In 2024, indie developer VEA Games released Nikoderiko: The Magical World, their love letter to classic platformers. Now, they’ve released a Director’s Cut that refines gameplay and adds new content, and they’ve offered it as a free upgrade.

If you missed out on Nikoderiko the first time around, it’s a family-friendly platformer with an art style inspired by Saturday morning cartoons. It stars mongooses Niko and Luna and can be played in single-player or couch co-op. You travel through the game’s varied worlds on a quest to retrieve an ancient relic stolen from you by the nefarious Baron Grimbold, and you can team up with animal mounts to defeat his Cobring army and save the local tribes.

Since the release of the base version of the game, the dev team has received extensive feedback from players and worked to improve on as much as possible with the Director’s Cut.

“We have a lot of emails; I personally read and answer every email,” said Dmitry Smirnov, founder of VEA Games and director of Nikoderiko. “We tried to implement all the necessary features you asked for. There are a lot of ideas for the game and how to improve the game. It really helps us to make a good game a great game.”

One of the biggest improvements to the Director’s Cut is the expansion of its difficulty options, which target a wider range of players and experience levels. For hardcore players, there’s a new Hard Mode with level modifiers.

“It will push players,” Smirnov said. “There are more challenges, more hard but honest mechanics. We would like to give you the experience of a soulslike game in a family platformer.”

On the other end of the spectrum, Easy Mode has been made easier, lowering the barrier to entry for younger players or those new to gaming or the platformer genre. It is a family game, after all.

“We decided to make it more accessible for kids and younger players,” Smirnov said. “While we were developing Nikoderiko, it was nice to know that my kids will be able to feel the same impressions like I did in my childhood.”

Keeping with the theme of making Nikoderiko accessible to as many people as possible, the Director’s Cut adds text and voiceover options for several languages, including German, French, Italian, Spanish, Japanese, and Chinese. It also adds Steam Deck compatibility for the first time.

There’s also a new secret eighth world for players to unlock, with its own hidden treasures and new boss. With the new world comes new music from veteran composer David Wise, who composed the soundtrack for the base game. Wise has worked in gaming for more than 30 years and is probably best known for his composing work in the Donkey Kong Country series.

“On my fourth birthday, I got a present and it was Donkey Kong Country,” Smirnov said. “I always loved to play with my brother, and it changed a lot of my direction in life, because I was very inspired by the graphics and the mystical and atmospheric music.”

In addition to all the new content in the Director’s Cut, it also refines what was already there. Graphics have been upgraded, animations have improved, and performance has been optimized across all platforms.

If you’ve already bought Nikoderiko, the Director’s Cut is available as a free update and is compatible with your previous saved games, so you don’t need to start over. For the achievement hunters, the update adds new trophies and achievements on the appropriate platforms.

If you haven’t picked it up before, the Director’s Cut has replaced the base game on all platforms, so buying it now will get you the expanded version. It’s available on PC, Nintendo Switch, PS4/5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, and Amazon Luna, so it’s safe to say you probably have access to it. It’s also offered on sale pretty regularly, so you can always wishlist it on your preferred platform and buy it when it’s at a price you’re comfortable with.

For the collectors among you, a physical release was recently announced and is scheduled to release on August 22. The base game will be available on its own, and there will also be a Collector’s Edition that comes with the game, David Wise’s soundtrack on CD, and an official artbook with around 100 pages.

For more information, check out the game’s official website or join the community on Twitter for updates.

With so many great games coming down the pipeline, now’s a great time to hop on the Xbox Game Pass bandwagon. If some titles joining the catalog this year have caught your eye and you’re itching to join in on the fun, you can choose between one or three month Game Pass Ultimate membership options at Amazon. Unfortunately, there aren’t any discount deals available at the moment, but we’ll update this when a new one drops.

You can learn more about options for signing up, what’s coming soon to Game Pass this month, and the big releases still to come below.

Navigate to:

• Best Xbox Game Pass Deals
• What’s Coming Soon to Xbox Game Pass?
• What Games Are Leaving Xbox Game Pass?
• Biggest Games Releasing on Xbox Game Pass

Best Xbox Game Pass Deals

One of the great things about Elden Ring has always been the diversity of playstyles it enables, and one of my favorite playstyles is loading up on Strength, grabbing the largest weapon I can find, and crushing foes with posture-breaking jumping attacks and charged-up heavy strikes. If that’s you too, then allow me to introduce you to the Raider in Nightreign (see the video below).

While the Guardian — the other big burly class with lots of health and an affinity for big weapons — is more focused on defense with a shield as a starter weapon and an ultimate ability that can mitigate damage for the entire party for an extended period of time, the Raider is designed as an absolute offensive powerhouse.

The most important ability of the Raider is Retaliate, which initially may not seem like a very strong skill on its own — it’s just two stomps that deal a bit of physical and poise damage. But the real magic is that thanks to the Raider’s passive, he cannot be knocked down while doing Retaliate. This means that the Raider basically has a free damage-soaking technique that will let you totally armor through pretty much any enemy or boss attack, with the added bonus of that weak second stomp getting replaced by an extremely powerful punch that will stagger even the largest enemies, if you manage to absorb an attack that would’ve done a substantial amount of damage.

Then there is the Raider’s ultimate, Totem Stela, which has him slamming the ground and causing a large totem to erupt, dealing big damage to anything around it. Like all of the other Ultimates in Nightreign, this is an incredibly powerful technique that can alter the tide of a fight. Not only does it deal big damage, but the totem is climbable, giving both you and your teammates either a safe place to lay low, or a vantage point to hit. In addition to that, it also gives everyone a damage buff as well, meaning it’s one of the first ults you’ll want to coordinate using so that the rest of the team can benefit from it.

The Raider starts with the Raider’s Greavtaxe, which is a pretty solid starting weapon that deals some fire damage and has the “Endure” skill affixed to it, which basically gives you another way to absorb and power through enemy attacks in case Retaliate is on cooldown. Still, you’ll definitely want to find a better weapon as the nights get closer, and large strength-scaling weapons are definitely the Raider’s go-to style of weapon.

Of all the classes I’ve played in Nightreign, the Raider is definitely the one that I’ve had the most fun with. It’s the one that is most well-suited for one-on-one battles, which is appropriate because its Remembrances (we’ll talk about those later on in the month) have you fighting in one-on-one boss fights in a sort of gladiatorial arena, which is a nice change of pace.

That’s all for our hands-on impressions of Nightreign’s classes, but stay tuned all throughout the month in depth looks at the mechanics of Nightreign, along with interviews with the developers, and more as IGN First continues on.

Mitchell Saltzman is an editorial producer at IGN. You can find him on twitter @JurassicRabbit

It’s been 35 years since Intelligent Systems debuted its Fire Emblem series on Nintendo’s Famicom. Through its ever-evolving combat and the introduction of beloved character bonding mechanics, the series has ascended to the upper echelon of tactical RPGs, culminating in two excellent mainline entries on the Nintendo Switch.

As we near the end of the original Switch era, we’ve compiled a list of every Fire Emblem game available on the console as well as what’s coming to the Switch 2.

How Many Fire Emblem Games Are on Switch?

There are five Fire Emblem games on Switch: two mainline games and three spinoffs. There are two additional Fire Emblem games available with Nintendo Switch Online, with a third due out for the Switch 2 in June.

Every Fire Emblem Game on Nintendo Switch

Fire Emblem Warriors (2017)

The first Fire Emblem game released on Switch was the Dynasty Warriors crossover Fire Emblem Warriors. The mashup incorporates the best elements of each series, blending Fire Emblem’s team-based strategy with Dynasty Warriors’ button-mashing, hack-and-slash action. It’s a worthwhile spinoff for action fans, though the light story makes it inessential to those concerned with Fire Emblem lore.

The game was developed by Dynasty Warriors studio Omega Force in collaboration with the action gurus at Team Ninja (Ninja Gaiden, Nioh).

Fire Emblem: Three Houses (2019)

Fire Emblem: Three Houses was a milestone release for the series. It was the first Fire Emblem game released on a home console in 12 years, the first mainline entry released on Switch, and a critical and commercial success that carried forward the momentum of Awakening seven years before it.

Three Houses is a massive tactical RPG that balances the grand with the intimate. Large-scale battles progress an overarching story of politics and religion within a continental war, while quieter moments between battles are spent in the monastery training, teaching, exploring, and bonding with other characters through well-written and -acted conversations.

Three Houses is Fire Emblem at its best, and what we’d recommend as a starting point if you’re looking to jump into the series on Switch.

Tokyo Mirage Sessions #FE Encore (2020)

In 2020, Nintendo released Tokyo Mirage Sessions #FE Encore, an expanded port of the original Wii U release. Encore added new story content, characters, and music to the Nintendo-Atlus crossover game, which blends Fire Emblem’s “weapon triangle” combat mechanic — swords have an advantage over axes, axes over lances, lances over swords — with the flashy style, dungeon-crawling, and moment-to-moment combat of Atlus’s Shin Megami Tensei and Persona games.

The story is a comical, often over-the-top send-up of Japanese pop-culture that, as in Warriors before it, takes a backseat to the action.

Fire Emblem Warriors: Three Hopes (2023)

Nintendo re-teamed with Omega Force for Fire Emblem Warriors: Three Hopes, the companies’ second Fire Emblem-Dynasty Warriors crossover following Fire Emblem Warriors. Three Hopes is a retelling of Three Houses set in an alternate timeline where Three Houses’ protagonist Byleth serves as the main villain.

Three Hopes is a more robust blend of the two franchises than its predecessor, integrating more of Fire Emblem’s social and tactical mechanics with Dynasty Warriors’ fast-paced action.

Fire Emblem Engage (2023)

Fire Emblem Engage is the series’ latest game and its second mainline entry on Switch. Engage is a progression of Three Houses’ excellence and an ode to Fire Emblem’s past: It refines and scales down the social and hub mechanics of Three Houses while shifting its primary focus to the series’ longstanding tactical combat, most notably reintroducing Fire Emblem’s “weapon triangle” system.

The story of Engage follows a Divine Dragon named Alear, who’s tasked with collecting 12 rings to defeat the Fell Dragon and save the continent of Elyos. Engage’s original story connects to the series past through these 12 rings, each of which houses the spirit of a past Fire Emblem protagonist, allowing you to summon past heroes such as Marth, Ike, Celica, and Byleth.

Fire Emblem Games Available With Nintendo Switch Online