Warhammer 40,000 video games have been on a great run lately, with the likes of Space Marine 2 leading the charge of well-received, successful titles. The recently released Space Marine – Master Crafted Edition, however, may be Warhammer 40,000’s first video game misstep in some time.
Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine – Master Crafted Edition is a re-release of Relic Entertainment’s 2011 action game, Space Marine. Both Games Workshop and publisher Sega are not calling this a remaster. Instead they point to quality-of-life and graphical improvements “that take the Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine experience to the next level.”
These include higher fidelity and improved textures, 4k resolution, “improved” character models, a modernized control scheme and interface overhaul, and remastered audio.
Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine – Master Crafted Edition launched on June 10 across Xbox Series X and S and PC, and straight into Game Pass (there’s no word on a PS5 version). It’s going down better on Game Pass, where gaming is often more disposable and subscribers are free to try games out and discard them on a whim if they don’t like what they see. On Steam, however, where Space Marine – Master Crafted Edition costs $39.99 / £34.99, it’s getting destroyed.
Space Marine – Master Crafted Edition currently has a ‘mostly negative’ user review rating on Valve’s platform. Complaints revolve around the high price of the game relative to the changes it makes over the Anniversary Edition, and, on those changes, bemusement in response to what many believe is worse usability.
This, coupled with struggles to find others to play with online, has caused some to call Space Marine – Master Crafted Edition a “cash grab.”
“I was very excited for the idea of this being updated but honestly? I prefer the older version,” reads one negative Steam user review. “It feels better and looks better. Why couldn’t this just be an update or something? And for the price tag it just feels very meh. And this is one of my all time favourite games too. Just gonna install the older version and play through that.”
“Too bad, I really wanted to play this game,” reads another. “No players in PvP multiplayer. No players in co-op Exterminatus horde mode. FOV problem, aiming down sight makes 1000000x zoom. No option to change FOV. Maybe get it on sale after upgrades and updates and working enabled crossplay matchmaking. Refunded, sadly.”
“I bought and get refund” said one disgruntled customer. “Buy the Anniversary Edition, it’s almost the same but it isn’t a cash grab (around 7€ for a key).”
“Look how they massacred my boy,” declared another.
It’s a similar sentiment across social media, Discords, and subreddits. “Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine Master Crafted Edition is a mess,” said redditor KitsuneLynx, highlighting problems even on Xbox.
“This game came out a few days ago and has shown itself to be an absolute mess and disappointment. When I heard this remake was coming out, I was so hyped, I was curious what they’d do and was excited to play it on Xbox after having played it on PC a while back. I was disappointed to say the least.
“This game is a buggy, janky mess that didn’t bother to fix anything and instead made a worse UI, odd visual changes, etc. Why make the Orks all Goffs now? The colors helped recognize each unit, now they all blend together to the point it’s hard to decipher which is which. WHERE ARE THE DEDICATED SERVERS? Not to mention the NEW jank and bugs that came with this release that weren’t present in the previous remaster. It didn’t bother to fix the jank or make the game feel revitalized, this IS the definition of a lazy cash grab. Charging this game for 40+ USD is criminal.
“Crossplay is off by default which just leads to the game shooting itself in the foot when it comes to vacant servers. My wife also just experienced a bug which is more common than it should be where when you boot up the game, there is a chance for your save file to corrupt and reset ALL OF YOUR PROGRESS. Why hasn’t this game received a patch yet? I can’t imagine all the other bugs I haven’t seen yet.
“If you’re planning on playing this game, either get it on Game Pass or wait for a sale and mega patch, otherwise stay on Space Marine 2 or play the remaster on PC.”
It’s worth noting that there are players who are having a reasonable time with the game, although anecdotally most of them appear to be on Game Pass. Similarly, those who have never played Space Marine before seem to be enjoying experiencing the events that lead into last year’s blockbuster hit, Space Marine 2. Steam, then, appears to be the focal point of the backlash.
The hope is that Sega will announce incoming improvements sooner rather than later, as Space Marine is generally remembered fondly by those who played it back in the day. In 2025, with Warhammer 40,000 at the peak of its popularity and with a flood of newcomers sparked by the success of Space Marine 2, it’s important Space Marine gets it right. The Inquisition, after all, is always watching.
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.
All the while, MindsEye’s troubled launch saw the developer cancel sponsored streams, and reports of players securing refunds, even from the normally stubborn Sony.
Hotfix #1 is out now on PC (5.7GB) and PS5 (2GB), with Xbox Series X and S (4GB) to follow, Build A Rocket Boy said in a post on Discord that also included patch notes.
“Today we’ve deployed Hotfix #1 tasked on an expedited timeline as the first in a series of patches aimed at addressing your feedback and enhancing the game experience,” it said.
Across all platforms, the hotfix aims to implement CPU and GPU performance improvements and memory optimizations. It also reduces the difficulty for the CPR mini-game, adds a new setting to disable or modify Depth of Field, and fixes missing controls in the MineHunter and Run Dungeon mini-games.
On PC, there are new pop-up warnings for PCs that have Hardware Accelerated GPU Scheduling disabled, and PCs with CPUs that have potential crash issues.
Build A Rocket Boy said this patch also fixes the memory leak issue that had been causing most crashes reported by players. “Performance optimisation is our number one focus and an ongoing commitment that will take further time,” it added.
“We will continue to provide frequent and transparent updates. Our team is committed to do everything possible to urgently action your feedback,” Build A Rocket Boy said.
Build A Rocket Boy has said that by the end of June, players can expect ongoing performance and stability improvements, a rebalanced ‘hard’ difficulty setting, animation fixes, and AI improvements.
The question is whether the developer, which was founded by former Rockstar North chief Leslie Benzies, can turn MindsEye around. On Steam, which does not paint the whole picture of MindsEye’s current popularity, the game hit a peak concurrent player count of 3,302 on launch, but had a 24-hour peak of just 786 players. At the time of this article’s publication, 435 people were playing on Steam, with a ‘mixed’ user review rating.
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.
Right, put your hands on the table. Please. I won’t ask again. Thank you. Stellar Bladearrived on PC as of June 11th, and naturally that’s brought a new lease of life the the modding community who’d only had a demo to play with up until that point. Around 40% of the game’s mods over on the Nexus right now are a bit risqué, so we’ve done you a favour and picked out the three filthiest on offer.
Don’t feel you have to thank us. Well, me. This is all part of the job description, alongside all of the holding power to account and providing a service to the consumer stuff. Odds are my Pulitzer’s already in the post.
MindsEye may look like an exciting, GTA-adjacent action-adventure in short clips and GIFs, but actually playing it through to the end of its story has revealed an unfinished, overly ambitious project that’s plagued with performance problems, makes precious little use of its open world, and is crippled by unconvincing combat and dull mission design.
While it’s natural to draw comparisons with GTA, in basic terms MindsEye is more akin to the Mafia series. That is, it’s a tightly linear, single-player story where the open world largely exists as a backdrop for you to drive from mission to mission. That doesn’t end up serving it very well. Mafia is great. MindsEye is not.
You are Jacob Diaz, a former soldier and drone operator who has been railroaded out of the military after a botched mission, albeit with an extremely rare piece of tech still embedded in his neck. He’s a pretty thinly drawn amnesiac hero overall, with no especially memorable characteristics beyond his ability to follow instructions. After securing a security job at mega-company Silva Corp in the Las Vegas-inspired city of Redrock, Diaz is quickly embroiled in an AI-gone-bad, robots-gone-wild adventure that starts slow, gets a little more intriguing a few hours in, and then ends like someone’s yanked the plug out of the wall.
MindsEye does have style, and its near-future setting is accomplished and credible.
Credit where it’s due, MindsEye does have style, and its near-future setting is accomplished and credible. It fuses locations like normal homes and strip malls that wouldn’t look out of place in the present day with the proliferation of high-tech robotics and drones. The result is a world that appears appropriately futuristic, but doesn’t feel alien or unrecognisable. From an aesthetic perspective, it really does appear a few years from now in a well-executed way.
It also includes a genuinely impressive fleet of vehicles – and there’s a practicality to them that makes them look like real cars from, say, five to 10 years in the future. It basically takes modern trends – like today’s massive, chunkily-accented pick-up trucks, teardrop-shaped electric sedans, and battery-powered retromods – and successfully projects a decade of tweaks onto them. More importantly, the handling is actually genuinely good in a way open-world action games rarely manage. The cars you actually get to drive are weighty and really love to be whipped into high-speed handbrake turns through the realistically thick traffic. There’s none of that stickiness that’s typical of GTA clones like Sleeping Dogs (which I love regardless) or Saints Row (which I do not). You know, the kind of superficial handling that feels like you’re turning the world under the car, rather than the car itself.
Unfortunately, this is largely where the praise stops.
Mind Over Matter
The very first mission is a short drive into the desert to shoot four robots who barely have the vigour to fire back, and the second requires you to track a slow-moving thief by monitoring a security console and… switching cameras. It’s not exactly an explosive opening stanza, but things don’t get that much better when the bullets really start flying. It’s around 10 hours of the most boringly straightforward missions from the past decades of open-world action games.
Combat against the handful of bot types and human soldiers is mostly just plain, and dud enemy AI doesn’t make for particularly satisfying shootouts. Humans are the least sensible. Sometimes they take cover; sometimes they just walk towards you waiting to get shot. Run out to meet them and they’re confusingly slow to react (not that this is a particularly strong tactic, as there is no melee attack).
Dud enemy AI doesn’t make for particularly satisfying shootouts.
It’s just janky. On the one hand, you can actually shoot individual pieces – including weapons – off the bots. That’s nice. On the other, put a round into a human standing behind some scenery and they’ll often blink back into cover with no linking animation whatsoever. That’s shoddy.
It’s not due to a lack of firepower, because MindsEye does feature plenty of guns, although it mostly just chucks them into your arsenal with so little fanfare I usually didn’t notice. I’d just spot something new in my weapon wheel, like another assault rifle, or some kind of energy blaster. It’s rarely clear about what you should be using at any given moment, and it doesn’t seem to matter much.
The action does improve towards the back end of the story, as Diaz gets access to all his partner drone’s special perks. The ability to zap an enemy robot and turn it into an instant ally gives the action some zest that it absolutely lacks out of the gate. Your drone’s grenade ability is also neat for a while, but it’s probably a bit too effective at clearing out enemies ahead. I spent most of the late game missions as my drone, dropping endless grenades on soldiers and robots from high above. It made what turned out to be the penultimate battle into one of the easiest because the bad guys just have no defense against this.
The primary problem I had with MindsEye, though, was its drastically uneven performance on my high-end PC (RTX 4080, Intel Core Ultra 9 185H). While the auto settings placed the bulk of the configurable options at ‘High’ – and capped the frame rate at 60fps – my playthrough was rife with issues. It’s regularly blurry and choppy when panning, and the frame rate would flutter and sometimes hang. During one car chase performance chugged to a crawl and was only barely playable. Sometimes even the cutscenes would stutter and display ghosting. Experimenting with lowering the settings hasn’t yielded much in the way of positive results. It’s in really rough shape technically.
To be fair, there are definitely moments in MindsEye when it looks quite stunning. Explosions are excellent. The sunlight piercing through Redrock’s glitzy hotels is seriously snazzy. I liked the sheer scale and complexity of the Silva factory’s rocket loader, and at one point the metallic sheen of a parked jet in the desert glare stopped me in my tracks. When it runs well and looks good, it looks very good. But six months ago I played through Indiana Jones and the Great Circle on this machine and it performed fabulously. MindsEye does not. It’s like Steven Seagal circa 1990: Looks cool – just doesn’t know how to run properly.
It’s like Steven Seagal circa 1990: Looks cool – just doesn’t know how to run properly.
Performance optimisation won’t solve MindsEye’s myriad other issues, though. A lot of these are really just baked into how it’s designed. Too often, the missions are simply restrictive and dull. All you can do is drive a pre-assigned vehicle to a marker. That triggers a cutscene. Then you shoot everything. Then drive somewhere else. It’s all so rigid and leaves no room for the kind of goofing around or antics you can get into in comparable games, and there’s certainly none of the emergent fun you constantly get in something like GTA. MindsEye rarely trusts us to even park at a mission marker; it generally just splutters into a cutscene when you get close enough.
It doesn’t help that there are no radio stations or songs to listen to as you’re commuting between missions. Travel time from A to B mostly seems to exist to feed you phone calls to prod the story along a little further. Exploration is actively disencouraged, and you’ll be constantly scolded for not heading directly to your destination, or failed out. There’s no reason to explore anyhow, as it isn’t the sort of living world you might have expected. Police don’t even respond to Diaz’s crimes, so what’s even the point?
And there’s not really anything out there to find. Hunting for a cool vehicle to use? Don’t bother. Other vehicles are off-limits. Wreck the car you were assigned? That’s a mission fail. You won’t even be able to get out of it if it’s burning. It’s a baffling choice for a game like this – the entire genre is built around stealing cars.
MindsEye has some good ideas. An effective stealth mission mid-way is a positive change of pace, and there are some unexpected puzzles late in the piece that gave me a break from blasting. But it relegates the rest of them to its roughly two hours of cutscenes and wastes their potential. At one point a squad of robots are set sprinting after my car at highway speeds. While I was preparing myself for a potentially thrilling chase, the robots caught the car and destroyed it before the cinematic finished. This kind of thing is a real rug pull in a game that, a few hours earlier, made me play through a frustrating, one-off CPR minigame that could’ve just been a cutscene.
Even apparent bosses die in cutscenes. And in an unforgivable transgression, if there’s a way to skip them (even when replaying missions and watching them a second time), I couldn’t find it.
Bots on Your Mind
The kicker is, even if you get swept up in the sunk-cost fallacy of finishing this 10-hour campaign just to see how the story pans out, the ending itself is a colossal anticlimax. I’ll obviously refrain from spilling the specifics of the final moment, but it’s impossible to complete any assessment of MindsEye’s defects without explaining how deeply and desperately unsatisfying I found it. Story threads are left dangling and reams of questions remain unanswered. It’s not an artistic cliffhanger; it’s just vague and unearned. It’s an ending that feels like the writer was out of fresh paper and this was the only thing that would fit on the last line of the script’s final page. Picture Ghostbusters crashing to credits a few seconds after they cross the streams and you’re about there. There’s a PS after the unskippable credits, but it only makes things worse.
Well, until what happens after the finale, that is. After the story wrapped I was simply tossed back into the open world as… some random weirdo in a crop top. He has some kind of… base? With things in it I can interact with that do… nothing? There’s no explanation of how anything works, no direction, and no purpose.
Confused, I left the building in search of a vehicle, but even here you can’t carjack civilians, and you can’t steal parked cars. I got in the only one that would allow me to enter and drove to an icon that looked like the Hamburglar stealing a car. There was another car there, glowing, but I couldn’t enter it. I shot at the bystanders, and I shot at the soldiers. The soldiers popped out of their 4X4s like waffles from an overzealous toaster. Nothing else happened. No armed response.
I got back in the small hatchback I arrived in, which remained the only vehicle I could interact with. I drove to an icon that looked like a chess piece. The performance took another significant nosedive as I arrived. There were some soldiers there, spread throughout a multi-story parking lot. I shot at them until I got bored, which happened almost instantly because the action is restricted to basic third-person blasting. Chubby crop top man has none of the entertaining drone attacks that Diaz has.
This, it appears, is MindsEye’s free-roaming mode. It’s separate from the main campaign, but I have no idea what we’re intended to do in it. It’s pointless, scrappy, and a complete waste of time in this state. It just isn’t remotely close to finished.
13-second sprint round Koopa Troopa Beach, anyone?
Leave it to Nintendo to put a mechanic into a game that can be used in lots of ‘unintended’ ways. Then leave it to the typical Nintendo fan to figure out how to mess with it almost immediately.
Yes, just as we are routinely amazed by what players come up with in the likes of Tears of the Kingdom, it’s taken very little time for them to start doing things to Mario’s fancy new rewind feature in Mario Kart World – which, when playing offline, allows you to cycle back through a race by holding down on your D-pad, then resume from where you paused.
While running around in a match of Elden Ring Nightreign, it’s not exactly easy to stop and carefully think about numbers and details. In fact, the leveling system for the characters in Nightreign is streamlined compared to the more-freeform point-system of Elden Ring. So what do they all mean, and what numbers are worth chasing over others?
YouTuber Zullie the Witch recently dove into the behind-the-scenes numbers to figure that out. While Nightreign simplifies progression down to level-ups, these pre-assigned values can be looked at and charted, as Zullie has done in their video.
One fascinating detail they found was that the jump from level 1 to level 2 adds “far more” than any other level up, making that first Site of Grace a big one. On the other hand, levels 13 through 15 apparently add fewer attributes for most characters, imposing a “softcap” around level 12. You’ll get more stats, but they won’t be as drastic as those early levels.
They also note statistics seem to have different scales between the different properties. Duchess, for example, has a B in Dexterity and A in Intelligence, but her point values across the levels end up fairly even. Also, strangely, no one gains points in Arcane across their levels.
If you’re curious, the highest total level character if one were to build them in Elden Ring would be Recluse. Per Zullie, this is due to the Recluse having the same stat growth for both Intelligence and Faith; her points cap out at 51 on both values, at level 15.
There’s some actionable advice here for build-crafting. Zullie found that each point of Vigor always adds exactly 20 HP at any level. Additionally, it looks like Relics that raise attack statistics will seem stronger at lower levels, but get outpaced by “other damage bonuses” as the game goes on.
It’s some fascinating datamining that’s sure to help with build-crafting, as you put together your Relics and aim for different rewards in the field. If anything, just remember: that first level-up is big, so don’t delay it. And if you’re curious about other details, it’s worth looking into Zullie’s videos about what lies behind the mask of the Nightfarers and other videos, which you can find on their YouTube channel here.
If you’re desperate for some company of a non-Adoring Fan kind as you run around Cyrodiil in Oblivion Remastered, odds are the base game’ll leave you wanting. Enter a new mod, which adds in a beast master system that’ll let you tame a furry or scaly pet.
After all, one could argue you’ve not really experienced Tamriel unless you’re having to stop after every fight to give your precious wild boar Bobo some heal minor wounds-infused tummy tickles
Street Fighter 6 launched for the Switch 2 last week and if you’ve been wanting to throw your support behind this particular version of the game, but aren’t confident it will be supported on the same level as other platforms, we’ve got some good news.
As highlighted by EventHubs, the Nintendo version has been declared tournament legal, which means the Switch 2 version is now officially acceptable for online and offline tournaments according to Capcom’s Pro Tour website. This update originally came into effect on 9th June, just days after the release of the game on Nintendo’s hybrid platform.
These will be applied to all versions and include some fixes tied to improving the overall gameplay experience as well as some revisions to specific texts. Here’s the full rundown, courtesy of Nintendo’s official support page:
Earlier this week, Nintendo shared its first official sales data for the Switch 2 – confirming the new hybrid system had sold “over 3.5 million units worldwide” in just the first four days, making it the highest global sales level for any Nintendo hardware within this amount of time.
Now, in an update, the video game firm has revealed this new device is also the “fastest-selling Nintendo hardware in the US” in four days. This was reported by IGN – with the outlet also told “Switch 2 sales in all regions were approximately twice those of the Nintendo Switch 1 across both consoles’ first four days on the market”. Nintendo has not provided specific sales figures for this region.
