although I’ve definitely got a soft spot for the latter game’s dark humor and infinite armies of cartoon dwellers captured in the charming Vault Boy style.
No, this list is for the heavy hitters, the sprawling, prestige sandboxes that immediately come to mind when one thinks of a capital B, capital G “Bethesda Game,” though admittedly we’re starting out on a rather humble foot with…
9: Elder Scrolls: Arena
The first entry in the franchise isn’t last because it’s a bad game, it’s last because nobody knew what they were doing. The Bethesda of 1994 had basically only made sports and Terminator games, and Arena was kind of a mix of both. Originally, you traveled the world competing in medieval gladiator battles, doing the odd sidequest on the side. The developers quickly realised it would be a cool idea if your fighters could walk around the cities, talk to the people who live there, and dive into incredibly difficult dungeons on their behalf.
The result is an impressive little first-person RPG that’s very much of its era, a “where-the-hell-do-I-go-em-up” in the vein of Ultima Underworld and Might and Magic. Arena has loads of arcane systems and randomized loot, meandering, maddening, sidequests, and extremely clunky movement that will make you forget everything you’ve ever learned about using a mouse.
And given how bad the combat is, the kind of stats-based melee that sees you visually landing hit after hit on rampaging skeletons only to deal no damage thanks to a dice roll, maybe it’s a good thing the developers dropped the whole “gladiator” concept for Arena. Less fortunately, they didn’t drop it fast enough to change the title, since all the marketing materials were already printed up. The best they could do was tack on a “chapter one” and make it seem like the game was part of a larger saga about all-knowing Elder Scrolls.
Declaring your debut the start of a new franchise is a gutsy move that more often than not ends in failure, but the extremely flawed Arena was still successful enough to set Bethesda on a path that would fulfill its prediction, and boldly go beyond.
8: Starfield
With every new BGS game comes rumors and discourse on whether this will be the one that finally ditches their aging “Gamebryo” engine, or at least updates the notoriously inefficient cell-based framework beyond its well-known limits. Starfield did not. “Creation Engine 2.0” might have a fancy new name and a pretty new animation pipeline, but at the end of the day you’re still staring at a loading screen every time you step into a store.
The NASApunk sci-fi setting was a welcome departure from the low-tech locales of Tamriel and the Wasteland, even though it’s starting to wear out its welcome, but it’s ill-suited for Bethesda’s style. They’re great at creating one big connected world, full of discoveries, nooks and crannies, and intricately staged skeletons with nearby flavor notes. Instead, Starfield boasts 1,000 procedurally generated planets with what feels like a dozen different points of interest repeated between them.
Now, we’ve solved more than a few dragon claw puzzles in our day, but somehow that never felt as aggravating as landing on a new planet and stumbling across another abandoned cryo lab or mine. Dear god, the mines. If you’re bored in a samey Draugr dungeon, you can just walk to something cool around the corner. But in Starfield you’re just kinda stuck dejectedly wiping out the pirates, hoofing it back to your spaceship, and blasting off with a sigh.
It might seem harsh to place Starfield so close to something as primitive as Arena, but it’s easier to forgive the shortcomings of a gallant first effort from an inexperienced team than those of a $200 million triple-A behemoth that promised the moon and failed to deliver.
7: Elder Scrolls: Daggerfall
One reason the procedural generation in Starfield is such a bummer is that Bethesda has so much experience with it going way, way back. In fact, its second RPG ever is one of the most impressive feats of algorithmic open world creation that ever existed, and it came out in 1997.
The map in Skyrim translates to about 15 square miles, and that’s actually on the smaller side compared to games that came out in its wake. Breath of the Wild and Grand Theft Auto 5’s are both around 30 square miles, give or take. The Elder Scrolls: Daggerfall is 80,000 square miles, roughly the size of Great Britain. It’ll take you 69 hours to walk across the entire thing, though it’ll go slightly quicker if you’re okay with staring at the back of this horse’s head for days on end as your precious time on Earth slowly whittles away.
The world is vast, sparse, and kind of ugly, but it’s definitely not empty. The Iliac Bay area contains nine distinct climates, 44 different political regions, and 15,000 points of interest scattered throughout. We’re talking 4,000 dungeons and 5,000 cities or towns populated with hundreds of quests and non-player-characters. Needless to say, there’s a touch of wonky proc-gen involved.
But what good is a huge world if it’s a slog to move around in? The dungeon-crawling combat is only slightly improved, though the debut of the series’ trademark “improve your stats as you use their skills” progression system is definitely appreciated. In Daggerfall, it’s the experience above ground that made the biggest leap in quality. You can buy houses and boats, join guilds, steal and murder to your heart’s content and deal with the consequences. While it’s all relatively simple and extremely opaque, the opportunities for immersion within Daggerfall almost make you wish you could explore it with a friend or two. Almost.
6: Fallout 76
You might be confused as to why Fallout 76 is on this list at all, given that it’s more of a live service, multiplayer looter-shooter than an epic, story-driven RPG experience, and if you haven’t played it for a while that’s totally fair. The game was a straight-up disaster at launch, omitting hand-crafted dialogue and non-player characters in the hopes that griefing online randos would be able to provide the flavor that makes Fallout’s wastelands so worthwhile. This was a mistake, to put it mildly, and just one of many. From aggravating loot limits and endless crafting to questionable pricing practices, Fallout 76 was a dud when it debuted in 2018, thanks in no small part to a grueling development cycle that plagued the project from the start.
Things have changed, however. The Wastelanders update added voiced NPCs to the experience, so many in fact that technically it has the most characters of any game in the whole series. Whether they have anything worthwhile to say is still up for debate but they’re there, along with tweaks to the loot system and overall experience that make it less of a slog and more of a passable RPG to play with friends. The game has developed a healthy following, especially in the wake of Amazon’s hit Fallout TV series, but even so, it’s hard to rank Fallout 76 very high given the existence of the superior Elder Scrolls Online, Bethesda’s long-running MMO that only failed to make the cut here because it was developed out of house by Zenimax Online Studios.
Fallout 76’s pivot towards live-service, revenue-generating, trend-chasing slop gave fans grave doubts about Bethesda’s stewardship of the Fallout franchise, but they didn’t exist in a vacuum. Discontent had been brewing for a long time, even as sales skyrocketed.
5: Fallout 4
At 25 million copies sold, Fallout 4 is the most successful game in the series by a wide, wide margin, beyond the wildest dreams of Tim Cain and the rest of the Interplay/Black Isle crew that created the original isometric RPGs in the ’90s, though that success comes with a cost. Streamlined gameplay and welcome quality-of-life features can turn a niche cult classic into a mainstream blockbuster, but balancing that accessibility without sacrificing depth and complexity is no easy task. Fallout 4 fails in that regard.
First, the good: Fallout 4 feels great. The movement and shooting feels crisp and responsive compared to its clunky predecessors, and the Commonwealth is more than a worthy environment to explore. A new system that allows you to design and build your own settlements is an impressive addition to Bethesda’s aging tech, though it’s a coin flip as to whether you’ll find it fun or a complete waste of time. The game looks and sounds spectacular, and was arguably the most polished launch product Bethesda produced since… ever. Some of its expansions, particularly Far Harbor, seemed to capture that old Fallout feeling, and there’s at least one all-time classic character to emerge out of the crowd of Bostonian blandness and micromanaging Minutemen in the form of android private eye Nick Valentine.
The storyline, revolving around high-tech synthetic humans teleporting from a crisp and clean underground lab, is at odds with the grungy atompunk flavor of the Fallout universe, and the bizarre twist involving the identity of your character’s missing son was both blindingly obvious and incredibly dumb. The whole experience feels like a Fallout-flavored theme park ride, plopping you in power armor to face off with a deathclaw within the first hour of gameplay. From there, the game parades you through a series of shallow choices and uninteresting factions until you pick who you’re going to side with and watch the uninspired endings play out.
The biggest detriment to the game has to be the dialogue system. The first Fallout, famously, allows for all sorts of freedom in how the Vault Dweller interacts with the world around them, from monosyllabic grunts to talking the super mutant Master into unaliving himself in the final boss battle. Fallout 4, on the other hand, made the dubious decision to voice all of our protagonist’s interaction, severely limiting their options. Even worse, the four choices offered in response to any situation usually boil down to nice, rude, neutral, and “tell me more.” It’s a disappointing devolution of the RPG formula, but not entirely unsurprising given Bethesda’s first Fallout game.
4: Fallout 3
When Bethesda announced it had purchased the rights to the dormant Fallout franchise in 2004, fans went nuclear. For some, Fallout seemed like a perfect fit for the devs that wrote the book on systemic open world sandboxes, but there was a sizeable contingent of gatekeeping grognards who were a little more wary, warning that the Bethesda crew would tone done the anarchic spirit of the first two games for a more bland experience in hopes of capturing a more casual audience. The end result was a little bit of both.
The revival starts out extremely strong, with an opening sequence that begins with your character exiting the womb and then gives a quick crash course in all that life inside Vault 101 has to offer, from bullies to birthday parties. The intro also serves as a tutorial for the V.A.T.S. system, maybe Bethesda’s most brilliant addition to the franchise. The isometric, turn-based Fallout games allowed your character to target individual body parts in combat, allowing for agonizing and often hilarious precision shots. In the leap to first person, BSG compensates for their somewhat muddy controls by letting us freeze time and select precisely where we’d like our strikes to land in one of the most elegant translations of a game mechanic from 2D to 3D ever.
Not everything in Fallout 3 is as successful as V.A.T.S., however. The Capital Wasteland is a fantastic map filled with recognizably ruined national landmarks, but it’s also stuffed with repetitive encounters in subways and sewers awash in a hideous green filter that was all the rage in the early aughts. There are meaningful choices with megaton consequences that ultimately railroad you into an utterly ludicrous ending scenario that requires you to sacrifice your life to radiation while your radiation-immune supermutant friend watches from a safe distance A conclusion that was so derided, Bethesda would eventually patch it by way of the Broken Steel DLC.
It’s the very best and very worst of Bethesda’s instincts laid bare, and the awkward friction integrating BGS’s environmental storytelling with Fallout’s anarchic RPG flavor makes vanilla Fallout 3 a rather unpleasant experience today. An excellent alternative is theTale of Two Wastelands mod that fuses Fallout 3 together with Obsidian Entertainment’s fan-favorite Fallout: New Vegas to create a single massive game. Or if that’s too much of a hassle, you could just wait for the all-but-confirmed remake that’s coming in the wake of Oblivion Remastered. Speaking of which…
3: The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion
This was a tough call. Many of Oblivion’s adoring fans might find it blasphemous to be placed before Skyrim, while haters might contest that some of the Fallouts are superior. The truth, as always, is subjective, except for on ranking lists like this, which are infallible, definitive, scientifically determined and legally binding so let’s see how it stacks up.
Oblivion is the foundation of modern Bethesda games. Morrowind, obviously, came before, but it’s notable that Fallout, Starfield, and every Bethesda game (and Bethesda wannabe) since 2006 have used Oblivion as the template rather than its predecessor. The awkward pause and zoom in to start a conversation, the OP dominance of stealth archery, the ramping-up power fantasy designed to make a lowly prisoner feel like the most important being in all of Tamriel… It’s all here in pretty much its final form, though with lots of room for improvement.
The main plot sees you fending off a demonic Daedric invasion alongside a Sean Bean-voiced bastard in a cinematic saga that borrows bigtime vibes from Peter Jackson’s wildly popular Lord of the Rings trilogy. But it’s the sidequests, particularly those involving the guilds, that really elevate Oblivion. They’re all really solid in Skyrim, too, but Oblivion’s individual missions have a lot more going for them.
Instead of Skyrim’s fairly rote assassinations on behalf of the Dark Mother, your devotion to the Dark Brotherhood in Oblivion is tested by specific kill conditions that make you feel like an Argonian Agent 47. Meanwhile, while Skyrim’s introduction to the Thieves Guild effectively amounts to getting approached by a recruiter, in Oblivion, it only exists as shadows and rumors, the only clues to their existence are scattered posters and urban legends. You have to work to seek them out.
So why did we rank Oblivion below Skyrim? Maybe it’s the eye-searing ugly bloom of the XBox 360 era, or the dorky potato-faced characters stumbling through their lines. It could be the ill-conceived progression system that forces you to grind minor skills for fear of losing precious stat points when you level up, or the repetitive trudging through endless Oblivion gates. Of course, all of that can change with a remake.
The Oblivion Remaster goes a long way towards modernizing the game, with a slick UI, gorgeous new graphics, a more forgiving level-up system, and a deeply appreciated sprint button. Gone is the blinding haze of the seventh console generation, replaced with a solid Unreal Engine sheen. Unlike a lot of remasters, Oblivion maintains its awkward charms, for better or for worse.
The enemy scaling is sadly still intact, meaning you’ll find yourself running into gangs of filthy bandits bearing glass and Daedric gear. Most of the frustrating minigames have been retained, and the combat still feels strange by modern standards. But would Oblivion really be Oblivion without the jank? Without expensive horse armor and actors flubbing their lines?
The Oblivion Remaster is still the same game. It might be a little too early to tell if the remaster will be worthy of a higher spot than Skyrim, but there’s a fundamental difference between the two games that’s more than just skin deep.
2: The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
For all of its triumphs, Skyrim loses a lot of what makes the older Elder Scroll games so special. The quests are more shallow, your character build isn’t as customizable, and your choices matter even less. You can quickly become the leader of every single guild, and the biggest decision of the game is who you want to back in the Skyrim Civil War, which culminates in an epic battle of about 40 dudes clipping into each other outside of Whiterun.
In exchange for the simplification, Skyrim received massive, undeniable improvements to the moment-to-moment gameplay. You can dash across the landscape and glitch hop your way up mountains. Additions like dual wielding and weapon crafting finally make the kinetic act of combat enjoyable in itself, and the brilliant addition of shouts allows you to drop dragons out of the sky and blast guards into the horizon with a single squeeze of a shoulder button. Clearly, the game was designed with controllers in mind, as a glance at the oft-maligned default interface will tell you, but that brings with it a tactile and responsive game feel that Skyrim’s PC-first counterparts lack. Skyrim simply feels better.
But the real secret that separates Skyrim from Oblivion is its space. In past lore, Oblivion’s setting of Cyrodiil was an endless jungle of East Asian and Mesoamerican-influenced aesthetics. In the game itself, it’s basically England. Green forests, grassy fields, and the odd Ayleid Ruin dot a landscape that fails to leave much of an impression compared to Skyrim’s frozen tundra. The mechanical depths of the Dwemer ruins, the hazy valleys of the Rift, and the glaciers of Winterhold, all feel like part of a cohesive whole. Skyrim’s geography becomes second nature as you climb enormous mountains and explore endless caves, all the while knowing that the warm glow of Whiterun at night is just a cozy walk away.
Frankly, it’s a place you wouldn’t mind settling down and living out your days in a comfy Lakeview Manor, raising honey bees with your werewolf wife at your side. It’s no wonder so many people found themselves lost in Skyrim over the years, compelled to purchase the game over and over again with each slightly-improved release. For many, Skyrim and its suite of mods are the first thing to install on any new computer, just so you know it’s there – a true “forever game.”
Skyrim is the game that turned the Elder Scrolls from a successful but nerdy RPG franchise into a blockbuster AAA giant. It’s like comparing Dark Souls to Elden Ring. Similar to Oblivion, Dark Souls is probably the better game on paper, but in terms of impact, the refinement that led to Elden Ring and Skyrim allowed the games to simultaneously expand in scope and reach the widest audience possible. Skyrim isn’t a game you have to recommend with huge caveats to your friend who mostly plays Warzone, it sacrificed just enough of its systems to smooth out its friction points and in the process became an all-time best seller.
This isn’t to say that it should be ranked highly just because it made a ton of money, but rather that it made a ton of money because of how well it struck a balance between accessibility and depth, allowing players of all kinds to immerse themselves in an intricately crafted world and live out that timeless, universal fantasy of slaying dragons. But with all due respect to Skyrim’s successful efforts to make the game accessible to the mainstream, our number one spot goes to the game that achieved the exact opposite.
But first…
Honorable Mention: Fallout: New Vegas
We couldn’t in good faith leave this list without mentioning the best Fallout game ever made. Even if it was developed by Obsidian, it’s built on Bethesda’s bugs-and-all engine and wouldn’t exist without the other games on this list, even though it’s better than all of them. A near-perfect marriage of old-school sensibility and BGS open-world quirkiness, you don’t want to miss this one, especially if you plan on watching season 2 of the show.
Which brings us to the greatest Bethesda game of all time, coming in hot from the isle of Vvardenfell, it simply must be…
1: The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind
For a game that we’re definitively calling the greatest Elder Scrolls game of all time, it’s far from the most polished or accessible. The combat retains much of the RNG aggravation of earlier games, and The UI, cluttered with resizable windows and long lists of dialogue choices to scroll through, borders on utter madness. It’s almost impossible to believe that people once navigated this monstrosity with nothing but a giant Xbox Duke controller, but indeed they did.
And yet, despite the at-times overwhelming encumbrances of age and complexity, Morrowind is unparalleled when it comes to pure freedom. There are no quest markers or floating arrows on a compass to guide your way, just clues in a dense journal filled with vast amounts of text to click through with hyperlinks. Its spellmaking system, nerfed and eventually eliminated over the years, allows for utterly broken combinations that let you leap between cities and blast across the sky on Boots of Blinding Speed. Characters have seemingly endless amounts of dialogue, spewing forth on screen in massive paragraphs – though if you get tired of reading, you can always end their worthless life. Always.
No NPC is unkillable in Morrowind, not even the essential ones. In most Bethesda games, if you bludgeon a story-integral character to death with the Mace of Molag Bal, they just take a wee nap and rise again to move the story along. Morrowind instead presents you with the haunting yet somehow liberating message: “the thread of prophecy is severed… restore the weave of fate or persist in the doomed world you have created.”
And what a doomed world it is. Vvardenfell is an ashen wonderland where giant insects float among towering fungi and dark elves set up shop in hollowed-out exoskeletons. It borrows more from The Dark Crystal and Dune than it does from Tolkien, a bold, experimental, and organic departure from tropes and tradition. There’s just something magical about Morrowind. Even when later games like ESO return to the region, it never quite hits the same as the original’s rough graphics and smeary textures that render the world as a trippy fusion of Cruelty Squad and Xavier: Renegade Angel.
But that individuality comes at a cost. For every person enamored by riding giant bugs as public transit or reading 36 volumes of a Dunmer god’s wisdom, someone else decided to play Halo 2 instead. Bethesda made a very conscious decision to make Oblivion more inviting, and its investment obviously paid off. Still, it’s hard not to ponder what could have been.
Reflecting on Morrowind, one can’t help but think of Baldur’s Gate 3 – a modernized, uncompromised take on the classic CRPG genre that took the video game world by storm when it was released. BG3 isn’t a retro novelty throwback, nor is it a dumbed-down trend-chasing crowd pleaser. It’s simply what fans of the first two games could have envisioned a long-delayed followup would look like, which begs the question: How would an actual sequel to Morrowind work? And would today’s audience accept it?
Truthfully, the top three Bethesda games are almost entirely interchangeable. You can make a solid argument for them in any order, based on your own personal preferences and, let’s face it, more than a little nostalgia. For us, Morrowind is at the top of this list because there will never, ever be another Bethesda game like it –- but as always, your own personal ranking may vary. So, commence dragonshouting your favorites in the comments below!
These are solid picks for anyone expanding their collection or looking for a high-quality gift. Oh, and did I mention a Pokémon TCG 2004 trick or trade pack for over half off?
Written by TMNT co-creator Kevin Eastman and the original Last Ronin team, the story follows Casey Marie and a new generation of heroes rising from the sewers to bring peace to a fractured New York City. The oversized hardcover is set to release on July 8, 2025, making this a great time to lock in early savings.
Temporal Forces Elite Trainer Box
Temporal Forces Elite Trainer Box featuring Iron Leaves is holding at $55.42. It includes booster packs, Energy cards, themed sleeves, and tools for competitive play.
This expansion brings back ACE SPEC cards and features both Ancient and Future Pokémon ex, including Walking Wake ex and Raging Bolt ex. With singles from this set also seeing price drops, sealed boxes may offer better pull value for players chasing newer cards
Temporal Forces Chase Cards
Apple AirPods Pro 2
Apple’s AirPods Pro 2 with the updated USB-C case are available for $169, which is $80 off the standard price of $249. That’s one of the lowest prices we’ve seen this month.
These wireless earbuds offer active noise cancellation, adaptive audio modes, personalized spatial audio, and a secure fit with multiple tip sizes. They’re also IP54-rated for water and dust resistance, making them a reliable option for both everyday listening and workouts.
Oblivion Remastered Akatosh
The Elder Scrolls IV Oblivion Akatosh Ingot is up for pre-order at the IGN Store for 34.99. This officially licensed collectible is finished in black nickel with colored printed details, sized at 100 by 56.8 millimeters, and includes a display stand.
Limited to 5,000 pieces and individually numbered, it’s a standout item for Elder Scrolls fans looking to commemorate one of the series’ most iconic deities.+
Screen Protector for Nintendo Switch 2
This 2-pack screen protector for the Switch 2 uses amFilm’s latest auto-alignment system for quick, bubble-free installation in under 30 seconds. It’s currently down to $9.99, a 23% savings off its usual $12.99 list price.
You’re getting tempered glass rated at 9H hardness, plus anti-fingerprint coating and responsive touch sensitivity. A smart add-on for anyone who’s preordered Switch 2 and wants protection without hassle.
Poké Ball Tin Bundle 2024
Pokémon TCG Poké Ball Tin 3-Pack Bundle is available at Amazon for 49.90, down from 59.99. This exclusive bundle includes three collectible tins styled as a Poké Ball, Great Ball, and Ultra Ball, each containing three Scarlet and Violet booster packs and a sticker sheet.
That adds up to nine booster packs for under 50 dollars. It’s a solid value for anyone looking to score new cards and adds a bit of fun for collectors thanks to the unique tin designs.
Corsair Vengeance i7500 Gaming PC
Corsair’s Vengeance i7500 Gaming PC is on sale at Amazon for 2,599.99, marked down from 2,899.99. It’s powered by a liquid-cooled Intel Core i7-14700KF CPU and NVIDIA’s RTX 5070 graphics card, paired with 32 gigabytes of DDR5 RGB RAM and a 1TB NVMe SSD.
The system is housed in a tempered glass 3500X ARGB case with robust airflow. Whether you’re gaming, streaming, or working with creative apps, this build is designed to deliver high-end performance out of the box.
Tycoon Titans Bundle
Tycoon Titans Bundle at Humble is packed with management sims for anyone who enjoys building, optimizing, or running virtual businesses. Pay 13 dollars or more to unlock 10 Steam titles including RollerCoaster Tycoon 3, Frostpunk, Mad Games Tycoon 2, and PlateUp.
The bundle also includes coupons for 35 percent off Frostpunk 2 and 10 percent off Farm Manager World. A portion of every purchase goes to No Kid Hungry, so it’s a great way to expand your library while supporting a good cause.
2024 Trick or Trade BOOster Bundle
Pokémon TCG Trick or Trade BOOster Bundle is down to just 15.93 at Walmart, marked down from 39.99. This seasonal bundle includes 35 mini booster packs, each with three cards, all featuring Halloween-themed art and spooky packaging.
It’s a fun and affordable option for parents, party hosts, or collectors looking to stock up ahead of October. With over 24 dollars in savings, this is one of the best prices you’ll find for bulk Pokémon packs.
Pokemon TCG Classic Box
Pokémon TCG Classic Box is now just $194.76 at Sam’s Club, a major drop from its original 400 dollar price. This deluxe set includes three 60-card decks based on the original partner Pokémon, six new cards, and foil reprints of some of the game’s most iconic cards.
It also comes with high-end accessories including a foldable game board, magnetic damage counters, and a durable case. Designed for collectors and competitive players, it’s one of the most complete and well-crafted sets the Pokémon Company has released. Sam’s Club memberships have been discounted recently, so this could be great shout if you’re looking for rare and discounted Pokemon card sets.
Iono’s Bellibolt ex Premium Collection
This Premium Collection features Iono’s Bellibolt ex as a full-art foil promo, plus a foil Iono’s Tadbulb card and six booster packs. At $53.23, it’s a modest discount off the typical $55.88 price (for Amazon).
You’ll also get standees, a photo sticker, and a backdrop display themed around Iono and Bellibolt. With several playable cards in this set seeing markdowns on the singles market, this box is a good option for collectors or those hoping to pull value.
The detailed design captures the fiery gates seen in-game and measures 110 x 76mm. Scheduled to ship in October 2025, this is a good pick for fans of the series looking to add a unique item to their collection.
XCOM Bundle
Humble is offering a full XCOM franchise bundle starting at just $10. That unlocks 17 titles, including XCOM 2, Enemy Unknown, Chimera Squad, and multiple DLCs with a combined value of $269.
This is a rare chance to pick up nearly the entire series in one package, and part of your purchase supports the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research. Whether you’re new to the franchise or filling gaps in your library, it’s worth a look.
id & Friends Humble Game Bundle
I think calling this a bundle is almost underselling it. You are getting DOOM, Wolfenstein, DOOM Eternal, and a coupon toward DOOM: The Dark Ages, just to name a few. It is a lot of chaos and a lot of catharsis for not a lot of money. Steam ratings are strong across the board if you care about that kind of thing, but honestly, DOOM 1993 still sells itself.
Pokémon TCG: Scarlet & Violet – Surging Sparks Booster Bundle
Six booster packs in one bundle sounds good on paper, but in my opinion, the smarter move right now is to look at singles. Prices for this set are dropping fast, and if you are chasing specific cards, buying them outright is probably cheaper and less soul crushing than another box full of commons.
Pokémon TCG: Scarlet & Violet—Twilight Masquerade Elite Trainer Box
Greninja ex SIR, that is all. In all seriousness, this is a brilliant set that’s often overlooked. Whilst the price is a little over MSRP, it’s worth getting just for the booster packs included. Plus the promo, sleeves and dice look great in this particular ETB. Following the trend, Twilight Masquerade single cards are also crashing in price, so make sure to check if you can just buy the cards you’re after for less.
Twilight Masquerade Single Cards
Surging Sparks Single Cards
Pokémon TCG: Shining Fates Collection Pikachu V Box
kachu gets a lot of oversized cardboard love in this box with a promo card, a giant version, and four Shining Fates booster packs. It is a decent pickup if you like opening packs, but single card prices are slipping hard right now. I think it makes more sense to hunt down the exact cards you want unless you are feeling reckless.
Shining Fates Single Cards
The Elder Scrolls IV Oblivion Remastered Dark Brotherhood Medallion
In my opinion, this is one of those collectibles that you either want immediately or not at all. It is an officially licensed Dark Brotherhood medallion, limited to 5000 pieces, finished in black and gold, and somehow still cheaper than most novelty keychains. Ships later this year, assuming you survive the wait
Pokémon TCG Paldean Fates Booster Bundle
Paldean Fates brings back shiny Pokémon in a big way, and this bundle gives you six booster packs to chase them. I want to be excited about it, but again, single card prices for Paldean Fates are not holding up well. If you just want a shiny Charizard ex SIR without the suspense, the singles market is sitting there quietly judging your pack opening addiction.
Paldean Fates Single Cards
Pokemon TCG: Azure Legends Tin – 5 Packs
I like a good tin, especially one with five booster packs packed inside, but getting a random Kyogre, Xerneas, or Dialga promo card feels a little like gambling with slightly better odds. It is a solid pickup for the price if you do not mind leaving your promo fate to the RNG gods. If you are only after one specific chase card though outside of the included two Surging Sparks boosters, it might save your blood pressure to just buy it separately.
Surging Sparks Single Cards
Lexar Sale
Lexar is finally giving some breathing room on pricing with this Amazon sale, and the Armor 700 is a standout. You are getting 4TB of rugged storage with serious transfer speeds for about 100 dollars off the typical price. It is water resistant, dust resistant, and a lot more durable than whatever junk is sitting at the bottom of your backpack right now.
Pokémon Game Sale
Woot is offering a solid spread of Pokémon games today, and I want at least three of them. Brilliant Diamond, Legends: Arceus, Let’s Go, Eevee!, and a few others are sitting between $39.99 and $44.99, which feels right for anyone catching up before Switch 2 changes the landscape again. In my opinion, it is a smart time to grab them while prices are behaving themselves. Everything here is fully playable now and will likely get performance bumps once Nintendo’s next system arrives.
MSI Desktops & Components Sale
MSI’s factory-reconditioned gaming desktops are quietly one of the best parts of today’s sale. Machines like the AEGIS R 13NUE-448US are going for $1,129.99, and RTX 4060 GPUs are under $300. I want to be responsible, but this pricing makes it harder than it should be. If you have been thinking about rebuilding your setup, this is exactly the kind of deal you hope not to miss.
Samsung Pro Plus 512GB MicroSDXC + Reader
Amazon has the Samsung PRO Plus 512GB microSD card with a USB reader for $29.99. I think it is a good fit if you are adding games to your Switch, Steam Deck, ROG Ally, or anything else still using microSD storage. It is fast enough for quick transfers, big enough for most libraries, and cheap enough that you do not have to think too hard about it. Just know it is not built for Switch 2, in case you’re planning ahead.
The 8BitDo Retro 87 Mechanical Keyboard is down to $99.99 at Amazon. I think it is one of the best-looking keyboards out right now if you want something that works and does not scream “boring office equipment.”
It has Kailh Jellyfish X switches, a top-mount design, fast response, and Xbox-inspired styling that actually looks good on a gaming desk. I probably do not need another keyboard. I am thinking about it anyway.
Christian Wait is a contributing freelancer for IGN covering everything collectable and deals. Christian has over 7 years of experience in the Gaming and Tech industry with bylines at Mashable and Pocket-Tactics. Christian also makes hand-painted collectibles for Saber Miniatures. Christian is also the author of “Pokemon Ultimate Unofficial Gaming Guide by GamesWarrior”. Find Christian on X @ChrisReggieWait.
Italian studio 3DClouds has revealed Formula Legends, an Art of Rally-inspired take on arcade-style, open-wheel racing that pays (unlicensed) tribute to over 50 years of Formula 1 racing.
3DClouds gave IGN an early look at how the game is shaping up and, while elements like AI behaviour are still being honed, the level of commitment to recreating a variety of eras of F1 is already very impressive.
Formula Legends will feature 16 car models, each with seven different liveries. The cars may be chunky, toy-style caricatures of the real things but, clad in their off-brand odes to some of the most iconic racecar designs in history, the inspiration behind each one is very clear. Sound has been a big focus for the team, which is good to hear considering how crucial that is to the identity of older F1 cars especially. Formula Legends will also feature modding support – from liveries to helmets and trackside sponsors – which has the potential to be quite a boost.
Speaking of tracks, each of the 14 circuits will have multiple variations to reflect how they’ve evolved over the years, from the ’70s to the 2020s. These too are inspired by real-life locations.
Formula Legends’ story mode sounds particularly promising, with era-based championships set to take us on a tour through the defining moments of F1’s high-speed history.
There sounds like there’ll be quite a bit of nuance to the racing, too. Not only will each of the 200 drivers in Formula Legends (including the cheekily-named Mike Shoemaker and current championship leader Osvald Pastry) have skill perks to consider, but tyre wear, fuel consumption, rubbered-in racing lines, damage, and dynamic weather will also all be factors. How 3DClouds ultimately blends these deeper elements with an otherwise accessible arcade approach will be interesting to learn.
Producer Francesco Mantovani explained that the team took inspiration from 2023’s New Star GP (which itself is an F1-themed throwback to early 3D racing games) but wanted something that was a little less outright arcade-oriented for Formula Legends.
“We tried to move it in line between New Star GP and Art of Rally, in terms of gameplay,” said Mantovani. “Art of Rally was the main inspiration we took for this game. We appreciate how they worked on the camera and on the tracks.”
3DClouds’ history of racing games has admittedly trended towards licensed racing games for a far younger audience (including games like Paw Patrol Grand Prix, Fast & Furious: Spy Racers, and Hot Wheels Monster Trucks: Stunt Mayhem) but Formula Legends is described as a true passion project for the studio, which it has created entirely independently.
“I think it’s a game that they’ve been wanting to make for a really, really long time, and finally we have the resources to do it,” confirmed executive producer Roberta Migliori, noting the studio’s work-for-hire history has set it up just as F1’s popularity continues to soar. “With the increasing popularity of the sport and the strong passion, it just seemed like the right moment. The game is completely self-funded thanks to other games we’ve worked on.”
3DClouds being located in Milan, just a short drive from Monza (Formula 1’s legendary Temple of Speed and the third purpose-built race track ever built) probably hasn’t hurt, either.
Formula Legends will launch on Xbox One and Series X|S, PS4 and PS5, PC, and Switch later this year. The team does not currently have Switch 2 kits, but Migliori confirmed they will “look into that opportunity as soon as we are ready.”
Luke is a Senior Editor on the IGN reviews team. You can track him down on Bluesky @mrlukereilly to ask him things about stuff.
Evil Dead: The Game is no longer available to buy after its publisher began pulling it from digital storefronts.
The asymmetric multiplayer game based on the much-loved action horror franchise launched in 2022 across PC, PlayStation, and Xbox. IGN’s Evil Dead: The Game review returned an 8/10. We said: “Evil Dead: The Game is an asymmetric multiplayer game of cat and mouse that’s compelling and exhilarating, despite being rough around the edges – much like the horror/comedies that inspired it.”
Now, three years after launch, Evil Dead: The Game is gone for good, but its servers will remain online for existing owners to continue playing.
In a statement published to the game’s Steam page, developer and publisher Saber Interactive confirmed the change:
We can confirm we’ve begun the process of removing the game from digital storefronts. Anyone who has purchased the game will still be able to play it as we plan to keep our servers online for everyone.
We want to extend a sincere thank you to our community, to those who have been part of the game from the very beginning, and those who have recently joined us. We appreciate all of your support.
There are a number of negative reviews left on Evil Dead: The Game’s Steam page lamenting the decision to pull it from sale, with most saying it’s effectively dead now. It retains a ‘mixed’ Steam user review rating overall.
“The end is nigh,” reads one recent positive review from a player with over 380 hours in-game. “It was fun while it lasted, lads. I mean that.”
Saber Interactive, which developed last year’s breakout hit Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2, has a number of licensed movie games in the works, including John Carpenter’s Toxic Commando, Jurassic Park Survival, and an untitled Avatar: The Last Airbender game. Turok: Origins and Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 3 are also in development.
Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.
Pokémon TCG’s next big release, Destined Rivals, is out this month, and preorders are finally back in stock at Walmart. Stock has been going in and out of stock all morning, so YMMV.
You’ll need to log in and join the queue for each set available: ETBs, Booster Bundles, and 3-Pack Blisters. Prices will be automatically adjusted at checkout.
Destined Rivals US Preorders
Destined Rivals Brings Back Classic Villains and Stunning New Cards
Team Rocket returns to stir up trouble once again, Trainers’ signature Pokémon are back in the spotlight, and the card art? Some of the slickest in years. Whether you’re chasing eye-catching collectibles or just addicted to the thrill of cracking a fresh pack, Destined Rivals is engineered to tempt you.
Between May 17–25, pre-release events will pop up at select stores, offering early access via Build & Battle boxes and small-scale tournaments. Want in? Talk to your local league store yesterday. And maybe bring snacks—you’re negotiating with gatekeepers now.
What’s in the Destined Rivals Lineup?
We all tell ourselves we’ll buy just one item. That’s adorable. Here’s everything that’ll test your willpower on launch day:
Booster Packs
Booster Boxes (36 packs)
Elite Trainer Box
Pokémon Center Exclusive Elite Trainer Box
Booster Bundle (6 packs)
Triple-Pack Blisters
Build & Battle Box
Build & Battle Stadium
Expect premium collection boxes too—likely with alternate art promos starring fan-favorites like Misty, Cynthia, Ethan, or Marnie. You technically don’t need them. You’ll get them anyway.
Trainer Cards: Team Rocket’s Giovanni, Archer, Ariana, Receiver
Special Energy: Team Rocket Energy
Steven’s Starter Deck
Steven’s Metagross ex
Steven’s Skarmory, Beldum, Metang
Steven’s Carbink
Steven’s Claydol, Baltoy
Trainer Card: Granite Cave
Marnie’s Starter Deck
Marnie’s Grimmsnarl ex
Marnie’s Impidimp, Morgrem, Liepard, Scrafty
Marnie’s Purrloin, Scraggy
Trainer Cards: Energy Recycler (reprint), Spikemuth Gym
Destined Origins Cards I’ve Got My Eye On
There’s a good chance I’ll end up with multiple binders full of these, but a few cards have already secured a permanent place in my mental wishlist.
Cynthia’s Garchomp ex is a power move in every sense. Big damage, hand draw, and the smug energy of someone who always gets her turn one setup. This is peak Champion energy and I want three.
Ethan’s Ho-Oh ex is what happens when utility and sparkle collide. The ability accelerates Fire Energy like it’s no big deal, and Shining Feather heals your whole team while smacking for 160. It’s absurd, and I’m obsessed.
Team Rocket’s Mewtwo ex is pure drama. It refuses to attack unless you’ve built an entire Rocket-themed deck around it, but when it does, it throws energy around like a caffeinated Gengar. It’s also incredibly extra, which I respect.
Misty’s Psyduck is here to make you laugh and then probably lose a game in the most lovable way possible. It has an ability that lets you discard it to the top of your deck, for… reasons. I don’t care. It’s perfect.
Marnie’s Grimmsnarl ex brings the villain vibes with an aggressive Dark-type build that thrives on energy acceleration and being just annoying enough to work. It’s a disruption deck’s dream, and I plan to run it like it’s 2020 all over again.
Pokémon TCG Single Card Deals
That’s right, I’m hunting down single card deals now too. Hype it as an all time high right now, so that means prices are at their peak. That also means they’re ready to bottom out at any moment, as ridiculous pricing turns buyers away eventually.
The Pokémon TCG bubble is set to burst this year, either by scalpers getting too greedy or by massive reprints. Some prices are already dropping, with Journey Together slowly calming down:
Surging Sparks Single Cards
Journey Together Single Cards
Shrouded Fable Single Cards
Temporal Forces Single Cards
Stellar Crown Single Cards
Scarlet and Violet Base Single Cards
Twilight Masquerade Single Cards
Christian Wait is a contributing freelancer for IGN covering everything collectable and deals. Christian has over 7 years of experience in the Gaming and Tech industry with bylines at Mashable and Pocket-Tactics. Christian also makes hand-painted collectibles for Saber Miniatures. Christian is also the author of “Pokemon Ultimate Unofficial Gaming Guide by GamesWarrior”. Find Christian on X @ChrisReggieWait.
Codemasters has confirmed that no further expansions will be released for 2023’s EA Sports WRC, and that the team has “reached the end of the road” working on the game. Unfortunately, alongside this news comes the additional confirmation that Codemasters is also “pausing development plans on future rally titles.”
“Our WRC partnership was a culmination of sorts for our Codemasters journey with off-road racing, spanning decades through titles like Colin McRae Rally, and Dirt,” reads the studio’s statement. “We’ve provided a home for every rally enthusiast, striving tirelessly to push the boundaries and deliver the exhilarating thrill of driving on the ragged edge. We’ve brought together incredibly talented racing developers, worked with some of the sport’s icons, and had the opportunity to share our love of rallying.”
The World Rally Championship itself has acknowledged the news on social media, with a largely vague comment noting the “WRC gaming franchise is going in an ambitious new direction with more news coming in the near future.”
Codemasters has been at the spearhead of rallying video games for almost three decades, dating back to 1998’s iconic Colin McRae Rally. The pioneering rally simulation kicked off a series of successful and highly esteemed racing games. Following the death of Colin McRae in 2007, the series retired McRae’s name and continued its evolution as Dirt. 2009’s Dirt 2 (known as Colin McRae: Dirt 2 in Europe and other PAL game territories) marked a transitional point for the series, which was reinvented again as a hardcore simulation in 2015’s Dirt Rally.
2023’s EA Sports WRC was the first Codemasters rally game to hold an official WRC license since 2002’s Colin McRae Rally 3. IGN’s review notes EA Sports WRC took the class-leading feel of 2019’s Dirt Rally 2.0 and stuffed it into an officially licensed World Rally Championship experience, like a steel rod in Timo Rautiainen’s backside, but its technical gremlins left it feeling like a “great racing game trying to fight its way out of an unfinished one.” Subsequent updates sought to improve its screen tearing issues.
Luke is a Senior Editor on the IGN reviews team. You can track him down on Bluesky @mrlukereilly to ask him things about stuff.
Editor’s note: La Quimera was originally set to fully release on April 25, but it was unexpectedly delayed that same day. A developer update on April 29 didn’t provide a new release date, but did say La Quimera would now be launching in Early Access whenever it did arrive. This announcement came well after our review of what we were initially told would be the full game was largely complete – however, the update post indicates that the content at its new launch will be the same as what we played, so we have decided to publish this as a review of the Early Access version.
I have to admit, I’m a sucker for direct-to-video sequels. There’s something about being five Tremors movies deep where all pretense is abandoned, and we all know what we are there for: To watch some ridiculous action and give our brains a break for a bit. La Quimera reminds me a lot of popcorn flicks like that. This FPS is not particularly good-looking, well-written, or innovative. The action doesn’t do anything memorable, and its acting ranges from mediocre to terrible. There is admittedly a certain charm to be found here, especially if you bring a friend or two along to share this rocky ride in co-op. But by nearly every metric, La Quimera is about as good a game as Tremors 5: Bloodlines is a movie. Which is to say it’s not.
Set in the fictional South American city of Nuevo Caracas, the world is going to hell in a handbasket. Outside the city walls, some sort of robot apocalypse that’s never really explained is taking place. Inside, there are warring corporations and extreme poverty. That setup isn’t a socio-political commentary so much as a throwback to 80s sci-fi, complete with Power Loader-esque rigs that would look right at home on Ellen Ripley in Aliens. As a new PMC recruit, you and your squad get stuck in the middle of some nonspecific and uninteresting power struggle between corporations, leaving an equal mix of broken bodies and bots in your wake.
There is some legitimately cool environmental storytelling here. My favorite by far is the Bone Wall, a literal wall filled with what must be thousands of skeletons, that you get to see when one mission takes you deep through it. A voice in your ear describes the desperation that went into building the wall as all hell was breaking loose, and it’s neat to piece together how there was no time to slow down and help anyone who fell, whether that was due to exhaustion, injury, or dying from whatever encroaching threat drove the frantic construction.
In fact, La Quimera would have been better off if it let the environments do all the talking, because once its characters open their mouths, it is rough. The dialogue is awful, with obscenity-laced tirades that sound like someone watched a Quentin Tarantino movie once, and tried to mimic it without knowing how to make any of the lines land. The acting also ranges from a normal kind of bad to so awkward I can’t tell if it’s being purposefully campy or potentially using some sort of poorly implemented AI. Characters are very chatty too, and I found myself actively cringing on several occasions as allies shout out things like, “Oh perfect, robot dogs!”.
The dialogue is awful, and I found myself actively cringing on several occasions.
The story itself doesn’t make much sense, either. Apparently, saving a billionaire’s daughter gets your PMC conscripted because… you are afraid he will sue? Which, naturally, means the people in the PMC all have to get experimental and highly dangerous augmentations, too. I wouldn’t mind the nonsense, it’s fine enough as a vehicle to make me want to go shoot robots – but the story is so clearly unfinished, ending abruptly after just a few hours without resolving anything. Developer Reburn unexpectedly decided to delay La Quimera on the day it was supposed to launch, and then later announced its eventual release would have the Early Access label on it. Given development is largely based out of Kyiv in Ukraine, the fact that it’s still coming out at all feels like something of an achievement worth applauding. But while this campaign is planned to grow over time, the version that’s here now doesn’t have any semblance of a complete story.
Identity Crysis
La Quimera isn’t exactly shy about the influence Crysis has had on it. Early on, you and your crew gain access to exosuits, complete with energy-powered armor, cloaking, and scanning. That last bit is especially important – one quick ping allows you and your teammates to see any nearby enemies, even behind cover. That’s huge when your weapons operate like a poor man’s version of the FarSight from Perfect Dark, able to lethally penetrate shockingly thick obstacles. It’s extremely satisfying to drop a bunch of orange silhouettes in rapid succession from sight unseen.
That said, where Crysis tended to be more of an inverted funnel that pushed you toward open areas, La Quimera is decidedly about straight lines. Its levels are very linear, and your objective is almost always to clear enemies as you walk from point A to point B. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, as a bit of a throwback like this can be a welcome palate cleanser in a time when wide-open gameplay is increasingly the norm, but it does all start to become a bland blur. That’s because so many areas repeat the same cycle of kill the enemies, open the heavy door, kill the next enemies, open the next heavy door, and so on. There are a handful of encounters that break that trend, most notably an extended gunfight on a slowly rising elevator in a corporate office building, but they are few and far between.
The gunplay itself is extremely basic, with your weapons effectively limited to a sidearm, shotgun, or rifle. You can’t change guns mid-mission, nor pick up any temporary options like a limited-use power weapon. You are given the choice between conventional firearms and electromagnetic weapons – the former works better against humans, while the latter tears through shields and robots more quickly – but you’ll be required to bring one of each into your missions anyway. Which one gets to be the more powerful primary weapon and which is relegated to your sidearm could have added a small strategic wrinkle, but the conventional arms are so poor against bots that there’s only one right choice, which is too bad.
The thing I like best about the fights themselves is the ammo economy. Bullets can become scarce, especially in later missions, which means you can’t just sit in one spot and pick off every enemy by shooting through walls the whole time. I had to keep moving to either scavenge rounds off of corpses or find more ammo boxes, which was just enough to create some badly needed forward momentum during otherwise slow fights.
Time is Money
As a PMC, you are, of course, paid for completing missions – but while there are things to buy between them, the progression is badly underbaked at this point. There aren’t enough items or upgrades for sale in the first place, and the stuff that is here isn’t very interesting. You could buy one of a very small number of generic guns, or invest in either of the two alternate versions of your exosuit’s head, arms, torso, and legs, each of which have differences like improved cooldowns or increased med kit capacity. But those effects are all so small that it’s hard to feel a need for any of them.
The way you get money is a little weird, too. In addition to completing missions, cash can also be found in containers mid-level – but you have very shallow pockets for some odd reason, hitting “max money” far too quickly (which is a problem I can say with all honesty I have never experienced in my life). That’s too bad, because collecting more would have given me a real incentive to go off the beaten path. There are some of the obligatory voice memos people seem to leave behind in every video game, but I can’t bring myself to opt into hearing more of this dialogue than I absolutely need to.
For as down as I am on La Quimera (and, believe me, I am), I did still have a strangely fun time with it. That’s due primarily to two things: First, you can play the entire campaign (minus the tutorial) in online co-op with up to two other people. A couple of buddies is the exact thing you need to transform cringey dialogue from something you’ll roll your eyes at into a hilarious shared experience. Having another gun or two covering your back makes the combat more exciting as well, and the ability to do things like alternate who is doing scans so that you are never waiting on that ability’s cooldown keeps the fights moving at a faster pace.
The other quality that keeps its many issues from becoming downright infuriating is how short La Quimera is. It took me right around four hours to complete my first playthrough. That could certainly be a negative if you put a lot of weight on “hours played per dollar spent” or whatever, but it does make a stronger case for going in with some friends, having a ridiculous time, and then getting out in a way that lets you enjoy the handful of high points while minimizing the impact of the lows. Of course, one of the reasons for this brief length is that La Quimera is outright incomplete in parts, and it would need to be significantly fleshed out to justify spending any more time than this in Nuevo Caracas anyway.
