The director of Resident Evil Requiem has said Western players are more likely to choose the game’s first-person option, after growing up on a diet of PC first-person shooters such as Doom.
Meanwhile, Japanese fans more accustomed to third-person console RPGs like Dragon Quest have tended to play Requiem’s demo in third-person, director Akifumi Nakanishi told Denfaminicogamer, in an interview translated by Automaton.
While Requiem doesn’t launch until next year, a demo version has been publicly available at both Gamescom in Germany and Tokyo Game Show over the past couple of months. After attending both shows and watching fans try the game for themselves, Nakanishi said he had spotted the difference in how most opted to play in each location, and suggested it was due to how audiences had played other games while growing up.
“I think those kinds of differences are significant,” Nakanishi said, describing the popularity of shooters in the west, as opposed to console RPGs in Japan. However, this was now changing, he continued, citing the popularity of both Minecraft and Apex Legends among younger Japanese gamers today.
After originating in third-person, the Resident Evil series switched to first-person gameplay for Resident Evil 7. But recent years have also seen the launch of various re-releases of previous third-person classics, such as 2023’s celebrated Resident Evil 4 Remake. Requiem will be the first title to hand players full control over which perspective their prefer.
After playing the Resident Evil Requiem demo myself at Gamescom, there’s definitely something to be said for its first-person perspective, which is presented as the demo’s default. In first-person, it’s harder to tell how close behind you the game’s unsettling new monster might be, something that ramps up the horror elements. That said, the view does give you a narrower field of vision for finding hidden objects and clues, which sometimes proved a little frustrating. In reality, it seems likely that most players will likely try a bit of both.
At the moment you can preorder it for $39.99 from a variety of storefronts including Amazon, GameStop, and Target. That’s weirdly $20 cheaper than the digital deluxe edition that’s been available since the game first launched, but hey, we’ll take that win. Get your preorders in at the link below and learn everything that comes with this physical deluxe edition further down.
Preorders are live for the PS5 and Xbox Series X versions of the game.
The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered Physical Deluxe Edition Contents
When you pick up the physical deluxe edition of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered – which features a very cool cover that features a leather-like background texture with gold detailing – you’ll get plenty of bonuses alongside the base game. These include:
Unique digital Akatosh and Mehrunes Dagon Armors, Weapons, and Horse Armor Sets
Shivering Isles and Knights of the Nine story expansions
Access to the Digital Artbook and Soundtrack App
Additional downloadable content: Fighter’s Stronghold, Spell Tomes, Vile Lair, Mehrune’s Razor, The Thieves Den, Wizard’s Tower, The Orrery, and Horse Armor Pack
Earlier this year when it was released, we gave The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered an 8/10 in our review. Writer Travis Northup said it’s, “a fantastic open-world RPG that’s aged quite well, with questlines and stories that are better than I remembered, modernizations (like the slightly improved leveling system) that remove some of the friction of the original, and loads of opportunities to make this adventure whatever you want it to be via the plentiful freedom afforded to you.”
Other Preorder Guides
Looking to secure a few more games for your physical library? Have a look at our list of other preorder guides below to see what else is available to preorder at the moment, from 007 First Light to Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 and more.
If you happen to be a PC gamer more interested in savings than physical copies, I’d also check out the Steam Autumn Sale, which happens to include digital discounts on Oblivion Remastered.
Hannah Hoolihan is a freelancer who writes with the guides and commerce teams here at IGN.
Minecraft has announced a major new game update, Mounts of Mayhem, that will be spearheaded by the addition of… the spear!
The sharp-tipped stick is the first new weapon added to Minecraft in some time, and the first new tiered item — one that is available in progressively more durable variants — added since the hoe, back in 2010.
After so long jabbing at skeletons with a sword, you might wonder why the spear is being added now. Well, thankfully it sounds like there will be some interesting new gameplay possibilities as a result of the spear’s addition, and in particular: jousting.
As in real life, you’ll be able to wield your nearest spear on foot, or on your nearest horse, which is where part of that Mounts of Mayhem title comes in. The other part? Well, that comes from the fact that it isn’t just you getting to play around with a spear… Mounted Zombies (who also now ride Zombie Horses) will get spears also.
In an update video revealing the spear’s mechanics, developer Mojang explained that the weapon can be used for slow, long-range jabs or stronger charge attacks that deal damage based on how fast a player is moving. On horseback, at a gallop, your spear is going to do significant damage to any enemy standing in your path. However, the same is presumably true of those Mounted Zombies.
Crafting or upgrading your spear using different materials will allow you to create a bog-standard wooden spear, but also fancier golden, stone, copper, iron, diamond and even Netherite alternatives. However, while the item’s durability might increase, fancier materials will be heavier — making the spear’s attacks slower. It’s an interesting trade-off.
Mojang has confirmed that your mounted combat can extend underwater, via Mounts of Mayhem’s new tamable aquatic mob, the Nautilus. You can even wield spears while soaring through the skies with Elytra wings.
Will spears be part of the next Chicken Jockey meme whenever the Minecraft Movie sequel comes around? Perhaps. Until then, players can begin testing Mounts of Mayhem features “soon,” Mojang said, ahead of a full release further in the future.
Sony has confirmed the global release times for PlayStation 5 exclusive Ghost of Yotei.
Sucker Punch’s Ghost of Tsushima sequel has an official release date of October 2, but fans in some parts of the United States can play it earlier, from October 1, Sony confirmed to IGN.
It’s worth noting Ghost of Yotei has an important day-one patch, which makes a number of significant improvements to the game. Sony revealed the patch notes to IGN, and confirmed disc owners will have to install the update. Sony also asked players to make sure they’re on Version 1.006 before playing the game.
Ghost of Yotei pre-load via the PlayStation Store went live last week, with the game itself weighing in at over 85GB.
IGN’s Ghost of Yotei review returned an 8/10. We said: “A predictable but well-executed story takes you through Ghost of Yotei’s gorgeous landscapes and satisfying, fluid action — it may not be revolutionizing open world games, but it’s a great distillation of the samurai fantasy.”
Ghost of Yotei global release times:
Wednesday, October 1, 2025
PDT (Pacific Time):
9pm
MT (Mountain Time):
10pm
CT (Central Time):
11pm
Thursday, October 2, 2025
EDT (Eastern Time):
12am
International (midnight local time):
12am
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.
Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 officially releases on November 14, 2025, for PC, PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X/S, and Xbox One. However, those hoping to try before they buy can test Treyarch’s updated formula October 5-8 via an open beta. Players willing to pre-order can get in on the action even earlier via an early access beta running October 2–5.
Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 Beta Start Times: Early Access
Thursday, October 2, 2025
PDT (San Francisco):
10am
EDT (New York):
1pm
BST (London):
6pm
CEST (Paris, Rome, Berlin):
7pm
EEST (Turkey):
8pm
HKT (Hong Kong):
11pm
CST (Beijing):
11pm
Friday, October 3, 2025
JST (Tokyo):
2am
AEST (Sydney):
3am
Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 Beta Start Times: Open Beta Access
Sunday, October 5, 2025
PDT (San Francisco):
10am
EDT (New York):
1pm
BST (London):
6pm
CEST (Paris, Rome, Berlin):
7pm
EEST (Turkey):
8pm
HKT (Hong Kong):
11pm
CST (Beijing):
11pm
Monday, October 6, 2025
JST (Tokyo):
2am
AEST (Sydney):
3am
The beta test ends at the same times given above on Wednesday October 8 (Thursday October 9 in Asia/Oceania).
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.
Activision has warned PC gamers that they will not be able to play Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 during the beta and at launch if they do not enable TPM 2.0 and Secure Boot.
Like rival shooter Battlefield 6, TPM 2.0 and Secure Boot are required for Black Ops 7 to run on PC as part of strict anti-cheat measures. These features block modified hardware and unauthorized software, with the goal of creating a fair, secure environment for all players even as cheaters ramp up their efforts.
Indeed, Activision has said it’s well aware Call of Duty cheaters will hammer on the Black Ops 7 beta, insisting: “that’s exactly what we want.”
In a new blog post, Activision suggested PC gamers enable both TPM 2.0 and Secure Boot now to be ready on day one, with the Black Ops 7 beta set to kick off on October 2 for those with early access, then October 5 in open beta form.
However, some Battlefield 6 players ran into issues enabling TPM 2.0 and Secure Boot, preventing them from playing on PC. Speaking to Eurogamer, Battlefield 6 technical director Christian Buhl lamented the situation. “The fact is I wish we didn’t have to do things like Secure Boot,” Buhl said.
“It does prevent some players from playing the game. Some people’s PCs can’t handle it and they can’t play; that really sucks. I wish everyone could play the game with low friction and not have to do these sorts of things.”
Enabling Secure Boot involves tinkering with a part of a computer not all PC gamers will be instantly familiar with: the BIOS. You need to make sure your Windows disk is GPT and not MBR (not everyone will know what these are), too. All this before you can even enable Secure Boot — and then you may not be able to enable it anyway, which then means you need to refer to your manufacturer for guidance. While this won’t be a problem for more experienced PC gamers, it will be an intimidating process for some.
“When Black Ops 7 launches on November 14, these requirements will combine with our newest RICOCHET Anti-Cheat upgrades,” Activision said. “At that point, we will introduce a remote verification system (known as Remote Attestation) to provide the strongest safeguard possible. This type of attestation is the most secure method of validation, more stringent than the client or local attestation methods found in other games, allowing us to validate TPM 2.0 and Secure Boot settings with Microsoft Azure servers in the cloud.
“This creates a tougher environment for cheats to operate in and ensures that the protections these features detect cannot be bypassed or spoofed, which would be possible if we used local verification on a player’s PC.
“Our layered defense that combines TPM 2.0, Secure Boot, and RICOCHET Anti-Cheat’s upgraded detection systems delivers our most advanced anti-cheat protection yet, safeguarding fair play across Call of Duty.”
Activision continued: “We’re setting a new standard for gaming security. TPM 2.0 and Secure Boot are not optional; they are the foundation of our multifaceted defense system, and with your help, they ensure a fair and secure experience for everyone.”
Call of Duty has a reputation for cheating, especially with the free-to-download battle royale Warzone. Activision has spent a significant amount of time, money, and energy in response, even taking on cheat makers in court, although it, like all video game developers, faces an uphill battle in the war on cheaters.
“Cheaters will try to test the limits during the Beta. That’s exactly what we want because #TeamRICOCHET is here, watching, learning, and removing them as they appear,” Activision said. “Any account permanently banned for cheating during the Beta will be banned across all Call of Duty titles, from Call of Duty: Modern Warfare to future releases.”
It’s worth noting that Activision has highlighted its new aimbot detection, which it said is “one of the strongest detection systems we have ever built,” and its new wall hacking detections, “making it harder for cheaters who manipulate the game to see enemies through surfaces harder to escape detection.”
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.
Terminator 2D: No Fate — the new retro game that blends scenes from Terminator 2: Judgment Day with original scenarios and multiple endings — has once again been delayed, this time to November 26, 2025.
It would appear that not even Skynet is immune from tariffs; publisher Reef Entertainment confirmed the delay in a brief blog post, claiming the release date had been pushed back from the original October 31 date due to “ongoing global trade and tariff changes that delayed shipment of the components for our Day One and Collector’s Editions.”
“Because we are committed to launching all editions together, this new date applies to both physical and digital releases worldwide,” Reef added. “We truly appreciate your patience and understanding, and we’re sorry for this further delay. The team is working hard to make sure your wait is worth it, and we can’t wait to share Terminator 2D: No Fate with you all this November.”
Terminator 2D sees you play as Sarah Connor and the T-800 as you try to put a stop to Skynet’s plans before the human race is annihilated. It’s coming to PC via Steam, Nintendo Switch, PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and last-gen console systems. It was initially slated to release on September 5 before being delayed to the end of October.
(Terminator 2D: No Fate includes gameplay that sees the player control future war John Connor in a fight against the machines, fleshing out that brief opening scene in the movie into an entire section of the video game.)
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.
Given that the LEGO brand has been slapped onto almost every kind of family-friendly multiplayer game you can think of at this point, from kart racers to Super Smash Bros clones and even a Rock Band spin-off, it’s surprising that it’s taken this long for the world’s biggest brick maker to construct its own monument to Mario Party. LEGO Party is something more than a block-based knockoff of Nintendo’s long-running virtual boardgame series, though. Sure, it might use Mario Party’s fundamentals as a baseplate to build upon, with a host of wacky minifigs in place of the Mushroom Kingdom’s finest, but every last piece here is absolutely pulsating with personality and there isn’t a single stud-based dud in the 60 minigames on offer. If lots of laughter is what you’re after, LEGO Party has all the right parts for assembling a fun night in with friends and family.
If you’ve ever played one of Nintendo’s party-starters before then the basics of LEGO Party will be as easy to grasp as a tiny coffee mug in a minifig’s fist. In this instance, the goal is to collect gold bricks and studs instead of stars and coins, as you and three other players move around four uniquely themed game boards littered with various stud-sapping hazards and potentially lucrative event spaces to land on. Depending on the board you choose, each session can be as short as six rounds or roughly 45 minutes but can be extended all the way up to three-hour-long, 24-round epics, and each round pits all four players against each other in a minigame designed to be easy to pick up for LEGO Juniors and old-timer Technic fans alike, but tricky to master.
Everybody can carry up to three power-ups that can be bought with studs at the shop or collected from Wheel of Fortune-style spins, and these can have dramatic leaderboard-levelling impacts, like teleporting your minifig directly to a gold brick space, or slowing your roll so you can increase your chances of moving the exact number of spaces you need. Many of these basics have been established in the Mario Party blueprint several times over, and Lego Party takes an ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fish the dog-eared instruction booklet out of the toy chest and rebuild it’ approach to keeping many of these proven core concepts intact.
However, there are some key elements to be found in LEGO Party’s Pirate, Ninjago, Space, and Theme Park boards that set them apart. For starters, each minigame is chosen democratically by moving your minifig in front of one of three options presented at the beginning of each round, and I liked that it meant my party was given a bit more control over which events we were able to enjoy in each evening’s session. (Of course, if you prefer a more randomised minigame experience like Mario Party, you can opt for that too.) I also prefer LEGO Party’s system of letting the results of each minigame determine the order of turns in each subsequent round, as opposed to Mario Party’s more rigid setup of dictating the order via a dice roll at the start and sticking with that all the way to the end. I find that LEGO Party’s results-driven method increases the ebb and flow of each board and brings extra incentive to do well in each minigame.
Each of LEGO Party’s wonderfully candy-coloured and brilliantly detailed boards has a number of special construction zones to land on.
More notably, each of LEGO Party’s wonderfully candy-coloured and brilliantly detailed boards has a number of special construction zones to land on, giving you the choice of two structures to build on that space that can dramatically alter the map and introduce a variety of game-changing additions. For example, in the Theme Park board you might opt to build the Extreme Zone, which introduces a gauntlet run of twitchy stunt challenges to successfully pull off in order to earn a gold brick. Alternatively you could go for the Royal Ramparts, which brings with it a ballista-based minigame for quickly snaring studs, and a catapult for lobbing you at another random player and stealing one of their gold bricks. Mixed in with the various other board-specific features, like when the Space map briefly transforms into a turn-based battle against a giant green alien, and each go-around of these game boards has felt fresh and fun over the dozen or so hours of playtime my family and I have put in together so far.
Everything is Awesome
It’s also been consistently funny, and that’s largely due to the inclusion of Ted Talker and Paige Turner, LEGO Party’s own quip-cracking commentary team. Seemingly inspired by gag-making game show playcallers like those of Wipeout or Holey Moley, Ted and Paige provide colourful context to each turn taken, as well as responding in real time to each player’s performance in a minigame – either bigging them up when they’re on top, or hilariously dragging them when they’re struggling. Surprisingly, even after multiple playthroughs of each of LEGO Party’s four boards I’ve barely heard the same joke twice, although in fairness that could be because half the time the commentary has been completely drowned out either by fits of uncontrollable laughter or salty bickering as a hard-earned gold brick is ruthlessly snatched away from another player. Seriously, if you’re playing with a competitive group, that tends to sting harder than suddenly finding a lost LEGO brick with the fleshy part of your bare foot.
The rest of the comedy in LEGO Party stems from the competitive chaos of the challenges themselves, and developer SMG Studio – who previously entertained with the slapstick-based shenanigans of its Moving Out series – has really outdone itself as far as crafting a construction derby of morish minigames. From memory-testing challenges to physics-driven races and rhythm-based dance-offs, Lego Party’s roster of minigames is as diverse as it is diverting, dripping with personality and creative flair. Besides, it’s always a great indication for how immediately engaging multiplayer minigames are when players get caught up in the competition without realising they haven’t even left the pre-game practice screen, which has been a regular occurrence during my time with LEGO Party so far.
Some minigames are terrific, toybox tributes to other titans of multiplayer mayhem, such as the obstacle course dash that feels straight out of Fall Guys or the zero-gravity space shuttle soccer that’s very much in the same orbit as Rocket League. Others lean into the familiarly tactile feel of playing with LEGO itself, like the one that involves trying to build monsters out of a pile of different-shaped blocks without being provided any instructions. There’s one challenge with four soccer goals to defend from an ever-increasing number of balls that plays out like an inverted game of Hungry Hungry Hippos, and another that sits each minifig on a LEGO motorbike and challenges you to navigate an undulating course like a cutesy recreation of Trials HD.
Some of the most popular minigames amongst the contestants on my couch are the ones that feel like nothing else we’ve ever played. There’s the frantic, four-way battle to smash your opponents’ LEGO vase with a brick boulder that gradually speeds up as it’s deflected off each player, or the nightclub-themed showdown that sees each of you scramble to fling your minifig onto a floating dance floor with elastic grappling hooks. Of course, everyone in my party has their own personal picks: I love anything on four-wheels, my son’s really into the zero-gravity games, while my daughter’s favourite is… basically whichever minigame she won most recently. But the quality of challenges here is so consistent across the game board, that even when we opt for a random minigame choice we’re rarely disappointed with whatever comes our way.
Everything is Cool When You’re Part of a Team
I also appreciate that success in these minigames is mostly reliant on a combination of skill and luck. You won’t find any cheap button-mashing challenge types here like the ones that often pop up in Mario Party, which I always felt put unnecessary wear and tear on my expensive game controllers, not to mention seeming somewhat unfair to the younger players in my lounge room who haven’t had decades of button-pressing practice pumped into their biceps.
There also aren’t any lopsided three-vs-one match types to force the majority to unfairly gang up on an individual, as LEGO Party’s minigames are always evenly split – either every man for himself, or face-offs in teams of two on the occasions you land on a Brick Battle square. These team-based clashes range from the pure intensity of a doubles game of air hockey through to more ridiculous co-op tasks where one person aims a T-shirt cannon and the other fires it at an audience of shirtless minifigs, and all of them demand effective communication and coordination between duos in order to get the win. In fact, I enjoyed these Brick Battles so much that I was slightly disappointed to find there were only nine of them included in the roster.
Even so, I am happy that LEGO Party doesn’t bother with random participation awards at the end of each board, like many Mario Party games do. There’s still plenty of twists and turns as fortune-changing chance spaces are sprinkled across the map in the closing stages, and many games I’ve played have seen the lead constantly change hands all the way through to the final round, but the winner is always clearly defined by the time you reach the end – not unfairly elevated into first position after the fact purely because of some arbitrary, unseen statistic like they happened to land on the most event spaces. It makes victory feel like it was achieved through genuine merit rather than more mystifying means. That doesn’t mean that other players won’t take any opportunity to knock you off the winner’s podium, though – and I mean that quite literally, especially during the riotously interactive results screen that typically devolves into delirious slap fights, slipping on banana peels, and background breakdancing.
Some minigames are terrific, toybox tributes to other titans of multiplayer mayhem.
While LEGO Party’s lineup of playable minifigs might not feature anyone as iconic as Mario or Yoshi, it makes up for it in terms of sheer numbers and the substantial suite of options for character customisation. Playing through each of the game boards or one of the curated minigame playlists earns XP that gradually unlocks new minifigs along a series of simple progression paths, as well as awarding you carrots that can be spent unlocking a separate collection of minifigs in the shop. There are more minifigs here than you could shake a mini twig at – by my count well over 200, from goth kid minifigs to person-shaped pizza slices and stylish ninja warriors – and as you unlock each one their individual parts can be used to craft entirely new creations of your own. Want a minifig with tigerprint pants, a Miami Vice-style linen jacket, and an American football helmet? Weird combination but sure, it’s all yours.
Speaking of bolting things together, I’d love to see LEGO Party leverage the many pop culture partnerships that the Danish brickmaker has amassed over the years and bring them to the party either in the form of expansion packs or future sequels. A LEGO Star Wars board with minigames designed around lightsaber battles and Death Star trench runs would be a treat, as would a LEGO Indiana Jones board that had event spaces to trigger Raiders of the Lost-ark style booby traps and boulders. Given Nintendo’s cosying up with the LEGO brand in recent times, it’s not inconceivable that we could even see a LEGO Mario LEGO Party expansion, at least in the Switch versions, to really bring things full circle. To be clear, nothing of this nature has been announced and I’m merely thinking out loud, but I’ve had a blast with LEGO Party so far, and I really hope that it’s set the fantastic plastic foundations for a series that’s here to stay.
Resident Evil has been one of the video game industry’s quintessential, flagship horror games for years now, delivering everything over the years from unsettling, atmospheric haunting to outright jumpscares. But as its development team continues to search for new ways to freak people out, a few of its leaders are admitting that they’re not always 100% certain what elements of Resident Evil are actually scary anymore.
This comes from our interview with director Koshi Nakanishi and producer Masato Kumazama at Tokyo Game Show 2025. We started by talking about Resident Evil: Requiem’s new protagonist, Grace, and her differences from the more action-oriented Leon S. Kennedy. That led to a discussion of why the series was pulling back on the heavy action elements in Requiem, as Nakanishi explains:
I think you can broadly classify Resident Evil titles on a scale of how much they’re like Resident Evil 2 or Resident Evil 4. Resident Evil 7 was definitely on the 2 side of that, as it returned to survival horror roots and was very acclaimed for that. Resident Evil Village built on that and added in more action and gunplay and brought it toard the RE4 side of that particular scale. But if we kept going in that direction there’s almost an inflation effect, where you have to keep adding more and more action to outdo the previous title, and by doing that you ultimately end up where Resident Evil 5 and 6 went, and although they’re still great games, the general consensus is that they pushed Resident Evil so far in the action direction that it was no longer horror. I didn’t want to have to do that with Resident Evil’s ninth title where I just tried to outdo the action in Village and ended up making something I didn’t want to make. Firmly swinging the scale toward the Resident Evil 2 style was our intention, and it’s almost an upgrade of that Resident 2 style.
But that led to a follow-up question where I asked Nakanishi about the other side of the coin, of trying to outdo their own scares with each new title. Nakanishi noted that their goal isn’t necessarily to innovate horror, but there is a certain numbing effect that working on these games for so long has, where they really need to see audience reactions to know if what they’ve made is actually scary or not.
“We’ve made so many of these that we can’t tell anymore until someone else plays it,” Nakanishi says. “There was actually a bit of a worry internally before we showed the [Resident Evil: Requiem] hands-off at SGF and the first hands-on at Gamescom, was this actually scary? Because we don’t even know anymore. This is our bread and better, what we make every day.”
I ended up asking Nakanishi if there was anything they had cut from the game for being too scary. He couldn’t recall anything specific that was actually removed from the game after it had been added, but he did remember one anecdote that might make fans of Ethan Winters chuckle:
“We didn’t really implement it, so it wasn’t cut, but- we don’t know if something’s scary. So we say, we’ll do this, we’ll do that, we keep adding on stuff, and at one point we were like, what if [Grace] gets a big gash in her leg, or her leg gets cut off, because that thing attacks her, and oh my god it’s so scary, but we talked ourselves down a little bit.”
So at least we know Grace probably isn’t going to have the same issues Ethan did with hands. Probably.
Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. You can find her posting on BlueSky @duckvalentine.bsky.social. Got a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.
IGN recently held a fan-voted tournament to determine the greatest racing game of all time. There were a total of 32 entries split across four categories: Arcade Racing, Simulation, Street Racing, and Wild Card.
While Mario Kart 8 Deluxe ultimately won the fan vote and was crowned champion, it isn’t exactly known for its realism. Several other entries in the tournament give you the chance to drive cars based on real-life counterparts, including a wide variety of different Toyota models.
The Toyota brand has been around for almost 90 years and competes in several different racing series, meaning there are lots of different models that can be included in racing games. And some games make very good use of that. Here are five standout titles that were popular in our fan-voted tournament and also put you in the driver’s seat of Toyota cars.
Forza Horizon 5
Forza Horizon 5 has the rare distinction of getting a 10 from IGN, and it finished as the runner-up in our fan-voted tournament, so we think it’s safe to call this one of the best racing games ever made. One of its many strengths is the dizzying number of cars in its roster. It had more than 500 vehicles at launch, and DLCs and seasonal additions have brought that number to more than 900 in the nearly four years since it released. That includes 32 different models of Toyota, ranging from classic sports cars like the 1974 Celica GT to pickup trucks like the 2020 Tundra TRD Pro to rally cars like the 2021 GR Yaris to modern sports cars like the 2022 GR86.
Gran Turismo 7
Gran Turismo 7 won the Simulation region of our tournament and made it to the Final Four before being ousted by Forza Horizon 5. It was a very close battle between the two, so this is clearly a beloved title. And IGN gave it a 9, so we’re big fans too. Like the game that defeated it, GT7 also sports an incredible number of different cars. It had 424 cars at launch and has since brought that number to more than 500, which includes 41 Toyota models. In addition to the kinds of sports cars, rally cars, and pickups that are present in Forza Horizon 5, there are also LMP1 cars like the TS030 Hybrid ’12 and TS050 Hybrid ’16, as well as concept cars like the FT-1 and FT-1 VGT.
Forza Motorsport 4
Forza Motorsport 4 might be 14 years old, but it still holds up as an outstanding racing game and celebration of all things four-wheeled. It had a tough draw in our tournament, dominating its first-round matchup before having to go up against the juggernaut that is Gran Turismo 7 in the second round. IGN gave Forza Motorsport 4 a 9.5, and like the two games that preceded it on this list, its vast selection of cars was a big reason why. That included 19 different models of Toyotas, highlighted by the S class 2002 Top Secret 0-300 Supra, one of the most powerful Unicorn cars in the game.
Project Gotham Racing 2
Project Gotham Racing 2 might not have catapulted into mainstream popularity like the previous games on this list, but IGN gave it a 9.5 and it holds a special place in our hearts, largely because of its focus on style in addition to speed. You earn Kudos points for doing things like powersliding, catching air, driving clean races, and drafting behind opponents. And many goals require that you finish with a certain number of Kudos points, meaning you have to balance driving fast with driving pretty, providing a gameplay experience that separates it from other racing games. That sense of style extended to the cars themselves, too. There were three Toyota models in the game, and they’re all classics: the 1967 2000GT, MR2 Spider, and 1996 Supra.
Midnight Club 3: DUB Edition Remix
In what some might have considered a surprise, Midnight Club 3: DUB Edition Remix made it to the quarterfinals of our tournament and put up a solid fight against Forza Horizon 5. This is the updated version of Rockstar’s third game in the series, which added new vehicles, songs, races, maps, updated UI, and brought back Tokyo from Midnight Club 2. It was a marked improvement over said predecessor, and while it was never the fastest or prettiest game around, it more than made up for that with depth and variety. IGN gave it an 8.8, and it let you drive, customize, and fine-tune the 1998 Toyota Supra Turbo.
