The creators of sci-fi corridor explorer Duskers are making a “spiritual successor” to the 2016 space game. The studio revealed their plans in a video showing three prototypes they’re currently working on. The working title for this one is “Humanity 2.0” and it’ll see you carving up derelict ships to build your own vessel and sometimes defending that ship from pirates trying to take it over. It sounds like you’ll still be the sweaty cybermaster of a bunch of glitchy drones, who now might suffer “fun personality quirks” when you install upgrades, “like not wanting to go down narrow corridors because it’s now claustrophobic”.
Sad, busted-ass space robots just trying to get by? Yes, I’m interested.
Sci-fi battle royale Apex Legends is due a “meaningful update” , according to the CEO of Electronic Arts, something he’s called “Apex 2.0”. To a normal person, adding a 2 to the end of your game’s name is the sign of a sequel. But as the attendant decimal and zero suggest, it’s not clear if that’s exactly what he means. It could mean a revamp with new features, or some other new direction for the existing game. His later words do make it sound more like this is what EA have in mind. Or at least what they’re prepared to tell folks in a financial report.
Listings online previously suggested the game would take up around 15 GB of space and now the estimated file size on the Switch eShop says the game will require an installation of 13.4 GB (thanks, necrolipe). So it seems Monolith Soft and Nintendo have found a way to save some space! In comparison, the Wii U version was around 20+ GB all up.
Last week saw the arrival of Hello Kitty Island Adventure on the Nintendo Switch. Apart from featuring an all-star cast of Sanrio characters, the game takes a fair bit of inspiration from the Animal Crossing series while also freshening up the genre.
As more reviews have been published, we’ve now got a round up. Starting with ours here on Nintendo Life, we thought this was a “great” experience on the Switch – awarding it 8/10:
Complete the missions to get credits towards character stats upgrades.
Seven playable characters to upgrade.
Complete the missions to unlock Arena mode.
The wait is over: single player Sci Fi fantasy Third person shooter Stellar Ghosts Settlers ((SGS)), is out today on Xbox. Let’s jump in to some details on how to get the best out of your gameplay and stay alive!
Upon succeeding a mission, the player will receive credits that can be spent towards upgrading the player characters’ stats of his choice. Seven playable characters are available and each of them starts with their specific stats (Health, Stamina and Armor) and their own unique special ability (force shield, incineration invincibility, orb sidekick, regeneration, megablast and homing electro shots). Making the best use of those hard-earned credits is crucial to enhance your favourite playable characters so that it gets easier to complete the missions.
Make sure to get rid of as many enemies getting in your way as possible. It’s the best way to earn additional credits! So have no mercy! Blast everything that moves! The SGS will reward you for it! But watch your ammo!
Completing missions will also unlock the Arena Mode. This mode will provide countless hours of gameplay where the player will have to go through all the waves of enemies and try to beat the top ranked players on the leaderboards.
If you want to reach the highest ranks in the leaderboard, the best practice would be to use the weakest weapons first to beat a maximum of the weaker enemies in the early waves. As the player gets to the higher waves it will be useful to use stronger weapons since more enemies will attack or stronger enemies will rise. There is a set number of collectibles items (weapons, mechs, energy kits and health kits) in each arena, so you will have to collect them wisely if you want to make it to the highest ranks.
You have an hour to complete an arena, the faster you complete it, the more points you receive. So, you’ll have to be as accurate as possible to save ammunition and try to be as quick as possible to gain extra points thanks to those sharp shooting skills!
We have also hidden a secret object in each mission and arena. If you want to finish the game, you’ll have to find them all to complete that achievement.
You can only earn credits during Campaign mode. So, if you plan on upgrading all the playable characters, you’ll have to redo the missions. The way to go if you want to find all the secret items as well.
Playing the arenas will be a requirement if you plan on completing all the achievements in the game. And you’ll relax while blasting away all the alien creatures and the enemies of the settlers using all the arsenal of weapons available.
Making it to the top ranked players on the leaderboard will feel like a great achievement in itself as you’ll have to beat the score of some relentless pest control players! SGS is available today on Xbox!
Stellar Ghosts Settlers is a Sci Fi Fantasy 3rd person action shooter game that sticks to the basics and immerses you in a world full of original and powerful wildlife.
You are part of a group of settlers who decided to go away from the corrupt galactic Government’s yoke. The settlers decided to set their first colony on the recently discovered and uninhabited planet Prosopopia B-21, planet full of resources so that the colonists could thrive. Despite the hostile wildlife the settlers managed to set multiple bases across the planet. Unfortunately, it wasn’t that long until the galactic Government found out about that treason and decided to invade the planet in order to get their hands on all those new resources.
Once upon a time there was a hugely popular card-drafting game called 7 Wonders. But drafting, where you pick a card to keep and pass the rest on, is pretty boring with two players, seeing as you know exactly what you’re going to be given on each pass. So, eventually, the game got a spin-off for two players only called 7 Wonders Duel which cleverly mimicked a draft by giving players a mixture of face-up and face-down cards to choose from. That was also hugely popular: indeed popular enough that it’s now received a shiny new Tolkien reskin in the form of Lord of the Rings: Duel for Middle-Earth (see it at Amazon).
What’s in the Box
Since this is essentially a card game, that’s the majority of the box contents. Fortunately they’re great cards, vibrant with evocative Middle-earth art. Some of the art actually joins together to make panoramas – although it’s unlikely you’ll manage to collect a set during play. Cards have a colored top bar to indicate what type they are, and most also have several symbols indicating both what that card can do for you, and the prerequisites for acquiring it.
Players new to this version might be more interested in the other components, which are used for tracking the game state. There’s a mini-map of Middle-earth onto which you place delightfully tiny wooden army and castle pieces. Another lovely touch is the hunt for the ring track, over which you place a plastic slider with the hobbits at one end and a movable plastic ringwraith at the other. This ensures the hobbits can inch closer to their objective at Mount Doom, the wraith can inch closer to the hobbits, but the hobbits can never get further away from the wraith.
The remaining pieces are punchable cardboard. There are several stacks of shields, one for each of the neutral factions of Middle-earth that the players hope to ally with, featuring icons on the reverse to indicate the reward for doing so, and lots of gold coins. Finally there’s a tile for each region on the board indicating what fortress you can build there, what it costs, and what you gain for doing so.
Rules and How it Plays
7 Wonders: Duel simulated drafting for two by having each of its three rounds set out a pattern of cards in which a row of face-up cards overlapped a row of face-down cards. That same layout is replicated here exactly, except rather than competing civilizations, one of you is the dark lord Sauron and the other represents the free people of Middle-earth. You can’t pick a card – or flip it, if it’s face-down – until the cards beneath it in the pyramid have been cleared. This makes your choice of which card to take each turn difficult and tense, because you want to try and minimize the options available to your opponent while also maximising your own further down the line.
This card pyramid isn’t the only thing that Lord of the Rings: Duel for Middle-Earth retains from its predecessor. Indeed, pretty much the entire game flow will be familiar to veterans of that game. Most early cards are free, so you can pick them up and add them to your growing tableau. But as the game progresses, more powerful cards will either require you to have particular skill icons or prerequisite symbols from cards you already own in order to take them. If you can’t afford anything, you can use gold to make up the shortfall of matching symbols or discard a card for gold instead.
You are thus quickly caught into a dilemma as to whether to specialize in certain sets of skills, which will make it easier to get similar cards, or play as more of a generalist. There’s no right answer to this: it depends on what cards you get and in what order, and learning when to break one way or the other is a key tactical skill that comes with experience. Either way, this makes flipping face-down cards surprisingly exciting because there can be a lot riding on it if it’s the next key part in the specialist chain that you’re building. There’s nothing worse than suddenly finding you’ve handed the opportunity to pick-up a critical card to your opponent because grabbing something else you wanted revealed it.
In addition to cards that grow your tableau economy, there are also cards that move you forward on victory conditions. These are where Lord of the Rings: Duel for Middle-earth makes clear water between itself and its predecessor. Ring symbols let you advance on the quest for the ring track. If either side reaches the end of its track, it’s an instant win, with identical bonuses to be had along the way. Green cards represent an alliance with another faction such as Elves or Ents: six different such symbols and you win, while duplicates get you a bonus token from a stack specific to each faction. Finally, red cards let you place armies on the map of Middle-Earth, kicking out rivals on a one-to-one basis. If you conquer all seven regions you win, otherwise the player with the most regions when the card stack runs out takes the victory.
Each victory condition is cleverly designed to close in on its apex during the third round of play. You are pretty much guaranteed to be within touching distance of one, if not two, by then and play becomes a matter not only of trying to inch yourself over the line but selecting cards that prevent your opponent from doing the same. This ensures that play builds towards a truly thrilling climax almost every time, lending the game an epic feel that belies its relative simplicity and snappy half-hour play time.
However, after a few plays it’s hard not to wonder how much of this comes down to skill, and how much of it is luck. As mentioned previously, revealing a card that either you, or your opponent, need, can be absolutely critical to which way the victory breaks and there’s very little you can do about it. The decisions you make along the way certainly matter, but the game is engineered to be close because whatever you don’t have the opportunity to get, your enemy will. You thus pay for that crescendo of excitement with the seeds of doubt about how much your efforts influenced the final outcome. In fairness, it is difficult to design really dramatic games that don’t involve a lot of random moments, and this one hides it fairly well.
Play builds towards a truly thrilling climax almost every time.
One other secret weapon the game has in this regard is its other major new feature: fortresses. At any given time there are three fortress tiles available of the full seven, one for each space on the map. They all cost large amounts of skill symbols and gold, but come with benefits to match. Not only do these rewards tie in with the central game mechanics, such as free ring track spaces if you gain the tower of Minas Tirith in Gondor, but they allow you to place a fortress piece in the matching space, which acts as an undefeatable army there. Fortresses are thus huge pivots in winning over map spaces. At the same time, buying a tile is the only way you can delay taking a card and thus potentially force your opponent into taking one that flips those critical unrevealed cards instead.
For all the vibrant card art and name-checking of key places and people in Middle-earth, the game doesn’t end up feeling like an evocation of Tolkien’s trilogy. Grabbing ring cards is no substitute for the long, desperate chase depicted in the books and there’s no real matchup between allying factions and the rewards they offer. Worse, the game often feels counter-thematic. There’s nothing to stop Sauron allying with his most implacable foes, the Elves, and the armies of the free peoples often end up conquering the shadow realm of Mordor and buying its fortress of Barad-Dur. These outcomes would have been unthinkable in the carefully constructed legendarium, but they’re so common here it makes light of Tolkein’s vast imaginative effort.
Monster Hunter Wilds is just a few weeks away, and Capcom has released a PC benchmark for players to see if their system is up to snuff. Alongside that, the PC system requirements have been officially lowered.
As announced during yesterday’s Capcom Spotlight, the PC benchmark for Monster Hunter Wilds is live on Steam right now. The tool will need to compile some shaders once it’s loaded up, but otherwise it’s fairly easy to run and see where your computer lands. It’s a good idea to check, especially if you’re curious about how the updated system requirements might affect your performance.
Previously, the system requirements for hitting 1080p and 60 frames per second (with Frame Generation enabled) called for an Nvidia GeForce RTX 2070 Super, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060, or AMD Radeon RX 6700XT graphics card; an Intel Core i5-11600K, Intel Core i5-12400, AMD Ryzen 5 3600X, or AMD Ryzen 5 5500 CPU; and 16 GB of RAM.
In an updated page alongside the benchmark, Capcom appears to have lowered the requirements. For Recommended, or 1080p (FHD) with 60 frames per second and Frame Generation enabled, here are the new requirements:
OS: Windows 10 (64-bit required) / Windows 11 (64-bit required)
This should, per Capcom’s site, have Monster Hunter Wilds running at 1080p and 60 frames per second with Frame Generation enabled. As you might have noticed, it’s a slight but still noticeable down-tick in requirements.
Users are already reporting some noticeable benefits to performance in the benchmark compared to the beta test, though that’s with Frame Generation enabled. Steam Deck still doesn’t seem likely; while the gaming rig I tested passed with flying colors, my personal attempt on the Deck didn’t elicit promising results.
What’s noticeable, alongside the processing changes, is the difference in storage size. Before, Monster Hunter Wilds called for 140 GB of available space on your SSD; now, it’s 75 GB. As file sizes seem to constantly grow year-over-year, it’s surprising to see such a change.
For more on what’s in store for Monster Hunter Wilds, be sure to read up on our recent IGN First coverage, showcasing bouts with fearsome beasts like the apex monster Nu Udra, and our final hands-on impressions of Capcom’s latest Monster Hunter before it arrives later this month. Monster Hunter Wilds is out for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X and S, and PC on February 28, 2025.
Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.
Part of ensuring “long-term stability and success”.
Sumo Group, the UK-based games studio behind Snake Pass dev Sumo Digital and publisher Secret Mode, has announced that its development team will transition to work “exclusively on development services for partners” and has warned of “an impact on our studios and people” as a result (thanks to Push Square for the heads up).
Revealed in a business update on the Sumo Group website, the studio announced the “strategic decision to focus Sumo Digital exclusively on development services for partners”. While it claimed that it has “embraced opportunities to develop own IP” in the past, the decision is part of ensuring the “long-term stability and success of our business”.
Shuhei Yoshida, former president of Worldwide Studios for Sony Interactive Entertainment, has revealed that Nintendo and Xbox each orchestrated the two scariest moments of his long career at PlayStation.
Yoshida told MinnMax that the release of the Xbox 360 one year before the PlayStation 3 was “very, very scary,” as those who considered waiting for Sony’s console would be well behind in tasting the next generation of video games.
But Yoshida said “the biggest shock I had from an announcement from the competition” was when Nintendo announced that Monster Hunter 4 was going to be a 3DS exclusive. “That was the biggest shock,” he said.
Monster Hunter was a colossal hit on the PlayStation Portable, to the point where it had two exclusive games, but Yoshida had no idea Nintendo had secured this new game for its own console. To make matters worse, it then slashed the price of the 3DS by $100, putting it well below the PlayStation Vita.
“After launch, both Nintendo 3DS and Vita were $250 but they dropped $100,” Yoshida said. “I was like, ‘Oh my god’. And [then they] announced the biggest game… The biggest game on PSP was Monster Hunter. And that game is going to come out on Nintendo 3DS exclusively. I was like, ‘Oh no.’ That was the biggest shock.”
Yoshida retired in January after more than three decades with Sony, where he became a face of the PlayStation brand and was beloved by fans worldwide. His no longer being with the company has allowed Yoshida to share some previously unheard insight such as this, however.
Steam early access games that haven’t been updated in a long while will now be more prominently labelled as such, according to reports. As noticed by third-party tracking platform SteamDB, Valve have begun adding warnings to early access info boxes, making it harder to accidentally spend your pocket money on a promising project that hasn’t advanced in years.
