Could tower defence be the ultimate “it’s Friday and I am here in body only” genre? I haven’t really thought about it before, but Rift Riff‘s effusively laidback crowd control has me pondering those optimal moments in any tower defender when the incoming horde hits the flamer-MG triangle just right, and you can settle back comfortably into the role of clockwatcher.
Rift Riff encourages this behaviour by being nice to look at. Created by a trio of developers including Hidden Folks designer Adriaan de Jongh, it’s a world of spacey, sun-carved mountains, forests and monoliths. The towers resemble the sacred architecture of Monument Valley, and the colour scheme and general ambience remind me of Cocoon. There’s a demo, if you fancy it.
Nostalgia, when you think about it, is bollocks. There has never been a better time than right this second – averaged out, and despite repeated attempts to the contrary, humanity has never been healthier, freer, or more enlightened by knowledge. It’s true of games too. For every by-committee platter of passionless map markers, there are thousands of more personal, more creative, more interesting works, all adding to the decades’ worth of great stuff we can still play today.
What isn’t bollocks is the emotional pull that nostalgia, for all its lack of cold, hard reason, still manages to wield inside our warm, squishy brains. Hence, the centrepiece of Apex Legends’ Season 23 update is a mode that recreates the battle royale FPS as it was back in 2019, defaulting back to the original map and weapon arsenal while cutting the 26-strong legend roster to the earliest ten. It’s a Fortnite-style rolling back of the clock, and a passably enjoyable one, but also a reminder that the good old days weren’t always that good.
Astro Bot has sold 1.5 million copies so far, Sony has announced.
As part of its latest financial results, Sony revealed that the PlayStation 5 exclusive platformer sold 1.5 million as of November 3, just shy of two months after its September 6 release date.
Astro Bot, developed by Sony-owned Team Asobi and published by Sony Interactive Entertainment, is the sequel to 2020’s Astro’s Playroom and the third game in the Astro Bot series. It launched to critical acclaim, with IGN’s Astro Bot review returning a 9/10. We said: “A fantastically inventive platformer in its own right, Astro Bot is particularly special for anyone with a place in their heart for PlayStation.”
While Astro Bot’s sales aren’t up there with some of Sony’s big hitters (Helldivers 2 remains the fastest-selling PlayStation Studios game of all time with an incredible 12 million sold in 12 weeks), it compares favorably to other recently released family friendly platforms. In Europe, launch sales of Astro Bot were 34% higher than those of 2022’s Sonic Frontiers and 52% bigger than those of 2020’s Crash Bandicoot 4.
To put Astro Bot’s sales success into more recent context, Sega’s Sonic x Shadow Generations hit the one million sold mark on its launch day of October 25, according to Sega. But that game launched across multiple platforms and generations, whereas Astro Bot is a PS5 exclusive. Astro Bot sales will surely continue to grow as we head into the crucial holiday shopping season and gamers look to buy a PS5 or the recently released PS5 Pro.
Team Asobi has continued to support the game since launch with a number of updates that have added speedrun challenge levels and new cameos to rescue. At launch, Astro Bot featured 173 bot cameos from PlayStation games past and present (check out IGN’s feature, Astro Bot: Every PlayStation Character – Easter Eggs, for more).
However, iconic Final Fantasy characters were conspicuous by their absence — an omission fans were quick to pick up on in the context of Final Fantasy’s long-standing association with PlayStation. That means no Cloud from Final Fantasy 7, or any other character from the famous role-playing franchise.
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.
Marvelous launched its new action RPG Farmagia on the Switch last week and it’s now been announced the title will be receiving some free DLC skins the month.
Empire of the Ants is striking to look at. For a moment, you might even believe it’s real macro-lens footage of ants in a nature documentary, and the level of detail on the textures of the forest floor is extremely impressive. It’s not really what it appears to be, though: this may be a real-time strategy game with swarms of insects on screen at once, but you’re never actually commanding more than seven units – and given the somewhat clumsy way its controls make you cycle through them to give orders, that’s a mercy. You may be capturing and building up nests, but there’s literally nothing beneath the surface. So while it appears vast, Empire of the Ants is actually a pretty small-scale strategy game in most other ways, and the lack of unit variety and multiplayer modes make it feel smaller still.
Multiplayer matches have a fair amount of nuance in how you use your small number of units and build out your nests to tech up, and there’s ample room for skilled players to turn a situation to their advantage with smart use of powers to boost their bugs’ damage output and debuff the enemy. It’s not unlike a slimmed-down version of Company of Heroes in the way you capture territory and generate the two resources – food and wood – and that’s a good starting point. Ant units get locked into melee combat and can’t disengage until one or the other loses, so you can learn to hold off a dangerous Warrior unit until reinforcements arrive or prevent a retreat while you finish off an enemy. And while you can quickly rebuild a lost unit if you have the food available, each ant legion has a home nest they’ll respawn from, which can mean there’s a long hike back to the front lines.
Each nest you capture has a set number of upgrade slots that can be filled by a building or spent to support a unit from that nest, so turtling up isn’t really an option – you won’t even have enough slots to tech up to tier 3, which means you’ll inevitably be overrun by ants with better stats. All the building is done from a radial menu that pops up when you interact with a nest and, cleverly, you use your ant as a cursor to select things. Crucially, taking out an enemy’s nest disables all the upgrades that were based there, up to and including turning off their minimap. (Fog of war is a thing on the minimap, but because you’re viewing the world in third person instead of a traditional RTS overhead view, it’s handy that you can spot a moving legion of ants from a long distance even if their icon hasn’t shown up on the map.)
There’s fundamentally only one faction to work with.
However, Empire of the Ants feels thin relative to most real-time strategy games, in large part because there’s fundamentally only one faction to work with. Everyone always has the same set of workers, big-headed warriors, and “gunner” ants as their primary units, and they all counter each other in a straightforward rock-paper-scissors balance. (You can’t even play as the visually different termites you fight against in the campaign.) The only variety comes from the ability to customize your loadout by choosing four of eight available powers for your main ant to cast, swapping out your support unit between healing aphids, armoring snails, or troop-carrying beetles, as well as one of three “super predator” unit types. Those certainly enable different strategies, but I’m not a fan of the way locking those choices in before a match begins limits your ability to pivot to a different approach if your opponent throws you a curveball. I’d rather be able to switch from the flying wasps to the acid-resistant beetles as my choice of predator if my enemy goes heavy on gunner units, for instance, but that’s not an option.
Another major weakness of multiplayer is that there are only two modes: 1v1 or 1v1v1. That means there’s no option to play cooperatively against the AI (which is very weak even on the highest difficulties and doesn’t seem to know how to use powers, which are crucial) with a friend. It does have 21 maps, at least, and there’s a fair amount of diversity there in terms of how they’re laid out and the creeps that guard their resource caches, like huge spiders and praying mantises that are cool to watch your ants take down.
That’s good, because it soon becomes clear that there’s basically no variety to the bugs’ animations. At first, skittering around at high speeds can be entertaining, even when the controls freak out because you accidentally climb a small branch and start spinning around it like an actual confused ant. Watching a swarm flow over terrain is convincing and, since we’re up so close, dramatic. Warriors will pick up enemies in their big jaws and shake them around, and dead bodies are flung high in the air like mortarboards at a high school graduation ceremony (which I don’t think ants actually do?) and then roll down hills. But when you’ve seen one ant-vs-ant fight, you’ve seen them all. Beetles in particular get repetitive to watch very quickly because of their lunging attacks. Even so, there are good reasons to play the Empire of the Ants’s multiplayer, which cannot be said for the single-player campaign.
Listen closely: do you hear that sound? It’s the cry of hundreds of beleaguered Dino Crisis fans, mourning the revival that could’ve been.
Adi Shankar, the creator of Netflix’s upcoming Devil May Cry show and a filmmaker with a strong reputation for video game anime adaptations (Castlevania, Captain Laserhawk), revealed some interesting information in a recent X/Twitter post. Specifically, when he first started talking to Capcom years ago, his sights weren’t actually set on Devil May Cry.
He began by sharing some quick thoughts on each of the three Dino Crisis games, praising the first two while conceding that the third “lost that magic” as it headed off Earth.
“Why am I telling you this?” he continued. “Because when I first went to Capcom in 2017, my mission was clear: I wanted to bring Dino Crisis back. But in an awesome twist of fate, they sold me Devil May Cry instead! I didn’t think DMC would even be on the table.”
1. Dino Crisis 1 nailed the survival horror vibe, blending the tension of Resident Evil with the sheer terror of being hunted by dinosaurs—perfect. 2.Dino Crisis 2 took it up a notch with fast-paced action & incredible level design. 3.Sadly, Dino Crisis 3 lost that magic—it took… pic.twitter.com/0pOZReOdkf
It’s an almost comically tragic twist of fate for Dino Crisis enthusiasts, who have long awaited another installment in the survival series created by Resident Evil’s Shinji Mikami. “Like it’s cool Devil May Cry fans can eat but god damn. Dino Crisis fans stay in sad I guess,” bemoaned one X/Twitter user.
The last mainline Dino Crisis game came out all the way back in 2003, and rumors have swirled for years about a potential fourth game. There are a few reasons not to hold your breath, though: for one, Mikami said earlier this year that the popularity of Monster Hunter doesn’t leave a lot of room for another Dino Crisis entry. Plus, Capcom recently tried its hand at another dinosaur-focused game, Exoprimal, a multiplayer title that stopped adding new content just a year after its launch.
Still, hope for a revival in anime form isn’t completely extinct just yet — even if it’s a little thin. While clarifying that he’s currently committed to a “very long-term plan” for Devil May Cry, Shankar added, “But yes, one day perhaps I usually use my powers to resurrect Dino Crisis.”
Alex Stedman is a Senior News Editor with IGN, overseeing entertainment reporting. When she’s not writing or editing, you can find her reading fantasy novels or playing Dungeons & Dragons.
I first played Taiko no Tatsujin in an arcade (in Japan, because I am very cool), where it’s controlled by hitting a recreation of an actual taiko drum. It was fun enough that I wish there was a taiko drum peripheral available for PC now the series is on our platform.
Taiko no Tatsujin: Rhythm Festival is out now via Steam, where it offers over 70 songs to drum through, and a subscription service through which to unlock over 700 more. Maybe I should try to get my Donkey Konga drums working on PC, but I’ll probably settle for playing it with a gamepad.
Gears of War voice acting veterans John DiMaggio and Carlos Ferro will officially reprise their roles as Marcus Fenix and Dominic Santiago for Gears of War: E-Day.
Developer The Coalition announced the news on Thursday, which also happens to be the 18th anniversary of the launch of the original Gears of War. It’s big news for longtime fans of the series, who will remember that DiMaggio and Ferro played the two leads in the franchise’s first three games. An image of the two stars standing together was shared to studio’s official X/Twitter account.
We are so back. 🤜🤛
On today’s 18th anniversary of Gears of War, we’re proud to share that John DiMaggio and @RealCarlosFerro are reprising their roles as the iconic voices of Marcus Fenix and Dominic Santiago in Gears of War: E-Day. pic.twitter.com/x9uaH9R0sR
Gears of War: E-Day is a prequel that takes place awhile before the mainline Gears story got its start. Specifically, it’s set around Emergence Day, which is known as the day the Locust horde made its way to the surface of Sera to launch its attack on humanity. That means that we definitely won’t be seeing protagonists like JD Fenix and Kait Diaz from future Gears games, and more importantly, it means that Marcus and Dom get one more game to see how exactly their bond was strengthened.
It’s not much of a surprise to hear that DiMaggio and Ferro will re-team for E-Day – fans had guessed that the longtime Marcus Fenix voice actor would at least return following the reveal of an emotional announcement trailer earlier this year – but it’s still nice to hear that Dom’s voice will be returning as well. While Marcus lived on to fight in Gears 4 and 5, his partner’s journey ended with a heroic sacrifice in Gears of War 3. Many believe the duo’s relationship and the performances behind them are what helped propel the Gears of War series to success, and now, E-Day is attempting to recapture that gritty, gory magic.
The Coalition told us earlier this year that Gears of War: E-Day gives the team to return to the series’ roots in more ways than one. One element set to return in the prequel is the horror that the original trilogy is known for. Brand Director Nicole Fawcette and Creative Director Matt Searcy spoke to us about their goals in an interview that took place shortly after the game’s reveal.
“For us, it’s like a what-if story,” Searcy said. “What if the ground opened up and monsters came out? Yeah, it’s set on a fictional, other planet, but there are very human reactions and stories we get to tell. To do that, we need to be able to tell a story that feels like a horror story.”
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.
