In Mecha Break you play as a booby anime statuette. She is the one driving the mech. This is a leery game of lasers and ass shots, and sometimes even manages to elicit moments of exciting robo-a-robo combat. You fight other players across a splatter of multiplayer modes, and may often feel the crunch and weight and whirl of a Gundam-esque ground-to-sky battle of wits and bullets. But there is always a boob or two waiting for you after the heights of battle, jiggling over endlessly popping screens of free-to-play gubbins. Somewhere in Mecha Break is a good game, but you have to peel away the plastic tits and pushy sales screens to find it.
“I am going to screw on my happy cap and try to find some upbeat/quirky news, because I feel like we could do with a bit,” I declared to the RPS Slack just now, after writing our eighth layoff/cancellation post this week. The very next thing I click is a link for a game about building hell. Not today, Satan. “Amnesia flying meat orb! Amnesia flying meat orb!” suggests James. James, you are not helping. Why are you never helping. Oh, what’s this? An unbeatably broken Elden Ring Nightreign bossfight? Perhaps this is the champion who will lead us out of our endless technofeudal apocalypse. No seriously, I think Animus, Ascendant Light is really onto something, here.
The new MMO from the Elder Scrolls Online developers would reportedly have been a sci-fi noir affair in which players swing around tall buildings on grappling lines, and do aerial dashes while shooting and looting. Call it Blade Runner Spider-Man. Call it Destiny 2077. Call it whatever you like, frankly, because it has been abandoned as part of wider layoffs at parent company Microsoft, the outfit that made tens of billions of dollars in profit this past financial quarter, yet has decided to jettison thousands of staff in the name of “discipline” and “continued success”.
Remember all of the confusion around whether the Switch 2 supports VRR? One moment, it did both docked and handheld, before Nintendo started removing wording surrounding docked VRR from websites and then apologised “for the error”.
Well, The Verge (paywalled) has made an interesting discovery — the Switch 2’s dock does support VRR, but it doesn’t work with the Switch 2 itself. How did editor Sean Hollister find this out? By taking inspiration from the SteamDeck subreddit and plugging a Steam Deck into the dock. It’s that simple.
Welcome to Next Week on Xbox! In this weekly feature we cover all the games coming soon to Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, Xbox on PC, and Game Pass! Get more details on these upcoming games below and click their profiles for further info (release dates subject to change). Let’s jump in!
Bring Glory Home and experience the world of college football. Whatever path to greatness you choose, from high school recruit to the Heisman, or as a coach, you can forge your legacy. Rep your colors across 136 FBS schools featuring over 300 authentic coaches, 2,700 new plays and 10,000 college athletes with upgraded abilities. Purchase the Deluxe Edition for up to three days of early access.
Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 + 4 – Digital Deluxe Edition
Game Pass / Xbox Play Anywhere / Optimized for Xbox Series X|S / Smart Delivery
Get hyped for the legendary franchise to return. Everything you loved is back, but revamped with more skaters, new parks, gnarlier tricks, eardrum shattering music, plus a whole lot more. Purchase the Digital Deluxe Edition for up to three days of early access.
Optimized for Xbox Series X|S / Smart Delivery Missiles are incoming. The stakes are high. Only you can stop the destruction. The teams at Mighty Yell and 13AM Games have taken one of Atari’s most iconic titles and created a high-pressure, tactical turn-based game where players must manage their pool of defenses strategically to survive rounds of incoming missiles.
Master acrobatic combat and uncover ancient secrets in a myth-inspired Metroidvania set aboard a forsaken space vessel. Explore, upgrade, and fight your way through a decaying world where every ability unlocks new paths—and survival means mastering your powers.
The Last Camp is a doomsday themed game. This game uses high-quality graphics, rich weapons and props systems, and a grand world map to create a cross-generational dual-stick shooting game, bringing a feast for shooting game enthusiasts.
The new season of a game about Love! Swap blocks to help hearts have a date, but avoid the black heart, spikes and other obstacles! Optional challenge: make the hearts meet specifically in a romantic zone – a special part of some of the levels.
Game Pass / Xbox Play Anywhere / Optimized for Xbox Series X|S / Smart Delivery
Welcome to Minami Lane! Build your own street in this tiny cozy, casual management sim set on a Japanese-inspired street. Create and manage your own street, make sure everyone is happy, and watch the villagers live their lives! Enjoy 2 to 4 hours of playtime, cute tanukis and lots of cats!
Get ready to sneak into the city’s most overprotected museum… all for food! If you enjoy challenging platformers, simple yet strategic combat, and a good dose of mischief, Rogue Raccoon is the heist you’ve been waiting for. Just don’t blame the raccoon.
Fight on multiple fronts in Holdfast: Nations At War – a multiplayer first and third-person shooter set during the great Napoleonic Era and WW1. Take part in historic clashes on land and at sea waged by the most powerful nations. Charge into battle with over 150 players per server!
Xbox Play Anywhere / Optimized for Xbox Series X|S / Smart Delivery
Save the princesses at all costs as you infiltrate castles filled with treacherous foes! Strategic real-time combat ensues as you storm the halls of each castle in side-scrolling pixel art style, from medieval Europe and mystical Persia to feudal Japan and more, all accompanied by an original retro soundtrack!
In this game, you’ll face an unimaginable number of alien mutants that appear rapidly from all around your field of vision. You’ll destroy more than 20,000 enemies per game and take on an endless mode for hardcore gamers who want to challenge themselves – and take on the challenge in both local and online co-op.
The next chapter in the beloved minimalist city-building franchise is here. Islanders: New Shores invites you back to a world of tranquil creativity, now reimagined with expanded gameplay, stunning visuals, and a host of fresh features that build on the charm of the original. Whether you’re a longtime fan or a newcomer, prepare to explore, build, and strategise like never before.
Xbox Play Anywhere / Optimized for Xbox Series X|S / Smart Delivery
Select your protagonist and explore a variety of terrible fates! The decisions you make in one story will affect the others. You can toggle these behaviors to open up new paths! Unfortunately, every path leads to a bad ending… Can you find a way to save this unlucky cast?
Can you mix a cocktail while eye-to-eye with a criminal? Find out in this murder mystery set in a bustling speakeasy where you serve customers, make friends and enemies, and solve crimes. At the Nightcap bar, prohibition is a killer… and so are some of your customers!
You are a simple sailor caught in a storm on your first voyage. The ship is wrecked on the reef, the whole crew is dead, and only you are thrown ashore on a deserted island. Do you have any other choice but to try to survive? Find out in this visual novel card game.
A first-person survival horror game and the much anticipated sequel to Bendy and the Ink Machine. Play as Audrey as she explores the depths of a curiously creepy animation studio that’s gone completely mad. Combat ink-tainted enemies, solve puzzles, and evade the ever-lurking Ink Demon while seeking your way back to the real world.
A casual yet heart-pounding climbing and platforming adventure that will test your skill, patience, and determination. As a stranded astronaut, you must ascend through a series of challenging, ever-ascending platforms to reach to the top after losing your shuttle. One wrong step could send you plummeting back to the start, erasing all your hard-earned progress.
Slide down the huge waterslide which spirals down from the sky, overtake your friends, push them off the track or use powerups to gain an advantage. Compete in multiplayer mode with up to 4 players or enjoy sliding solo. Prove that you are the fastest of them all!
Dive into a terrifying first-person survival horror experience inspired by 32-bit retro-style games. You play as a boy searching for his dog Tomy, who has been kidnapped by an evil corporation conducting twisted experiments on pets. Try to save Tomy — without losing yourself along the way.
The Griffin battle tank has been developed as a countermeasure against powerful neighboring countries. However, its designer has been captured by the enemy. Now, his granddaughter has gotten into the Griffin and taken on a solo mission to rescue her grandfather!
Stranded on a mysterious island, your survival instincts will be tested in Island Trouble. Gather resources, build structures, and complete missions to escape this paradise-turned-prison. Every decision matters as you navigate the challenges of survival and uncover the secrets of the island.
Nintendo fans now know who developed Switch 2 launch title Welcome Tour — the mini-game collection that also acts as an interactive instruction manual for the new console, which many have suggested should have been included for free.
While Nintendo Switch 2 Welcome Tour doesn’t state it within the game itself, Mario Party studio Nintendo Cube, formerly NDCube, has now updated its website to confirm the game is its work.
Nintendo Cube is a Tokyo-based subsidiary of Nintendo founded in 2000 that frequently handles the company’s various mini-game collection projects. It developed the so-so Wii Party (not to be confused with the better Wii Play, which came with a packed-in Wii Remote), as well as the disappointing Animal Crossing: Amiibo Festival on Wii U.
More recently, Nintendo Cube released the functional Clubhouse Games: 51 Worldwide Classics for Switch 1, before the infamous Everybody 1-2 Switch — a party game sequel launched with little fanfare that earned Nintendo some of its worst review scores in recent memory. (“Everybody 1-2-Switch might be the first party game I’ve played where I ended up with fewer friends afterwards,” IGN wrote in its 4/10 appraisal.)
But it’s for Mario Party that Nintendo Cube is best known, having taken over as the hugely popular party game series’ main developer beginning with 2012’s Mario Party 9 onwards, and continuing with Mario Party 10, Mario Party Star Rush, Mario Party: The Top 100, Super Mario Party and Mario Party Superstars.
Nintendo Cube’s next launch is (deep breath) Super Mario Party Jamboree: Nintendo Switch 2 Edition + Jamboree TV, a Switch 2 update for Super Mario Party Jamboree that makes use of the new console’s mouse controls and optional camera peripheral, due to arrive on July 24.
“Even if Nintendo Switch 2 Welcome Tour were the pack-in game it feels like it was meant to be, the execution of its charming concept is a muddled collection of quaint tech demos and boring factoids dressed up as an uncompelling completionist checklist,” IGN wrote in our Nintendo Switch 2 Welcome Tour review.
Tom Phillips is IGN’s News Editor. You can reach Tom at tom_phillips@ign.com or find him on Bluesky @tomphillipseg.bsky.social
There’s no doubting Hideo Kojima’s devotion to the art of video games. But one question that has followed the Metal Gear master around for much of his career is “Why doesn’t he just make a movie?”. This sentiment no doubt stems from the perception that his work at both Konami and Kojima Productions has been cutscene-heavy, opting to tell stories through often-thrillingly orchestrated cinematics rather than organic gameplay design. But is this perceived notion a reality? And, more importantly, does it even matter?
Well, I’ve done some number crunching and worked out what portion of each of the mainline Metal Gear Solid games, plus the duo of Death Strandings, is cutscenes. In some cases, it’s what you’d expect. In others, not so much…
How much of each Kojima game is cutscenes?
To work out just how much of each game is cutscene, I’ve used the average time to complete a main story playthrough, sourced from How Long to Beat’s data. I’ve then taken the total runtime of each game’s cutscenes and used it to assess what percentage that runtime is of the average playthrough. The results are:
Metal Gear Solid: 20.29% (11hr, 30m average playthrough, 2hr 20m of cutscenes)
Metal Gear Solid 2: 23.21% (13hr average playthrough, 3hr 1m of cutscenes)
Metal Gear Solid 3: 26.35% (16hr average playthrough, 4hr 13m of cutscenes)
Metal Gear Solid 4: 40.63% (18hr 30m average playthrough, 7hr 31m of cutscenes)
Metal Gear Solid 5: 8.13% (45hr 30m average playthrough, 3hr 42m of cutscenes)
Death Stranding: 15.75% (40hr 30m average playthrough, 6hr 22m of cutscenes)
Death Stranding 2: 15.97% (37hr 40m average playthrough*, 6hr 1m of cutscenes)
It is important to note that this percentage relates to cinematic cutscenes only. Codec calls or other such in-game conversations are not included, as they require some player interactivity to progress.
What do those percentages reveal about Kojima’s career?
It turns out that the original three Metal Gear Solid games follow a similar trend – cutscenes make up around 20-ish percent of the overall playtime, with each subsequent entry gradually contributing to a very slight upward trajectory. It’s with Metal Gear Solid 4 that things really shift. With 40% of it being cinematics, it’s not too far from the truth to say Guns of the Patriots is half cutscenes. Understandably, the game has become the poster child for Kojima’s cinematic indulgence, something only emphasised by length – the story famously crescendoes in a 71 minute-long final cinematic. That’s just 10 minutes shorter than the 1995 animated film Toy Story.
The same can’t be said for Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain, however. A game with a troubled development path to say the least, it suffers from the exact opposite issue as MGS 4: a paper-thin story. With just under 4 hours of cutscenes in 45 hours of gameplay, it’s a starkly low ratio by comparison to its predecessors. MGS 5 is undoubtedly one of the greatest stealth games ever made from a mechanical perspective, but its lack of narrative throughline (and, to be honest, ending) prevents it from feeling like a full Kojima package.
And then we have the Death Stranding games, which feature runtimes akin to The Phantom Pain, but a cutscene percentage closer to that of the first Metal Gear Solid. The result is a duology of games that feel more narratively complete than MGS 5, but not as trapped by cinematic ambition as Kojima’s more indulgent projects.
Are there too many cutscenes in Kojima’s games?
With all that data crunching out the way, let’s address the real question: is Kojima too reliant on cutscenes? I think the answer lies in each individual project, or at the very least each era of his career.
Across the original Metal Gear Solid trilogy, between a fifth and a quarter of each game is cinematics. Is being passive for that duration a problem? I’m not so sure. In the PS1 and PS2 era, telling complex stories was harder to do in player-controlled scenarios, and so that’s where cinematics, codec calls, or lengthy dialogue sequences came into play. The first three Metal Gear Solid games were lauded during their time, and are still revered, for their cinematic approach to presentation, and those early trips through Shadow Moses, Big Shell, and Soviet forests flowed beautifully. They told their tales through a healthy amount of cutscenes, yes, but never at the cost of gameplay, which ushered in never-before-seen approaches to stealth-action and many experimental fourth-wall-breaking surprises. They were cutscene-heavy, but never at the expense of the game itself.
That unquestionably changes with Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots. 7 hours and 31 minutes of it is spent idly watching cinematics that play out on either side of its linear stealth corridors and boss battles. Kojima had a grand story he wanted to tell, with multiple threads that needed tying up from across the trilogy that preceded it, but this arguably came at the cost of the game itself. The story isn’t necessarily a bad one, it just all-too-frequently interrupts the stealth-action we all desire from one of Snake’s adventures. And often they can be excessively lengthy – I’ve already mentioned the longer-than-a-movie finale, but the cutscenes that bridge one act to another often feature TV show-like runtimes.
Things go in the complete opposite direction with Metal Gear Solid 5, and while some of that can be blamed on its fraught development cycle, much of its reduced cutscene percentage is down to the switch from linear to open world design. This expanded vision aligned with “modern” game development trends in 2015, as massive maps full of opportunity were all the rage in a post-Skyrim world. Crucially, though, the open worlds developed around that time by studios like Bethesda, CD Projekt Red, and even Ubisoft were packed with narrative elements, both at small and large scale, made up of a combination of environmental storytelling, companion conversations, and cutscenes. Kojima didn’t subscribe to this formula, though, perhaps through a stubborn adherence to his traditional methods of sectioning off gameplay from story. But that big open world meant that more time was spent in active gameplay scenarios, and few individual missions in The Phantom Pain actually progress the plot as you play through them. The main story is told largely via cutscenes delivered as part of your trips back to Mother Base, and your time there is much more limited than your time in the field. This approach is simultaneously very Kojima, but oddly removed from the storytelling complexities we’d come to expect in 2015. It’s a fantastic game, but less so when viewed purely through a narrative lens, and the noticeably low number of cutscenes reflects this.
Heading into 2019’s Death Stranding, it may not have been a surprise to see Kojima head back to his roots when it comes to story construction. Sam Porter Bridges’ tale is told predominantly through cutscenes, and rarely during any of the many, many deliveries he’s asked to do. There’s the odd exception – Higgs planting a bomb in his cargo that he has to quickly dispose of, for example – but for the most part, story is reserved for hologram chatter (Death Stranding’s answer to codec calls) and beautifully rendered cinematics.
Both Death Stranding games are of a similar length to The Phantom Pain but, crucially, they don’t feel anywhere near as narratively sparse. The core gameplay, in which you connect various cities around a continent via delivering items and extending the internet-like “Chiral Network,” may not act as a direct vehicle for the story, but your mission goals never feel entirely divorced from the themes of human contact in a digital age. And so while the majority of the plot is therefore still told via cutscenes, as was the case way back in 1998 for Kojima on the original Metal Gear Solid, everything in between still feels narratively richer than it does in Metal Gear Solid 5.
Kojima’s effect on single-player stories
We’ve seen that the ratio of cutscenes can vary significantly across Kojima’s library, but how does his work compare to other studios working in similar spaces? Metal Gear Solid did, afterall, practically shape what modern-day PlayStation would become. We can see the impact of its legacy in many single-player, story-focused games – a recent prime example would be The Last of Us Part 2. 15.55% of its average playtime consists of non-interactive cinematic cutscenes, a percentage incredibly close to both Death Stranding games. Similarly, Grand Theft Auto 5, another open-world game with cinematic aspirations, is 12.5% cutscene on an average playthrough.
In both The Last of Us Part 2 and GTA 5, there feels like there’s a lot more story going on between cutscenes compared to Kojima’s games. Characters are constantly conversing to build out each other’s backstories, and radios chatter away to paint pictures of their worlds. But this constant noise can be overwhelming, and frankly, wouldn’t suit the worlds of Metal Gear Solid and Death Stranding at all. Both are built around protagonists that work in isolation – deep behind enemy lines, or trekking on a lonesome delivery path. This solitude, which enables stretches of reflection and contemplation, are what make these worlds – particularly that of Death Stranding – so singular to wander. The thought of story being injected simply to speed up the flow of its delivery feels counterintuitive. You don’t embody Sam Porter Bridges expecting an audiobook. Instead you get something of a therapeutic white noise machine that plays in between new chapter milestones.
So, should Kojima “just make a movie”? No. He’s created some of the most engaging worlds and unique mechanical gameplay experiences, both of which have helped shape the entire medium. We’d all be much poorer without his contributions. Should he be less reliant on cinematic cutscenes, or incorporate story into his missions? Perhaps. But his approach has worked well enough for me so far, and I don’t think a couple of blips 10-15 years ago should change my perspective on that. Death Stranding 2: On the Beach manages to tell a highly engaging story in only the way Kojima knows how, and I wouldn’t want him following a trend at the risk of receiving anything less interesting.
Simon Cardy is a Senior Editor at IGN who can mainly be found skulking around open world games, indulging in Korean cinema, or despairing at the state of Tottenham Hotspur and the New York Jets. Follow him on Bluesky at @cardy.bsky.social.
Room 17 of the British Museum contains an entire tomb – a two-thousand-year-old burial site framed by featureless lavenderbox walls, like an asset conjured up in a video game editor. Known as the “Nereid Monument” for the presence of sea nymphs among the pillars, it is thought to have been constructed for the Xanthian ruler Arbinas in what is now Türkiye, and appears in the Museum care of the 19th century British archaeologist Charles Fellows, who, in the Museum’s words, “brought many antiquities back to England with the full permission of the Ottoman Turkish authorities”. Modern-day Turkish repatriation organisations dispute this framing, naturally, and are campaigning for the monument’s return to the lands on which it once stood.
A developer who worked on Microsoft’s now-cancelled Perfect Dark reboot has addressed the claim that last year’s gameplay demo was “fake,” and said the glimpse was a vertical slice of the project running “in-engine.”
Perfect Dark was one of several projects canned by Microsoft this week as part of the company’s latest devastating cuts to Xbox staff and games. Developed by The Initiative, a studio Microsoft is now shutting down, alongside Tomb Raider studio Crystal Dynamics, Perfect Dark had rarely been glimpsed since its initial announcement back in 2020.
That all changed last year when a “gameplay reveal” video aired as part of the Xbox Games Showcase in June 2024. And it’s this video that has since sparked questions over how much of what it shows corresponds to actual, working game systems.
Earlier this week, Kotaku writer Ethan Gach posted on social media that he had been told last year’s demo had been “basically fake.” The question of the gameplay demo’s legitimacy was discussed in more detail by former Perfect Dark developer Adam McDonald, who now works as a senior game designer at Cuphead maker Studio MDHR.
“It is actually in-engine,” McDonald said. “I was one of three level designers that worked on it. It worked best if you played it the way the person playing in the video plays it, but it still worked even if you didn’t hit the marks perfectly.
“There’s some fake stuff in it,” he continued, “and the real gameplay systems shown off worked juuust enough to look good in this video. We were rapidly making real design decisions so as to not knowingly lie to players about what the game will be. The parkour is all real, the hacking/deception is mostly real.
“The combat is ‘real’ in that someone had to really do all that stuff in the video, but it’s set up to be played exactly that way and didn’t play well if you played it a different way.”
What McDonald is saying then, is that there’s nuance here. Like many vertical slices meant to showcase a project that’s still in development, it was made to work just enough, and to give a sense of how the final game would have appeared, had the project survived until launch.
McDonald’s suggestion here seems to be that the team behind it intended to show something that gave as accurate a sense of what Perfect Dark would be as was possible. That said, some elements clearly still sound like they were a work-in-progress, even if they were meant to be representative.
“I’m seeing big controversy over ‘THIS WHOLE THING WAS FAKE’ and it’s annoying me, so I wanted to say something,” McDonald concluded. Then, in a reply to another user, McDonald said “it was a pretty typical vertical slice” and “I don’t think we were particularly deceptive with it.”
He added: “It’s probably more real than you think. We were figuring stuff out on the fly in time to include it in the demo, doing our best not to ‘lie’ to players. There’s some fakery but quite a lot of it was legit.”
The studio making underwater survival game Subnautica 2 have promised fans that “nothing has changed” despite a recent drastic change in leadership at the company. The game is still planned to be a single player survival adventure with optional co-op.
“Nothing has changed with how the game is structured,” said a statement posted to Unknown World’s website yesterday. “It will remain a single-player first experience, with optional co-operative multiplayer. No subscriptions. No loot boxes. No battle pass. No microtransactions.” Okay nameless statement, this still dosn’t clear anything up.
College Football 26 Deluxe Edition
