Category: Video Games

Walmart’s Cyber Monday sale is officially live and you can pick up plenty of awesome console deals including the new PS5 slim bundles with a free game (Modern Warfare 3 or Spider-Man 2), plenty of Diablo 4 Xbox Series X bundles, as well as deals on the Xbox Series S and even Nintendo Switch OLED. Conveniently, the best Cyber Monday TV deal is also at Walmart, a Sony Bravia 65″ OLED for $1498. With a 120Hz refresh rate, it’s the perfect TV for the current crop of 4K consoles.

Walmart PS5 Cyber Monday Deals

PS5 Slim with Spider-Man 2 or Call of Duty Console Bundle for $499 (Save $70)

Note that this is the brand-new slim model of the PS5, which is pretty cool on its own. But if you were to buy these items separately, they’d cost you $569. These are currently on sale for Cyber Monday for $499.

PS5 Slim Vertical Stand

Believe it or not, Sony isn’t including a vertical stand in the new PS5 slim models. So if you want to set it vertically in your entertainment stand, you’ll probably want to pick up this $29.99 accessory. It’s kind of annoying that it’s an add-on, but it’ll keep your slim standing.

Walmart Xbox Series X and S Cyber Monday Deals

If you’re on Team Green (that’s what I’m calling Xbox fans; I think it’ll catch on), you can save a bundle on new console… bundles… at Walmart as well. Check out what’s available above and grab whichever one strikes your fancy.

Walmart Nintendo Switch Cyber Monday Deals

If you could use a new Nintendo Switch for yourself or someone on your list this year, you might as well get a free game with it. Walmart has the standard Switch holiday bundles (featuring a game + 3-months of Switch Online), but it’s also offering a Switch OLED bundle that includes Mario Kart 8 Deluxe for $359 as well.

Will We See PS5 Slim Digital Cyber Monday Deals?

So far, we haven’t seen any offerings for the PS5 Digital edition, only bundles for the disc-version. In fact, we haven’t even seen it listed anywhere at any configuration. Since the PS5 launched, the few instances where we’ve seen deals have always been on the disc version, so if you’re holding out for the digital PS5 deal, honestly, you might just want to bite the bullet and grab one of the PS5 slim disc editions on sale instead.

Walmart’s Cyber Monday deals also feature some exciting discounts for Apple users. Right now, you can save on the 2nd generation Apple AirPods Pro (both versions with a Lightning charging port and USB-C charging port).

Alongside Walmart, Amazon and Best Buy also have some Cyber Monday deals that are live and worth looking at. If you’re curious about what’s included in those, make sure to check out our roundups of Amazon’s Cyber Monday deals and Best Buy’s Cyber Monday deals to learn more. Although Black Friday has passed, plenty of deals are still live and we want to help you save as much as possible while shopping. You can also check out our breakdowns on what’s included in Costco’s Cyber Monday deals along with details on Apple’s Cyber Monday deals, PlayStation’s Cyber Monday deals, Xbox’s Cyber Monday deals, and Nintendo’s Cyber Monday deals.

Hannah Hoolihan is a freelance writer who works with the Guides and Commerce teams here at IGN.

The Black Friday deals may have come to an end, but Cyber Monday is still here for round two, and there are plenty of discounts for PlayStation owners to enjoy this year. Alongside the excellent PS5 console bundle deals, you can also save on a variety of PS5 accessories right now. This includes DualSense controllers (which were originally knocked down to $49) to SSDs to console covers. Below, we’ve broken down the best deals on PS5 accessories still available in this year’s Cyber Monday sales so you can pick up some exciting new items for your favorite console.

Cyber Monday 2023: Save a Tad on PS5 DualSense Controllers

Considering DualSense controllers usually run for $74.99, it’s well worth it to grab them now at this discounted price of $69. The only color remaining on sale is light blue.

Cyber Monday Deals: Best PS5 Racing Wheels

Racing wheels are an incredible way to play the best racing games on PS5. Boosting your experience with something like the Logitech G29 Racing Wheel can turn it into an incredibly immersive experience. They can be pricey, so this is the best time to catch a brilliant Cyber Monday deal on this wheel or others. But no matter your budget or preferred gaming platform, we’ve found a great racing wheel for you. For more info, we’ve discussed the best racing wheel for PS5 in our in-depth roundup that can be found on IGN.

These SSD Deals Are Our Favorites From Cyber Monday

Scoring a 2TB SSD for roughly $110 is an absolute steal, and a 1TB SSD for around $50 is a solid deal, too, and these options from Silicon Power and Nextorage Japan are here to make your day. They also come with pre-installed heatsinks, which are a must for PS5 users!

Save on PS5 Console Covers

You can jump on the chance to get the PS5 Darkplates 2.0 on dBrand for $20 off. As my favorite small-town pizza lawyer once said, ‘It’s all perfectly legal.’

What PS5 Accessories Do You Need?

While some items, like the console covers, are purely a fun investment to personalize your console, it’s always nice to pick up new controllers. Not only does PlayStation offer a great array of colors to choose from, but having a backup is always handy if your current one breaks or if someone else is coming over to play a co-op game. SSDs are also a nice investment for your PS5 so you can expand your storage. The PS5 doesn’t offer much on its own, so having an additional SSD with a heatsink ready to go can help you out as you build up your PlayStation library.

These PlayStation accessory deals just scratch the surface of what’s available for Cyber Monday. In our roundup of PlayStation and PS5 Cyber Monday deals, you can find plenty more discounts on games and, more importantly, bundle deals. There are a couple of bundles featuring the PS5 Slim that are well worth checking out before they sell out. And if you want to see some more gift options for the holiday season, we also have a PlayStation gift guide featuring a variety of items that make for great gifts for those in your life with a love for PlayStation.

Hannah Hoolihan is a freelance writer who works with the Guides and Commerce teams here at IGN.

Capcom just brought its latest Dragon’s Dogma 2 Showcase to a close, but it still made sure to show off towering new enemies like Talos, a new vocation in the form of the Trickster, and more immersive RPG gameplay.

It was a short presentation that had its show stolen almost immediately when Capcom began to introduce fearsome foes like Talos, a giant statue capable of destroying its surrounding environment. It appears players can take Talos out by climbing around its body and striking weak points Shadow of the Colossus-style.

Talos is proof that Dragon’s Dogma 2 is bringing a gigantic scale to the series, but that’s not the only thing that’s new. While the world may appear similar to the original adventure, Producer Yoshiaki Hirabayashi says the sequel’s story takes place in “a parallel world.” As the Arisen, players will find themselves caught between the struggle of two kingdoms: Vermund and Battahl.

Meanwhile, Dragon’s Dogma 2 Director Hideaki Itsuno introduced us to one of the many quests we’ll encounter. This specific excursion follows the player character as they work with and befriend Elven siblings.

This section of the showcase was used to show off the Elven settlement known as the Sacred Arbor. Here, the Arisen might encounter NPCs that speak their own language that requires translation to understand. If the player has a Pawn nearby who understands Elvish, they will be able to automatically translate it.

“These Specializations that Pawns can acquire will make each of them more unique,” Itsuno said, “and hopefully more enjoyable to journey with.”

Dragon’s Dogma 2 release date revealed

Other new features highlighted in the Dragon’s Dogma 2 Showcase include first looks at a more robust character creator and the new Trickster Vocation. The latter allows players to fight with foggy illusions while providing buffs for Pawns. Itsuno says that this style of combat was made for those who prefer to do their fighting from the sidelines.

Finally, Capcom confirmed that Dragon’s Dogma 2 launches for PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X | S on March 22, 2024. Of course, we already knew that thanks to a leak from earlier today.

Preorders open today, and there are a few options and goodies for buyers to choose from. In addition to the Standard Edition, players will have the option to pick up a Deluxe version of Dragon’s Dogma 2 that bundles the base game with 1500 Rift Crystals, the Dragon’s Dogma Music & Sound Collection, an Explorer’s Camping Kit, and six other useful items.

Those who preorder the standard edition will be granted access to the Superior Weapons set, which includes some shiny tools for the four starting Vocations. Preorders for the Deluxe Edition, meanwhile, come with the Standard bonuses as well as the Ring of Assurance.

For more on Dragon’s Dogma 2, be sure to check out our hands-on preview, where we came away saying, “If there’s one comfort that I can have as a fan of Dragon’s Dogma, it’s that Dragon’s Dogma 2 will offer up more of what I loved about that first game, and that many of those minor elements have been improved upon.”

Michael Cripe is a freelance contributor with IGN. He started writing in the industry in 2017 and is best known for his work at outlets such as The Pitch, The Escapist, OnlySP, and Gameranx.

Be sure to give him a follow on Twitter @MikeCripe.

Zombies can be fun to mow down, but they also run the risk of being one of the least interesting monster enemy types around: a slow, lumbering, decaying husk that’s better off buried than occupying our attention. If nothing else, The Walking Dead: Destinies, based off the otherwise fantastic early seasons of the TV show, succeeds in embodying all their worst qualities. In its ugly, shuffling attempts to stand tall even while looking like rotting husk of a game from the Xbox 360 days, Destinies deserves neither your attention nor access to your wallet – and we would be better off if this boring mess had stayed buried in the past, from which it seems to have exhumed its broken mechanics. While it earns a small amount of credit for at least attempting to play with plots that diverge from the TV show, little else is done to elevate it above the muck of banal design, awful character models, and the laughable sense that this is barely a rough draft of a game.

Longtime fans of the TV show are clearly the target audience here, since the characters poorly mimic the visual likenesses of their real performers. But aside from trying to strike a chord through recognisability, Destinies presumes you know the entire melody as you’re unceremoniously thrown into the shoes of Rick Grimes after he wakes up in the hospital alone.

It is here – right at the beginning of what became eight to nine painful hours – that everything falls apart.

The hospital is, naturally, filled with zombies and Rick must find his way out with some basic mechanics like pushing, sneaking, and healing that we’ve seen in essentially every third-person post-apocalyptic horror game ever, but worse. Zombies are, of course, mindless by design, but these are some of the most incompetent enemies you will encounter in any video game. Aside from there only being about three zombie models, they also get stuck in walls, glitch through the ceiling, collide with each other, and pose about as much threat as a wet sock on a carpet: annoying and unsightly, but otherwise forgettable.

Destinies is ugly as sin, with hideous character models, terrible lighting, and homely environments that themselves are re-used multiple times. I have been playing plenty of games out of my backlog from the Xbox 360 days on my Series X lately, and I can tell you this current-gen game looks worse than the nearly 20-year-old GTA IV.

The texture resolution reminds me of bad webcams we all endured during early COVID-19 Zoom calls. At the very least, the frame rate seemed consistent at 60fps on PS5, when it wasn’t crashing or failing to display its so-called cutscenes. I also hit several game-breaking bugs, one of which required a full restart. Also, during a boss fight, my character refused to interact with the enemy to initiate a cutscene. Not to mention sound and music would vanish for no reason, until I restarted.

Speaking of, the cutscenes themselves are consistent with those cheap-looking placeholder types we’ve seen in games like Redfall and Rise of Kong (which Destinies publisher GameMill was also behind). Characters are displayed in static poses while their voice actors deliver lines, giving you the opportunity to see their terrible designs in full glory. They are clearly meant to vaguely resemble their TV counterparts, but they look like what you’d get if you asked me to draw them from memory.

Strangely enough, the voice performances are actually not atrocious, but the actors didn’t have much to work with. For example, they all have one-liners when taking down enemies or fighting them off – “My blood’s boiling!” “Get off me!” and so on – all of which repeat endlessly. In the context of a dangerous world of constant terror, hearing weird action movie one-liners from both an ex-cop and a 70-year-old farmer was jarring.

Destinies doesn’t even retell the show’s story well. For example, early on when Rick’s son Carl is shot, it is never explained who shot him, and no one seems to know or care. At all. In fact, Otis, the culprit in the show, never even appears in Destinies. Instead, the survivors simply grab the boy and run off to the Greene farm story arc that infamously slowed the series’ pace down.

The only thing Destinies has going for it is being able to play with the titular dynamic: the fates of its characters. There are many occasions where you must make a binary decision that leads to the death or abandonment of a survivor. If you know the show, it is of course enjoyable to make the decision that runs against the established plot. Most notably, you can basically recast the main character, choosing who wins the fight between Rick and Shane after they spend some time on the farm, letting Shane can take over as husband and father to Rick’s family. That’s a pretty dramatic, fundamental change!

It’s clear the developers had some love for the show, given the work put in to portraying Shane as we’ve never seen him. His hair and beard grow out, he forms relationships with characters he never met, and so on. Another good example of an impactful decision involves changing who becomes the final boss’s right-hand man, flowing from a decision you make in the first few hours. But, unfortunately, this is only interesting conceptually, since it still fails miserably in execution, and naturally most decisions do little to affect the actual plot.

The survivors move through different camp areas in their grand road trip, such as the previously mentioned farm and later a prison. These become hub areas where you do three things: start the next main and side missions, resolve a meaningless conflict between two characters, and “talk” to other survivors. And by talk, I mean each person will say one arbitrary, generic line whenever you go back to the hub area, offering no reflection on the events happening around them. For example, Rick’s wife Lori will tell the man who blew her husband’s brains out about how she enjoys making pancakes for the family on Sundays.

Each main mission usually sees you playing as a different survivor. Often this makes little sense, since you’re generally by yourself or playing as the worst person for the task at hand. For example, a few hours into Destinies, Lori gives birth in the prison – but a few minutes later you’re playing as her to recover items from a nearby department store. There were many other survivors who did not just endure a birth in a zombie apocalypse who could have gone, but sure, let’s send the new mother. No explanation is given. Another time, a 70-year-old farmer is sent – alone – to recover an assault rifle and ammo in the basement of the prison. You’re never told why someone who actually handles weapons – like a younger, more agile police officer, for instance – could not have gone instead, or at least accompanied the old farmer.

Destinies attempts to shake up the scenarios in its main quests, but they all come down to either getting to a specific part of the map or collecting items. Very rarely will two characters be together, assisting one another – which was a central focus of the entire show and its spinoffs. There was an opportunity to have one character make decisions that a second character would have to endure the consequences of, but Destinies does nothing with this.

In fact, it’s just not very good at consequences in general. The central and titular dynamic of Destinies is watching your choices define the lives of these survivors, but it doesn’t function well enough to maintain the illusion. More than once, I saw characters I had killed – deliberately or inadvertently – appear during cutscenes. Rick’s son, who died from a gunshot in my playthrough, was running from the farm in a static cutscene; Rick himself, who I had Shane kill, appeared for a solid few seconds battling the horde in the final fight. This may be a universe where the dead return from the grave, but I don’t think Destinies is doing it right.

Each survivor has various unique skills that can be upgraded by acquiring skill points, either through completing tasks or… finding radios, for some reason? For example, the pizza delivery guy can upgrade his sneaking movement speed to avoid conflict with zombies, or Rick’s revolver can do more damage. The skill tree is a massive eyesore, and ultimately meaningless – in the first two hours, I had already maxed it out for everyone.

Even fully upgraded, combat in Destinies is some of the worst you will experience, and feels as though it might’ve been lifted from shovelware of previous console generations. There is no kickback or feel to guns or melee weapons. Shooting is floaty and unresponsive, with terrible auto-lock that has you targeting enemies nowhere near you. Every character has the exact same set of moves, whether they are a fit hunter or a new mom. Characters can use a kind of super move when they’ve built enough “adrenaline”, which restores health and kills enemies instantly, but that also feels pointless when you’re fighting zombies that are so slow and die in two hits.

You do eventually begin to encounter tougher human enemies, but their armor and agility just means they are more irritating and take longer to kill. Oddly, they are also introduced out of nowhere and not spoken of at all. They first appear during Shane’s only flashback sequence to when he was trying to rescue Rick from the hospital – who are they? What do they want? Why are they attacking Shane? Sorry, you’ll never know if you haven’t watched the TV series. Shane himself never reacts to it.