Atomfall is set to release for PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, and PC in March. The deluxe edition will be available on March 24, while the standard edition releases March 27. Billed as a survival-action game, Atomfall is set in a quarantine zone in Northern England five years after a nuclear disaster. The game is available to preorder now in a couple of editions (see it at Amazon). Read on for the details about what comes in each edition, how much it costs, what preorder bonuses are available, and more.
The digital-only deluxe edition of Atomfall comes with the game itself, plus the following extras:
3 days early access (March 24)
“Story Expansion Pack” (coming later)
“Basic Supply Bundle” Pack
“Enhanced Supply Bundle” Pack
Atomfall Will Be on Game Pass
Xbox and PC owners can play Atomfall on PC on March 27, as long as they’re subscribed to Game Pass. Click above for the current best deal on a three-month membership, our check out our guide to the best ongoing Game Pass deals.
Atomfall Preorder Bonus
Preorder Atomfall from any retailer, and you’ll receive the following digital items for free:
In the five years since the Windscale nuclear disaster in Northern England, the place hasn’t become any more inhabitable – at least for the types of people you’d want to spend time with. Living in the quarantine zone are cultists, rogue government agencies, and all sorts of strange people. Your job is to survive by scavenging resources, bartering with others, and crafting items, as well as fighting and talking with the locals.
Don’t get too comfortable. As an RPG that puts you in the synthetic boots of an escaped robo-person, Citizen Sleeper 2 often has you on the run. It’s a crunchy, dicey machine of vibrant world-building that sometimes forgets itself in wandering prose. A compelling universe to sail through, with more habitats and hovels than its predecessor, more stations and stellar gateways. It can’t – for me – escape the dense gravity of the first game’s compact storytelling and novel character building, no matter how often it funnels you from one space caper to the next. But it has a good time trying.
It’s been confirmed that Summer Game Fest will return this year with a 2-hour showcase taking place on 6th June at the YouTube Theatre in Los Angeles.
Following this, a ‘Play Days’ hands-on event will take place from 7th-9th June in which media and influencers can experience new and upcoming games from over 40 attending publishers.
Typically, if I’m holding my breath while playing a game, it’s because I’m focused on the rhythm of say, an intense combat sequence or platforming section. The tension stems from the precise, real-time input needed to triumph in those situations, a perfectly-aligned leap or parry. Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector, an RPG in which the main mechanic is placing dice into a slot at your leisure, does not require the lightning fast touch of a button, and that in itself is a testament to how exhilarating the game can be.
Citizen Sleeper 2 is the sequel to 2022’s Citizen Sleeper, and a compelling evolution to the first instalment that introduces new characters, stories and mechanics. You don’t necessarily need to have played the first game, but it does help in understanding the nuance and complexities of the unforgiving, dystopian world that Citizen Sleeper is set in. While the first game often felt like an isolated journey where helping yourself was often a zero-sum game, Citizen Sleeper 2 introduces a crew system, alongside some other clever new features, allowing your Sleeper to become the quirky, unappointed protagonist of your very own episodic sci-fi adventure.
Mechanically, the sequel feels fresh but familiar. Like the first game, Citizen Sleeper 2 is driven by ‘Cycles’, and at the start of each, you’ll roll a set of six-sided dice that will determine your output during any given Cycle. These dice will then slot into numerous activities, and the higher the roll, the higher the chance of success. Where Citizen Sleeper 2 builds on this is in a brand-new ‘Glitch’ system, a quirk that can debuff one or multiple of your dice rolls substantially, and the ‘Push’ system, which allows you to decrease the risk of using a specific dice to accrue Stress, another new feature.
Stress is an exchange, letting you exchange short term success for further complications later on like ‘breaking’ a die, rendering it useless for a Cycle. This system forces you to gamble, to analyse whether success in the moment is worth whatever damage you’ll do to yourself in the long run. This is where those tense, exhilarating moments come into play, Citizen Sleeper 2 is at its best when a critical success or punishing failure hinges on an unpredictable dice roll.
It’s a much more engaging system, turning the act of simply rolling dice into a wider risk/reward system that enables you to essentially push through a difficult situation and pay for it later. Citizen Sleeper 2 is effectively a game about being alive in a body that doesn’t quite work as you’d like it to, and its mechanics are masterfully built to force you to wrestle with that at all times, yet it never feels a burden to play.
Another new addition that impacts how you play is the class system, which introduces three distinct Sleeper archetypes with their own strengths and weaknesses. Each class starts with strength in one skill, with the ability to unlock points and build out other skills as you play. However, each of these has one skill completely blocked off, you’ll not be able to build on it and will always be at a disadvantage on activities that require it. For example, I went with the Machinist role, a pragmatic archetype that excels with the ‘Engineer’ skill and falls short with the ‘Engage’ skill. In short, great at fixing things, not so great at socialising. It’s a balanced system, but one that drives a natural instinct to play a role, which will also impact how you build your party, another excellent addition to Citizen Sleeper 2.
As you progress, you’ll meet new characters that can be recruited as part of your crew, and each of these new additions comes with their own skills. This changes the dynamic of Citizen Sleeper 2 dramatically – you’re no longer only dependent on your own dice rolls, your crew members can contribute additional die in certain moments.
However, these characters are more than just tactical additions to your tabletop arsenal. Citizen Sleeper 2‘s colorful cast is compelling to follow, because they’re not merely compelled to follow you. They’re individual personalities, each with their own drives and dreams. Sometimes, crew members will be indisposed on errands of their own making, and sometimes their actions will put you in interesting positions, and sometimes those situations may conflict with how you have chosen to roleplay your Sleeper. These characters are not written to be necessarily “good” or “bad” personalities, but everyone you meet has been molded by the dystopian landscape they all share in some way. There’s moral ambiguity in characters that have been shaped by loneliness, conflict and desperation, and there’s a muted cordiality in everyone just trying to survive.
One thing to really heed is that there is no right or wrong way to play Citizen Sleeper 2. Progression is not confined by the binaries of success and failure here, there is no “game over” if you find yourself stumbling through a run of bad luck and poor dice rolls. The decisions that you or your crew decide or deign are the ones that truly matter, and your priorities may change as you uncover new threads to pull on.
The main story of Citizen Sleeper 2 is propelled forward by Major Drives, main missions that’ll advance the plot, but you’ll also pick up Minor Drives, side quests that are optional but will uncover integral additions such as new crew members and valuable items, some of which will pertain to the personal goals of your crew members. However, the new Contract system is where Citizen Sleeper 2 really shines in its homage to the episodic television format the game draws influence from. Contracts are little missions that your crew can embark on with their own engaging narratives and rewards, and they’re also where camaraderie with your crew is key to survival. Opportunities are often shrouded behind inconspicuous interactions that require good use of every skill, and not just your own.
Contracts are accessed via a new map layout, which allows your crew to travel freely between several locations. Citizen Sleeper 2 is far less linear, some Minor Drives will take you to new locations, or you can just choose to spend a few Cycles exploring a place with no specific goal. While its predecessor kept you isolated and tied to one place, Citizen Sleeper 2 extends an open invitation to explore a sprawling galaxy, as long as you have the supplies to get where you’re going.
There is, however, a constant clock running in the background as you partake in all of this wild-eyed wandering. The next narrative beat will often be forced upon you after a certain number of Cycles, and the way to keep failure at bay is to always be moving around. Again, this isn’t a pending failure, but a persistent reminder that there are consequences to your actions in this unrelenting universe.
Citizen Sleeper 2 constantly dances on the line between a calm, controlled stroll and a high-octane sprint. While you may be engaging in some non-important churn, taking your time with its many engaging dialogue sequences, the everpresent thrum of danger is always creeping up to you, making sure you can never truly relax wherever you are. It’s a masterful feat of thoughtful worldbuilding, where your success is often either clutched through chaos or entirely incalculable, which is also a salient question that Citizen Sleeper‘s world poses about existence: What if everything just went wrong anyway, and that was okay?
Team Ninja will release a Ninja Gaiden 2 Black update in mid February to make “balance adjustments” and add “additional features.”
The update was announced on X/Twitter but little was said about what it includes specifically. Players have already replied to the post with features they’d like to see, including options to tweak camera movement as well as a more traditional new game plus option, but Team Ninja has only said it will address “feedback” received so far. No release date was announced.
“Based on the feedback received, we are preparing a patch aimed for release in mid February with some balance adjustments and additional features,” the studio said.
Ver. 1.0.6.0 Patch Released A patch for the Microsoft Store ver. to fix the issue where super-resolution couldn’t be selected has been released.
Ninja Gaiden 2 Black, which shadow dropped for players on PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X and S last week, also received a smaller update in the form of patch version 1.0.6.0 today. As detailed on its website, it comes with two specific changes: a fix for an issue that removed DLSS and XeSS resolution options for copies bought through the Microsoft Store, and a fix for a “rare” problem that halted progress for players after defeating certain bosses.
The game was revealed alongside word that Team Ninja and PlatinumGames are both hard at work on Ninja Gaiden 4, which is set to launch in fall 2025. The remake of the second Ninja Gaiden game, meanwhile, is here now, and it’s already made quite an impression in the gaming space. We’ve enjoyed it, too, giving it an 8/10 in our review, where we called it a “definite and gorgeous improvement” over the Sigma 2 re-release and “an excellent action game all around.”
I found a lot of joy in Hello Kitty Island Adventure when I first started playing its closed beta for IGN’s guide, way back before it hit Apple Arcade in 2023. Getting to create my own little Sanrio character and run around a tropical island collecting bits and bobs to gift to my new animal friends was pretty relaxing and fun. But day by day, that motivation to complete all my quests, find missing friends, and unlock new regions started to wear off. At a certain point it felt like a chore to log in, spam friends with gifts until I hit obnoxious daily limits, and hope I’d be allowed to progress my friendship levels a little further. Sadly, it’s the same situation on Switch and PC a year and change later: this island is still just as large, colorful, and geographically diverse as it was on my iPad, but it’s as frustratingly gated, repetitive, and stale too.
Don’t get me wrong, there’s plenty to like about Hello Kitty. The crafting, for instance, feels simple and intuitive. There are many different things you can make, from a variety of food items to cute plush pals. But at the end of the day, the main purpose of crafting is to get better gifts for your island friends. The better your gifts, the quicker you’ll advance friendship. That means there is very little incentive to craft things outside of gift giving or unlocking the next step of the very light “story.”
Gifting is what makes the world go ‘round in Hello Kitty Island Adventure. Everything revolves around giving your island residents presents and receiving resources (which you’ll use to make better gifts) in exchange. Progression in the story is largely locked behind different Friendship levels, which can be a slog to get through unless you’re gifting your residents two- or three-heart items – but the catch is that you won’t even be able to craft those higher level items until you’ve hit certain Friendship levels. It feels like a carefully curated maze of roadblocks to keep you from progressing too far too fast.
Although discovering the best order to level your residents while trying to figure out each of their favorite three-star gifts can be a fun challenge, gifting eventually starts to feel more like a tedious chore. You can’t even deliver multiple of the same gift at once to hurry up the process. And since gifting whatever earns you the most Friendship points is the only correct option, there’s nothing creative or rewarding about it – it’s a thinly veiled spreadsheet color-coded in bright, bubblegum pink. Even the dialogue triggered by gifting remains largely the same from friend to friend, only varying depending on the “tier” of the item you give.
The characters are super cute, but talking to them each day feels fruitless.
The characters themselves are super cute, and are sure to spark some nostalgia for longtime Sanrio fans. They have a bit of spunk to them, with the odd moment of humor which livens up otherwise-dull dialogue interactions. Other than that, though, talking to the island residents each day feels fruitless. You don’t really get any new interactions with them as time goes on. You just have to keep plugging along giving gift after gift to unlock their quests if you hope to see anything new or different.
So if Friendship and gifting are simply the keys, surely the questing door they open is where more interesting or engaging experiences must be hidden… right? Unfortunately, all that awaits you is even more flavors of busy work. From quests unlocked by reaching new levels of Friendship, to the story quests which reveal the “mystery” of the island, these objectives are another never-ending list of to-dos, with very little variety in the simple puzzles, object fetching, crafting, and more they ask of you.
That means quest tasks get repetitive fast, and I had very little motivation to complete them outside of unlocking more of the story (which itself is full of dialogue that often falls flat) because rewards felt either minimal or inconsequential. We’re talking about a crafting material here, a “spooky” furniture item there – nothing that changed anything about the way the next task would unfold.
That’s because furniture and decorating are just as underwhelming as the crafting and collecting that precede them. You can decorate your own island home, plus the other homes you unlock to attract new Visitors, using the friendship and quest rewards. If you’re lucky, you might find something in a random chest hidden around the island. It’s a while, though, before you’re able to craft your own furniture.
Once you’ve unlocked some variety, the options are… okay. While you could mix and match, the decor isn’t very versatile, leaving little room to get creative and design your own style outside of the “themes” each furniture set comes in because they just don’t play well together. What am I supposed to do with a Hello Kitty bookcase, a Spooky Candelabra, and a Pirate chair? I can’t make my house look like a bookstore, or a cafe, or even redecorate for an upcoming holiday with such limited options. Heck, you can’t even rotate furniture at quarter turns or place objects on tables! Overall, unless you like decorating your houses in full-on Kawaii styles, you’re out of luck.
One of the areas where Hello Kitty Island Adventure’s customization is more successful is its character creator. I love that you get to build your own little Sanrio character, rather than the Animal Crossing approach of you being the only human on an island full of sentient, talking creatures. There’s a nice variety of different animals to choose from, including birds, bunnies, and even sheep (though I am bewildered that it doesn’t have frogs as an option). As you play more and level up your Friendship, you unlock even more “avatar” color options to choose from.
A lack of interesting hooks is why my motivation started to wane.
Tuxedosam has some cute clothes available to purchase at his island shop, and you’ll get the odd outfit from a chest or quest. However, much like the decor, there isn’t enough variety to inspire my creativity or make me want to dress up every day (or even very often) like I usually enjoy doing in games like this. I found one outfit I kind of liked and it became my “uniform.”
This lack of interesting hooks is a big reason why my motivation to continue playing started to wane once I reached a certain point. Sure, there are lots of things to collect in Hello Kitty Island Adventure, including furniture, clothes, critters, fish, and more, but there is very little incentive to do so other than simply for the sake of keeping you busy.
There is at least the Nature Preserve to fill up with critters, as well as the Fwishing Well to give fish to, both of which would normally satisfy someone like me who enjoys “catching ‘em all” and hitting collection goals. But, once again, the rewards for adding these places are so minimal they might as well be nonexistent. You’re telling me that for donating all the critters that can be found in the bog area of the island I get… 10 mushrooms? I could gather those myself in a single day!
It does help that the designs for the critters themselves are unbearably adorable, branching off beyond bugs to also include frogs, chickens, and even turtles. But that’s not enough to change the fact that bug catching itself is overly simplistic, and doesn’t offer much to make certain bugs more of a challenge than others besides having them vanish quicker. Of course, you can enlist Kerropi’s help to get a buff that makes the bugs stick around longer – but, as you might have guessed, this too is locked behind their Friendship level.
In comparison, I really like the fishing minigame, which puts a small spin on the typical “keep the fish in the colored bar” mechanic by turning the bar on its side and testing your reaction time to keep an arrow balanced in the center. However, there isn’t much more to fishing beyond this. There are no upgrades to get and no fishing collection challenges that I could find, other than hitting certain milestones by giving gifts… sorry, I mean making donations to the Fwishing Well. That’s a shame, because the designs of the fish are really cute, colorful, and match the unique vibe of the regions they are found in perfectly.
At this point, you’ll probably be making comparisons to another cozy tropical island game. Allow me to be the bearer of bad news: No, Hello Kitty Island Adventure is not really comparable to Animal Crossing: New Horizons. While these two games might seem very similar on the surface (you are stuck on an island with some cute animal companions, tasked with sprucing the place up), they couldn’t be more different once you actually jump in.
Animal Crossing is all about collecting and crafting as you shape your own personal dream island, essentially a sandbox decorating game full of fun little guys who live alongside you. Hello Kitty, on the other hand, is all about transforming an abandoned island amusement park into the best (read, predetermined) version of itself along a linear path. The lack of customization for not only the island itself, but also your own house and visitor’s houses, means it feels less like your dream island, and more like a dream of Hello Kitty’s that you’re just visiting.
That makes it feel like Hello Kitty Island Adventure is asking nothing of me except for my time. While a game coming to more platforms is never a bad thing on its own, I fear this one was better off played on a phone – something to open up and fill the dull moments on long commutes or in waiting rooms. Despite the disdain mobile games often unjustly draw, there is no shame in wanting something that serves as a casual distraction for short spurts at a time. (That isn’t even to touch on the fact that many mobile games are so much more than that.) But even in that context, this isn’t one I want to spend my spare time on, and it makes me sad to think it could be what some people now think all cozy mobile games are: colorful, cutesy, and totally mindless.
Bioware released a statement yesterday. It talked of “turning towards the future”. It dreamed of “a more agile, focused studio”. Nowhere in the post did the word “layoffs” appear. But this is what the post was actually about. The closest it got to addressing the facts of what happened to an unspecified number of workers is the phrase: “we don’t require support from the full studio.”
It’s one of the most disingenuous announcements of job cuts in a recent and plentiful history of job cuts. A weirdly impressive feat from BioWare, considering the last two or three years have seen some spectacular verbal gymnastics from games companies when it comes to shitcanning people. Let’s take a look at some of our “favourite” mealy-mouthed press releases in which people have their jobs poetically “sunsetted” rather than, say, dropkicked out the window.
Sony has issued an update on the classic PlayStation, PS2, PS3, and PS4 limited-time console themes for PS5, as well as the prospect of more themes coming to the console.
In a tweet, Sony confirmed that the much-loved classic themes leave tomorrow, January 31, 2025. However, it also confirmed that they will return at some point, which is certainly good news for PS5 users who’ve enjoyed those nostalgia-fueled boot-up sounds whenever they turn their consoles on.
“Thank you for the fantastic response to the classic PlayStation, PS2, PS3, and PS4 limited-time console themes, which will be leaving tomorrow,” Sony said. “Due to the positive response on these 4 themes, we’re doing some work behind the scenes to bring these special designs back in the months ahead.”
Your PS5 now has themes that use imagery and sound from previous PlayStation consoles! pic.twitter.com/5UAwEplcwX
That’s the good news. Now for the bad news. In a follow-up tweet, Sony said it has no plans to release more themes in the future. Here’s the statement:
“While there aren’t plans to create additional themes in the future, we’re excited to keep celebrating legacy PlayStation hardware with you all.”
Fans were quick to express their disappointment at the news. Sony has yet to add themes to the PS5 despite it being a feature of previous consoles, and based on this statement, it’s not happening at lease with this console generation.
The nostalgia themes let PS5 users style their home screen and menus after the PSOne, PS2, PS3, and PS4 in celebration of the 30th anniversary of PlayStation on December 3, 2024. The PSOne theme adds the classic console to the home screen background, the PS2 theme adds its menu shapes, the PS3 theme adds its wave background, and the PS4 theme similarly adds the wave patterns seen in the background of the previous generation of PlayStation. All themes also add each console’s sound effects.
Image credit: Sony Interactive Entertainment.
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.
The last Minesweeperalike I wrote up was a sparkling slurry of mind-altering pop-ups and resinous AI cleavage. It was David Cronenberg’s Minesweeper: The Substance Edition, and I was sincerely worried that I’d put you all off Minesweeper for life. But before you mop your last munition and turn in your index finger for good, give Dragonsweeper a try. It’s Minesweeper with an altogether less atrocious twist which you can hopefully deduce from the name.
The ‘Casey Jones & The Junkyard Jam’ DLC is set to land on Switch on 5th February, bringing with it the Turtles’ hockey-mask-wearing pal, a new stage and a fresh wave of enemies to take out along the way.
