Palworld developers Pocketpair have announced their next gig as a fledgling games publisher. They’re palling up with MythicOwl to release the latter’s jaunty delivery sim Truckful, in which absolutely nothing waits for you in the woods. In which there are no ghost trucks. In which “hidden paths, misty wetlands, unforgiving marshes and dusty quicksands [do not] tell the stories of the past, waiting to be discovered”. Here’s a trailer.
Astro Bot has once again won big at an awards show, this time securing five gongs at the 2025 BAFTA Games Awards, including Best Design, Best Family Game, and Best Game.
The BAFTA Games Awards — the UK’s independent arts charity celebrating excellence in games — took place overnight on Tuesday, April 8, 2025, in London, UK. Senua’s Saga: Hellblade 2, Astro Bot, and Still Wakes the Deep led the charge with 11, eight, and eight nominations, respectively. Thank Goodness You’re Here! also received seven nominations, Black Myth: Wukong six, and Helldivers 2 was up for five awards.
And the winner of Best Game is…
ASTRO BOT🎮@TeamAsobi pic.twitter.com/fOsI1iGyPP
— BAFTA Games (@BAFTAGames) April 8, 2025
Accepting the award, Astro Bot director Nicolas Doucet paid tribute to the game developers of the past, who paved the way for Sony-owned Team Asobi and other current studios to find success in the modern era.
Whilst Astro Bot was the night’s most-crowned game, The Chinese Room’s impressive Still Wakes the Deep secured three wins — including both performer awards — and Helldivers 2 won two BAFTAs.
Thank Goodness You’re Here!, Balatro, and Metaphor: Refantazio were also among the winners.
2024 BAFTA Game Awards winners included Baldur’s Gate 3, which secured five wins, including Best Game, with other wins for Alan Wake 2, Super Mario Bros. Wonder, and Viewfinder.
BAFTA recently revealed that the most influential video game of all time, according to the public, is Shenmue, which left the internet somewhat puzzled.
BAFTA polled the public to discover that while games like GTA, Tetris, World of Warcraft, Minecraft, Doom, and Half-Life 2 did make the list, the top as ranked by the number of votes received was Sega’s 1999 action-adventure game.
Vikki Blake is a reporter, critic, columnist, and consultant. She’s also a Guardian, Spartan, Silent Hillian, Legend, and perpetually High Chaos. Find her at BlueSky.
Earlier this week, we reported that the Korean Nintendo website had accidentally revealed an announced character coming to Donkey Kong Bananza (spoilers!), and now the website has confirmed an iconic track is making a return for Mario Kart World.
Warning! Potential Mario Kart World spoilers follow:
As with the Donkey Kong snafu, the guilty images were removed speedily from the official website, but not before someone snapped them and posted them to Reddit, of course.
As the images are pretty fuzzy — and there’s no accompanying text — this is essentially all we know so far. With a little cross-checking, it looks as though a hidden Rainbow Road track will sit just below Princess Peach’s Stadium on the four-way intersection in the bay area (thanks, Eurogamer), although it’s unclear if it’s a secret track or some kind of unlockable extra.
It’s also got some fans wondering if every four-way intersection could be the location of a hidden course.
On Monday, Nintendo justified Mario Kart World’s shock $80 price tag in response to controversy over the $10 hike for some Switch 2 games. IGN interviewed Nintendo of America’s Vice President of Product and Player Experience, Bill Trinen, at a recent Switch 2 preview event in New York, and asked about Nintendo’s pricing strategy (albeit ahead of Nintendo’s announcement about delaying Switch 2 pre-orders in the U.S. due to the potential impact of tariffs).
“I would say it’s less about the strategy of pricing Mario Kart World, it’s more just whenever we look at a given game, we just look at what is the experience, and what’s the content, and what’s the value?” Trinen said at the time.
As IGN has reported, some Nintendo fans have expressed concern that they may be priced out of the next-generation if the company goes even higher than the already controversial prices for the Switch 2 and its games such as Mario Kart World due to the tariff situation.
Vikki Blake is a reporter, critic, columnist, and consultant. She’s also a Guardian, Spartan, Silent Hillian, Legend, and perpetually High Chaos. Find her at BlueSky.
Good news for Smash and retro fans.
Last week, Nintendo shared a lot of fine details about the Switch 2 and in case you missed it, one thing it also confirmed was the new system would support the GameCube Controller adapter.
Read the full article on nintendolife.com
Whether twiddling their thumbs during the decades since Commandos 3 or calmly hiding in a hedge waiting to knife a nosey Nazi in the neck on his next stroll past, if there’s one thing Commandos fans are known for it’s lurking patiently. Good things come to those who’ve waited, and Commandos: Origins fits that bill. Slow-paced, challenging, and consistently satisfying when all your plans come together, its brand of isometric stealth action is intact and has never looked better. I’ve sunk nearly 60 hours into it over the last week and a half just to see out the missions, and there are potentially dozens more hours available should I return to play through some of them again with the intention of leaving no stone unturned and no soldier unslain. The only major issue is the assortment of bugs I’ve had to become accustomed to in order to keep enjoying myself. Like a peskily placed German sniper, some of these I learnt how to avoid entirely, but there were others I just needed to find a way to neutralise.
For those of you who skipped basic training, Commandos is a classic series of real-time tactics stealth ’em ups set during the Second World War that goes all the way back to the late ’90s. Picture a crew of elite but generally crabby commandos crawling around on their bellies behind enemy lines, driven by a whole lot of mouse clicking, and you’re most of the way there. For a modern comparison, it’s a lot like The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, only filmed exclusively from a drone (and without Guy Ritchie’s wit or Henry Cavill’s perfectly curled cookie duster). Or the BBC’s Rogue Heroes with 90% less swearing and 100% less AC/DC.
However, while its cheesy yet otherwise stony-faced approach may lack the outright humour of those crackling British Special Forces capers, Commandos: Origins is arguably the best version of the series’ concept to date. It’s a familiar yet modern experience for grizzled veterans, and also an intuitive and approachable one for new players who are ready to test themselves against a steadily escalating difficulty curve.
Like any great stealth game, Origins is as much a game about tactics as it is a salvo of deadly puzzles to solve. It essentially boils down to analysing every upcoming encounter, inspecting each enemy soldier’s vision cone, and finding a way to dispatch them that won’t bring the whole German army down on your squad’s heads. A large part of my time with Origins has been spent simply staring at the screen, surveying my prey like an ambush predator.
Each of the six commandos on your team has a set of unique tools and abilities. For the most part, Origins curates the characters available for each mission, tailoring the action for their skills. There are only two instances where all six soldiers will be on the same battlefield at once, which is kind of a shame because those are real highlights. That said, I probably would’ve played a huge amount of Origins exclusively using the Marine’s throwing knives and harpoon gun had I had the chance, so forcing me to expand my approach by sidelining him sometimes was probably wise and almost certainly kept things from becoming stale.
Speaking of sidelining, I actually don’t miss the inventory management of the previous games, though I feel like I wouldn’t have removed the ability to pick up and use enemy weapons for the Green Beret in particular. The argument here is that Origins is more about thoughtful stealth at all times – and less about spraying lead from scavenged MP40s at anything with a swastika on it. Thoughtful stealth, luckily, is empowered by the coolest part of Origins: Command Mode. Riffing on similar modes in the late, great Mimimi’s Desperados 3 and Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew, Command Mode allows you to freeze time indefinitely and queue up individual actions for each of your commandos. Back in real time, they’ll execute those simultaneously on your say so. Nailing the timing on a set of Command Mode instructions is powerfully satisfying, whether it’s simply two crawling commandos stabbing a distracted pair of soldiers from the side, or a more complicated and elaborately choreographed ballet of harpoons, blades, and bullets.
It’s all quite a slow process to do well, but it’s a truly rewarding one when you figure out the solution to taking on what initially may seem like too many meticulously positioned soldiers to tackle. Maybe your first choice of target is impossible to kill quietly because he’s always in sight of one of his other comrades, and maybe that very squadmate is always in view of a third, and so on. But there’s fun in uncovering who should be the first domino to fall throat-first onto a Fairbairn–Sykes combat knife. Some enemies will leave their posts to investigate strange sounds, like the Sapper’s whistle or the Green Beret’s radio – or inspect the Driver’s burning packets of cigarettes. Some will only temporarily turn and face a distraction, giving you precious moments to slip by them. Experimenting with which routes and tools work best is a task that tapped into a compulsive part of my brain.
The opportunities are always there; it’s just on us to find them – and the fact that they’re not telegraphed or signposted makes every victory feel like you’ve outfoxed the developers. At one point I spotted a tiny gap in the view cones of four soldiers on a small set of stairs in the water. It allowed me to not only get behind them to wipe them out, but also to bring three other squadmates via boat to the rear of my main objective. Was that there on purpose? Probably, but maybe not. Leaving it ambiguous as to whether you’ve gone about an encounter in the precise way Claymore Game Studios surreptitiously left ajar for us – or succeeded with an unpredictable sequence of moves the dev team perhaps never saw coming – is just good design. Either way, the encouragement to explore every corner of the maps for the best opportunities is thoroughly baked in.
In large part, that’s because these levels are all exceedingly detailed dioramas, sprawling and dense, and every one feels like I’m playing a high-stakes game of toy soldiers on the kind of miniature map exhibits you might see tucked behind glass at a war museum. Missions take place all across Europe and North Africa, too, so the variety of backdrops is terrific – from snowy Scandinavia to lush, soggy fields and baking deserts.
The huge environments are also rendered entirely in three dimensions and you can enter buildings seamlessly, and the fact that I felt the need to say that should give you an idea of how long it’s been since we’ve had a proper Commandos game. You can make fine camera rotations in any compass direction, so getting the right angle to spot a gap in security is easy. That said, scrolling around too fast sometimes introduces a bit of temporary choppiness, but it’s a short-lived gripe. It’s otherwise great looking overall.
There is, unfortunately, some occasional clumsiness when navigating particularly complex, multi-storey structures. Over the course of the campaign I encountered a few enemies that appeared to be sharing a floor with me, but who were actually on a different level entirely and should’ve been hidden from view at that moment. I also had the misfortune of placing down a beartrap that became irretrievable because it wasn’t on the same platform I wanted to leave it, and being shot through a solid container that apparently wasn’t really there is never any fun. There were also occasional instances where my commands were being misinterpreted and my men were setting off to unintended areas and directly into enemy sight lines, due to an apparent disconnect between what floors are being displayed and what floor Origins thinks I’m clicking on. These aren’t major frustrations, though, and remedying them typically just required some minor zooming, or panning the camera slightly. That, or a quick reload to bring back the prematurely deceased.
In the trial-and-error world of tactical games like Commandos, quick save is your friend – and Origins is no exception. The ability to pick up directly where you left off after doing something risky and/or stupid is what actually gives us the freedom to experiment with different approaches in the first place. Make no mistake, quick save well and truly saved my bacon (and quickly!) on many occasions – but, unfortunately, this essential feature also seems to provoke some of Origins’ most bothersome bugs.
For instance, loading a save you made while one of your commandos was climbing a wire – or perched high on a climbable pole – appears to leave the poor bastard marooned on an invisible level above the map, fruitlessly crawling or moonwalking into oblivion. The solution, naturally, is to simply resolve to never save while one of your men is climbing anything. That wasn’t the end of my issues, though. After another reload I noticed my Marine was no longer in his boat, but walking on water back to the marker I’d placed. This bug eventually resolved itself, but one where my Sapper simply disappeared off the map and became unselectable did not.
That kind of issue could’ve become game-breaking, but Origins – seemingly aware that it has a few technical landmines for you to step on – keeps a queue of several quick saves. For the most part, if something goes awry, there’s a strong chance you’ll have a slightly older save you can revert too. In this instance, though, I’d sadly filled all my saves without noticing my Sapper was no longer present. The only solution was restarting the mission entirely, which was over an hour lost.
One weird issue, and one I can’t tell whether it’s related to the quick saves or not, is the occasional instance of enemies falsely detecting one of your commandos in a bush they’re no longer hiding in – and getting locked in an alert state about it. They’ll subsequently circle it and blast it to hell to no avail. It wasn’t so bad because I was able to either skirt around it or totally exploit it by stabbing all the soldiers while they were busy slaughtering the unfortunate shrubbery, but it definitely wasn’t supposed to happen.
I wouldn’t necessarily call the enemies smart overall, and it would’ve been nice if they displayed a little more of the initiative we see in other modern stealth games. Instead of callously ignoring dead bodies after an alert phase resets, for instance, they might want to drag their kaput companions off to a predefined location, à la Hitman. They make up for their dim bulbs by being extremely dangerous, though – and they’re just unpredictable enough to keep you on your toes when you think you’ve got their patterns figured out. They won’t inspect the nearest hiding places in the same order after a reload, for instance, so you’d better have a backup plan – or at least make sure nobody’s climbing a telephone pole when they come looking.
Is $80 already enough?
There’s been a lot of talk about the $80 price tag attached to the Switch 2 launch title Mario Kart World and Nintendo has justified it by claiming the game is “so big and so vast”, but what if it ends up charging for additional content in the long run?
Ex-Nintendo Minute duo Kit and Krysta, who now run their own YouTube channel, have touched on the idea of Nintendo potentially demanding even more gold coins in the immediate future for possible Mario Kart World DLC – suggesting it would go against the current messaging:
Read the full article on nintendolife.com
It’s a keychain!
The Switch 2 has been officially confirmed for this June, and ahead of the big launch, Nintendo is now offering a new themed item on the My Nintendo Store in North America.
Read the full article on nintendolife.com
Right, Doom: The Dark Ages is still a month away, but I’m guessing there’s some of you that could do with a bit of boomer shooting to fill the gap in the meantime. Metal Eden will probably scratch that itch, the next game from the devs behind the quite violent and flashy Ruiner, given that it’s out May 6th. That’s still about a month away though, so you could always try out the free demo that dropped today offering a small taste of its sci-fi shooter.
Diablo 4 is coming up to its second anniversary but it still has a good bit of gas in the tank. Earlier today Blizzard shared its roadmap for the game across the rest of the year, though obviously we’re a quarter of the way through that already. The game is currently in its seventh season, with its eighth, Belial’s Return, starting sometime this month. This one, unsurprisingly, adds Belial, Lord of Lies as a boss, alongside a couple of bosses from Vessel of Hatred as “part of the updated Lair Boss system.”
Daemon X Machina: Titanic Scion is set to release for Nintendo Switch 2, PS5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC on September 5. In it, you strap yourself into an Arsenal mech and fly through an open world on your way to battle various enemies and create your very own loadout. It’s available to preorder in two different editions (see it at Amazon). In fact, this is one of the very first Switch 2 games available for preorder since preorders the Switch 2 itself have been delayed in the U.S. Read on for more info.
PS5
Switch 2
Xbox Series X|S
PS5
Switch 2
Xbox Series X|S
The limited edition costs $30 more than the standard edition, but it comes with the game itself, plus the following extras:
Daemon X Machina: Titanic Scion is a followup to the 2019 original Daemon X Machina game that was released on Switch and PC. This sequel is also helmed by Kenichiro Tsukuda, a producer for the Armored Core series.
Titanic Scion is all about speccing out your Arsenal mech to turn yourself into a fast-flying killing machine. It takes place in an open world, where you’ll blast your way through enemies, picking up the weapons and equipment they drop in order to expand your arsenal and abilities. Customization is key, so you can direct your abilities to your own particular play style. You can play solo or co-op with up to two friends online.
Chris Reed is a deals expert and commerce editor for IGN. You can follow him on Bluesky @chrislreed.com.
