Rebirth and third entry are now in development for Switch 2.
If you’ve been keeping up with Final Fantasy VII Remake on the Switch 2, then you’ll probably already know that its direct sequel, Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, along with the untitled third entry, will also head to the hybrid console in the future.
Rebirth represents quite a drastic departure from Remake, introducing a vast open world that serves as an almost direct contrast to the tightly-designed environments found in the first entry. This will no doubt sow doubts in fans’ minds about just how well it might hold up on the Switch 2. After all, Rebirth’s visuals were already noted to have suffered from a few downgrades at launch when compared to Remake.
Nintendo has released an update for Pokémon Legends: Z-A, with some handy item adjustments and a list of bug fixes for the game’s Mega Dimension DLC.
The Switch and Switch 2 Pokémon adventure has today been patch to Version 2.0.1, which makes both berries and Mega Shards easier to buy and hold onto. With the update installed, you will now be able to purchase multiple berries at once from food vendors. Mega Dimension owners, meanwhile, will gain the ability to buy berries at Nouveau Café’s Truck.
Speaking of Mega Dimension, players with the DLC purchased will see a range of bugs fixed — including Shiny Pokémon not registering in your Pokédex, a side mission progression blocker, and an issue where the game’s weather was stuck being sunny (if only this was true in real life).
Launched last month, Mega Dimension adds a fresh story campaign to Pokémon Legends: Z-A, starring a donut chef and the Mythical Pokémon Hoopa. It’s set within an alternative Hyperspace version of Lumiose City, where the franchise’s typical level 100 cap can be surpassed. Most excitingly, it adds a swathe of all-new Mega Evolutions — though none as freaky as the fan-favorite Mega Starmie.
Looking ahead, the Pokémon series celebrates its 30th anniversary in 2026, and fans are eagerly awaiting news on the next generation of mainline games. Many expect these to be announced on the franchise’s anniversary during its annual Pokémon Presents livestream, due on February 27. There’s also the promising-looking life simulation spin-off Pokémon Pokopia to look forward to.
For now, Pokémon Legends Z-A’s latest full patch notes lie below:
Pokémon Legends: Z-A: Ver. 2.0.1 (Released January 21, 2026)
Adjustments Applied for Obtaining Items:
When purchasing Berries from a food stall, you can now purchase multiple Berries at once.
After beginning the story of the Pokémon Legends: Z-A – Mega Dimension DLC, you will be able purchase Berries from the clerk at Nouveau Café’s Truck No. 3.
The maximum number of Mega Shards you can carry has been increased from 999 to 9,999.
Fixes Applied for the Following Confirmed Issues Related to Pokémon Legends: Z-A – Mega Dimension Content:
When using moves in certain pockets of hyperspace, Pokémon may sometimes have faced a different direction from the intended target.
There were cases in which the weather remained sunny and did not change.
Shiny Pokémon obtained prior to the release of Pokémon Legends: Z-A – Mega Dimension may not have been registered to the Mega Evolution Pokédex, even if their Mega Stones were obtained after becoming available in the DLC.
During missions, images from unrelated scenes may occasionally have been displayed.
Players may not have been able to complete side mission 188 “Start Special Scanning!” even after earning the maximum number of survey points. (Players who are already experiencing this issue should be able to progress after entering and exiting hyperspace.)
Tom Phillips is IGN’s News Editor. You can reach Tom at tom_phillips@ign.com or find him on Bluesky @tomphillipseg.bsky.social
Ubisoft’s bloodbath of game cancellations and restructuring yesterday has attracted the expected fiery response from unionised workers, with the French game industry union Solidaires Informatique calling a half-day strike today. Cost-cutting and potential layoffs aside, the strikers are protesting against Ubisoft’s decision to mandate a full return to office, with workers given an annual allowance of work from home days instead – something a publisher executive has justified as a move “to enhance collective efficiency” and “the sense of belonging”.
Similar to the Sonic movies, the Mario movies are expanding their big-screen universe by introducing and surprising audiences with more characters. Mario’s companion Yoshi was teased at the end of the first movie, and since then, the official trailers for the Super Mario Galaxy Movie have introduced Bowser Jr. and Rosalina.
Speaking to GamesRadar+ recently, Mario’s movie voice actor Chris Pratt has apparently hinted there are at least “a couple more” characters not featured in the official trailers for the new movie that should excite fans. Here’s the full exchange:
Pokémon Legends: Z-A has received its first update of the year today for the Switch and Switch 2. When you download it, your copy will be updated to Version 2.0.1.
It focuses on some adjustments for obtaining certain items (including an increase to the maximum number of Mega Shards) and also applies a whole bunch of fixes to previously confirmed Mega Dimension expansion issues.
Kensuke Tanabe, veteran producer at Nintendo who became known for his work on the Metroid Prime series, has reportedly announced his retirement.
As covered by VGC, Tanabe’s announcement comes via an interview with the Japanese magazine Nintendo Dream, which has been uploaded online by a user on Weibo. Tanabe states that Metroid Prime 4: Beyond was to be his final game at the company, with his protégé producer Risa Tabata succeeding him should another Prime game be made in the future.
You ever accidentally find out that you’re the sovereign of an entire nation as dictated by a prophecy even though you’re technically just random nobody, and so you wind-up being the one to have to make all the decisions about how your nation is run? No? Well, that’s fine, but if you’d like that to be you, I’ll introduce you to Sovereign Tower, a management RPG where you send off your knights of the round table to deal with all manner of quests.
Elden Ring: Nightreign’s DLC, The Forsaken Hollows, has been out for a month and a half now, which means players have had plenty of time to get used to its two new Nightfarers, two new end bosses, and numerous new night bosses. But one element of the new content that everyone is still really struggling with, even after weeks of practice: the new DLC map. It’s really difficult, really confusing, and seemingly no one likes it that much, leading to a rash of negative Steam reviews and a lot of failed runs.
The new map is technically not even a new map, though it may as well be. It’s a Shifting Earth event, meaning it may or may not be active at any given time when you’re playing a DLC boss, with other options being the default map or one of four other Shifting Earths available. However, unlike the other Shifting Earth events, which only transform one part of the map significantly, the Great Hollow shifting earth essentially is a totally different area. Nothing is the same. There’s no castle at the center, no ravine running down the middle, no lake in the south or cliffs up north.
Instead, the Great Hollow is centered around a giant crystal in the middle which seems to have crashlanded, splitting the land around it into broken up cliffs separated into multiple levels. Built into and scattered around the cliffs and canyons are various ruins full of enemies, alongside the more familiar structures such as churches, forts, and mines. The actual in-game map of the Great Hollow has multiple levels with different points of interest on each level, and it’s necessary to use the game’s spirit springs carefully to fall down to lower levels and shoot back up to higher ones so you can actually get around effectively.
Additionally, the Great Hollow’s center crystal contains a major buff for the party that can be seriously clutch for a round’s final boss fights. But in order to obtain it, you need to find and break several smaller, colored crystals scattered around the map, whose locations change on each attempt.
So why is this causing everyone so much pain? Well, for one, because of the multi-level map, it’s far more difficult to tell at a glance what route you should take on a given run. Normally, as you’re flying into a new game, you’ll pop the map open and give it a brief scan, mentally planning out a route that will ideally give your team a few extra flasks, a mine for a smithing stone, and a gradually more challenging line of boss encounters so you can collect runes and weapons and level up. In the Great Hollow, there are so many different vertical levels to account for, plus multiple map levels to swap between, that it’s even more difficult to route a run and make a plan that will actually see your team effectively get stronger over the course of two nights. And that’s only exacerbated by the need to account for breaking crystals as you go, without knowing where they’re going to end up until the second day.
But by far the worst thing about Great Hollow is the giant, gaping chasm running through the middle of it.
Unlike Elden Ring, Nightreign doesn’t have fall damage. This was a big point of difference in gameplay style when it first launched, as Nightreign encourages players to sprint across maps, leap off ledges, and even climb up the sides of cliffs. Elden Ring, by contrast, favors a somewhat slower, more cautious playstyle. So over the last year, a lot of Elden Ring players have slowly adjusted to Nightreign’s rhythm of running and jumping without a lot of hesitancy, and by and large, that’s worked out well for them, because there really aren’t many places where falling in Nightreign is dangerous. You can technically fall off the outside edge of the map, and the Crater Shifting Earth does have a big lava pit that’s not great to fall into, but both of those are fairly simple to avoid.
Great Hollow, by contrast, has a death pit running down parts of the middle of the map, and it’s annoyingly hard to see. Because of how the ledges are positioned, it’s easy to look over a ledge, think you’re good to jump down, and end up falling to your death. What’s worse, for some reason Nightreign doesn’t treat death falls the same way it treats deaths to enemies. If an enemy kills you, you just spawn back at the last Grace you tapped, and your leftover Runes are either dropped near where you died or picked up by a nearby enemy. But when you fall, Nightreign will seemingly randomly drop you somewhere along a ledge near your death point, which could be above, below, or across from where you jumped off. But then it leaves your Runes back on the ledge where you started. Which means it’s possible (and even likely) that you’ll spawn on a far ledge, with your Runes somewhere behind you across a death pit, and no easy route back.
Whew! All this is to say that the Great Hollow, while aesthetically beautiful and thematically cool, is kind of a pain in the neck, and Steam reviewers are trying to let FromSoftware know. While Elden Ring: Nightreign itself has mostly positive reviews, Forsaken Hollows is currently sitting at Mostly Negative reviews for the last 30 days, with only 30% of 1,347 reviews this past month being positive.
“The new map is poorly designed, overly difficult and boring,” reads one review from today. “Takes forever to traverse, interesting points of interest are often too deep into the edge of the map to get through completely, boss battle tower is a damage-sponge time-wasting chore. New dlc pois in new and old map are full of enemy encounters designed to cheese you like it’s darksouls. Spend hours learning and memorizing crystal locations from youtube videos just so you can try to not lose in a bad map. Underground ruins filled with a dozen rot kindred that homing one shot you.”
Another reads: “The characters and bosses are great but the new “map” is absolutely horrible and is ruining the experience of the game as a whole.”
And a third: “Love the bosses and new classes but the new map is just trash. There was Zero NEED to add gaps in the map to kill YOU. You might as well add fall damage to the game.
“That map is NOT FUN!!! It’s a freaking chore. I avoided it completely until I am forced to play it to compete certain story lines.
“I am now forced to spend hours memorising the bloody thing because you will literally end up locations you cannot get out because the only bridge is light years away.
“An otherwise great DLC ruined by this nonsense map. EITHER GET RID OF THE MAP, MAKE IT OPTIONAL OR COVER THE GIANT HOLES.”
I also spotted a recent positive review that simply read, “the new map is ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ terrible but everything’s so good.”
Not everyone hates the map, and some FromSoftware fans are pointing out that this may be a bit of a skill issue. A recent Reddit thread about the Steam reviews states, “The more I play, the more I feel like it was fantastically designed.” And the replies themselves seem divided between acknowledging its flaws and celebrating what they love about it.
As someone who spent last night falling into chasms on this map, I can see both points here. Great Hollow really is beautiful and unique, requiring a very different gameplay flow and better team coordination so you don’t all end up separated and confused. But it’s pretty challenging to learn, and the only way to learn really is to fail at it a lot. After already putting over 100 hours into Nightreign, I’m not having the best time simultaneously trying to learn all the new bosses, two new characters, and the new map simultaneously – though, I guess you could argue, that’s just the FromSoftware experience.
Probably a fix for where the game places you after you fall, and maybe a little bit more clarity on the minimap would solve some of this. We’ll keep an eye out for a Nightreign patch to address it. But in the meantime, just keep practicing.
This is probably the umpteenth time I’ve said I’m not someone who plays many shooters, but here I am saying it again, because an FPS has rocked up that has clocked my interest. It’s called Firestarters, an arena shooter that’s a bit like Quake, a bit like Rollerdome, and looks like good, bloody fun.
War. War never changes. What does change, however, are board games. Those suckers change all the time, with thousands of new ones coming out every year, sometimes in big boxes, others in little ones, and occasionally ones based on a popular property. That’s the case with Fallout: Power Play, a small-area control card game designed by Resurrectionist Games and published by Modiphius Games, currently up for pre-order. It’s a small game with some good bones to it, but its compact design is more of a hindrance than a benefit.
Fallout: Power Play puts two to four players in command of four possible factions, each with their own unique decks and special ability. These are the Brotherhood of Steel (good at completing missions to earn influence and hunkering down in a location), Super Mutants (lots of big and powerful unit cards to deploy at locations), the Enclave (excellent at disrupting other players’ turns), and Raiders (thieves, every last one of them).
On their turn, players deploy agents to locations, complete quests to earn rewards, and use their faction-specific ability, all in a bid to earn the most influence in the different places, netting you victory points. Whichever player has their agent holding a location at the end of the turn gains influence over the spot, with the top play considered to be “dominating” and earning a victory point. The first player to reach 10 points triggers the end game and scoring, with whoever has the most points winning at the end of that round.
Things get shaken up a bit thanks to the random Wasteland Encounter cards you draw at the start of each round, and unique Power Play cards that each player has in their deck. These events can range from spawning ghouls that attack everyone’s agents to even detonating an Atom Bomb Baby and destroying everything at the location(s) where players have the most influence. That one is a particularly fun card to see safely from the sidelines, as all of your friends’ units are blasted out of existence all at once in the region they were fighting so fiercely over.
If the encounter cards are the right hand of chaos in Power Play, then the titular Power Play cards in your deck are the left hand of chaos. These cards have the potential to be played not only on your turn, but also in response to other players’ actions. Think an Instant spell in Magic: The Gathering. This resulted in some tense back-and-forth, play-and-counterplay moments with my friends, and I often found myself holding my breath whenever I would put down one of my more powerful cards in hopes they wouldn’t get countered or worse.
While at first glace, Power Play may appear to be more of a simple “bigger number better” war game, the more I played, the more nuance and strategy I found in it. Each location only has spots for four agents, and in games with fewer players, this allows for you to allocate multiple agent resources to a location. But regardless of how much you are overpowering the other players in a spot, you will still only gain a single victory point at the end of the round. On the flip side, every round where you don’t have an agent at a location will result in your losing an influence at that location (to a minimum of 1), so it pays to spread out your forces.
This management almost makes Power Play into more of a worker placement game, and I often found myself opting to have one stronghold as my main “VP generator” and then spreading out and setting up at the other locations to pull off big influence gain turns by completing quest cards that would net me a boost in influence for a spot. Whenever I managed to pull off these well-laid plans, it tickled that good spot in my brain and never got old.
Resurrectionist Games, Power Play’s designer, has put together a card game with solid bones, and its focus on capturing and holding locations reminds me of the hot new TCG Riftbound. That said, issues surrounding the delivery and presentation of the game blemish and knock Power Play down some notches. The most disappointing of which is that the whole product feels less like a Fallout card game and more like something with the beloved property slapped on the side of it.
Despite the four factions and other nods to the Fallout universe, I never felt as though Power Play did much with the property. Instead of decks featuring notable characters from the games that fans would recognize, the designers opted for bland and generic fill-ins instead. Taking the Brotherhood of Steel deck, for instance, a group whose Power Armor is arguably just as synonymous with the series as the signature blue-and-yellow vault suits, your forces are composed of no-name cards like “Knight” or “Elder.” Instead of a generic Elder, why not have the lead agent be a character like Arthur Maxson or Sarah Lyons?
The home base locations of each of the factions feel rather soulless and are identical to one another from a gameplay standpoint. While “activate a location” is an option you can take on your turn, there are only two locations that have something to activate, with the others being the starting strongholds of each faction. They are “War Camp” or “Raider Fortress” instead of something memorable from the series, like Nuka-World or even a Vault. I would have appreciated these spots to be two-sided, with a generic, ability-less side and the other having an action associated with it and pulled from somewhere players would recognize if you were in the mood for a more advanced game mode. Alas, no such luck.
This more uninspired approach extends into the art and even the card descriptions. Keeping on the Brotherhood train, the Initiate and Field Scribe agent cards feature nearly identical character faces, and cards like their “Knight” read as “Each time Knight kills an Enemy…” which feels generic. Do these things impact how the game plays? No. But if you’re going to adapt a well-known property, you want it to feel meaningful, and considering the attention to detail I’ve come to expect from Modiphius, especially with Fallout, thanks to the Fallout TTRPG they also publish, Power Play just doesn’t get there.
My other main gripe with Power Play has to do with some of the quality control and decisions involved with how the game is packaged. Now, I’m all for a game being nice and compact; heck, one of the most prestigious awards I can give (in my mind anyway) is the Glovebox Award, given to games that are small and fun enough that I always want them with me wherever I go (Flip 7 is an example). It’s rare that I’ve found a game that feels too small – but Power Play does. Inside its box are spots for two decks of cards, with a small gap in between. Now, these two spots aren’t quite deep enough to contain all of the standard-sized cards included, causing some annoying shifting, and unfortunately, you can just forget sleeving your cards.
Fallout: Power Play also uses tokens to mark each faction’s influence in the regions and other little reminders. Unfortunately, these tokens are incredibly tiny. And while the faction tokens are at least color-coded, some of the reminder tokens, all of which are about 3/4 the size of a dime and contain text, are barely legible from anything more than maybe six inches from your face, let alone from across a table. Power Play may also be the first board game I have that uses tokens but doesn’t come with a small bag to keep them in. And to make matters more annoying, they easily slip into the small gap between the two decks. Thankfully, my cardboard hobby has granted me extra baggies that I was able to put them in, but beforehand, more than a couple of times, I spent more time than I care to admit trying to get some of these damn cardboard pieces out of the box.
Fallout: Power Play is a great example of how a bunch of little missed opportunities and annoyances can add up, and it’s a shame. This is one of those products that I can see potential and promise if Resurrectionist Games takes a bit more care into any future properties they adapt. The underlying game is fun, and I can imagine a day down the road where Power Play becomes the system, and you can buy additional sets, akin to, say, Smash Up!, and you can have the Brotherhood of Steel facing off against the forces of the Borg from Star Trek, or the demons of Hell from Doom pushing back Super Mutants. That’s a game I would love to play, and if they put a bit more care into those sets, you can count me in day one. It may even make it into the glovebox.
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