Hey everyone, this is Mike Tucker, Design Director and Programmer at Bitmap Bureau. We hope you’re all excited for Terminator 2D: No Fate, coming October 31, 2025. On behalf of everyone at the Bitmap team, we’re thrilled to reveal the new Gameplay Overview Trailer! The trailer gives an in-depth summary of T2D’s various gameplay systems, including info about game modes, pickups, the scoring system and more.
Difficulty levels explained
Beyond what’s covered in the trailer, we thought this blog would be a great chance to delve into the game even further, specifically covering the different difficulty settings. Hopefully this overview will help you decide which difficulty to choose when picking up the game for the first time.
First things first, when you start the game, you’ll be asked to choose your preferred difficulty setting. From easiest to hardest, the difficulties are:
Easy Money
No Problemo
Hasta La Vista
Judgment Day (Unlocked only after completing Mother of the Future Mode. Completing Story Mode on Judgment Day unlocks the Cheats Menu.)
These difficulty settings are available for all game modes, but for Story Mode in particular, the choice means that the complete T2D story can be enjoyed by everyone regardless of skill level. We recommend first-time players start with the No Problemo difficulty setting for the most balanced experience, while those more experienced with the genre can try their hand at Hasta La Vista; that’s the one most of us here at Bitmap use as our Normal difficulty.
Broadly speaking, the differences between the difficulties revolve around enemy placement and damage output, the number of continues and whether the time limit is turned on. The Easy Money difficulty features no time limit (except for one level) and unlimited continues. However, there are more specific differences between the difficulties, affecting enemy placement, environmental trap timings and more. While it would be impossible to go over all of these changes in the span of this blog, below are a few examples to help you get a sense of the kind of differences you can expect between difficulties.
The Cyberdyne Factory level is a little different from the more run n’ gun levels in the game, testing players’ platforming and timing abilities with various environmental hazards. This level, set within a top-secret Cyberdyne facility, features automated welding arms, used by Cyberdyne in their early terminator experiments. These arms periodically drop down and ignite their torches, causing damage to the player if they come into contact with the sparks created by the arms or the arms themselves. These arms are scattered throughout the level, but how many of them are active will depend on the difficulty the player has chosen.
This isn’t the only difference between difficulties in this level, however. There is also a section of the level in which flames will periodically shoot out of jet engines. The player must evade these flames to avoid taking damage, and time their upward jumps in the periods in which the flames are inactive. You can see below that choosing harder difficulties increases the number of active jet engines and reduces the period of time between bursts of fire, greatly altering the level of challenge.
Here is an example from another level, Freeway Chase, a recreation of the classic chase sequence in Terminator 2: Judgment Day in which John, Sarah, and the T-800 are trying to escape from the T-1000 piloting a stolen police helicopter. In this level, the encounter with the helicopter alternates between two gameplay sections, driving and shooting. In the shooting section, there is a crosshair visible which illustrates the helicopter’s weak spots. As the difficulties get harder, the size of the crosshair gets smaller, meaning that the player has to be much more precise with their aiming to do damage.
Your choice in difficulty will also result in differences in the game’s boss fights, including changes to attack patterns, tighter timing windows and more. At the end of the first Future War level, the player will have to battle a Centurion, a behemoth Hunter-Killer quadruped built by Skynet. Below, you can see that in harder difficulties, the Centurion’s ground-sweeping machine-gun attack moves faster, meaning quicker reactions are needed to avoid taking damage.
These are just some examples of the kind of the differences you can expect to see between Terminator 2D: No Fate’s difficulties. When developing the game, we aimed to give it a sense of challenge that would feel authentic to the feeling of old-school arcade games. However, we realise that controller-smashing difficulty isn’t for everyone, so we implemented these difficulty choices to ensure that everyone can pick their desired level of challenge, regardless of skill level or experience.
Whichever way you choose to play, thank you for reading and we hope you look forward to Terminator 2D: No Fate, coming October 31, 2025.
Elden Ring Nightreign has been out for over two months now, which means players have had ample time to puzzle over and tease out every morsel of its lore. But there’s still one ultra-rare item in the game that most players have probably never seen before, but which some in the community believe still holds an enormous secret: the Cord End.
If you play Nightreign and, like me, had no idea what this even was until just now, here’s the rundown: the Cord End is a legendary consumable item that only appears in big and small churches in Nightreign from breaking boxes. Its drop percentage is ridiculously low – just 0.035% – meaning most players will likely never even run into it. Its listed use is cryptic: “Gain entry somewhere.” If you don’t know where that somewhere is, the item is totally useless to you.
But for those in the know (or those following our handy guide), it’s not too hard to find the secret door it opens. Hidden in a cliff wall in a ravine at the center of the map, there’s a sealed entrance that only opens if you have the Cord End on hand. Inside is a strange statue of a girl, and three Sacrificial Twigs, talismans that allow the wielder to die exactly one time without losing runes or levels. It’s an interesting reward, to be sure, but admittedly a little underwhelming given the ridiculous rarity of the Cord End required to get them.
Now, granted, it’s likely at least part of the Cord End’s mystery is in adding lore details to Elden Ring Nightreign via its description and the statue of the girl in the chamber it opens. We won’t cover that here, as the meaning behind it is pretty deep into endgame spoiler territory for Nightreign, but lore YouTuber VaatiVidya has a great breakdown of what the Cord End is from a lore perspective and why it matters.
But that all said, the lack of real mechanical payoff for such a rare find has players speculating that there’s something more to this secret door. For the last two months, the community has been testing out theories around the Cord End and the Sacrificial Twigs. With a lack of any new or recent clues, the secret hunting had largely slowed down, but a cryptic post on the Nightreign subreddit recently fired up everyone’s curiosity again, inspiring people to float new theories about how to do… something… with those twigs.
The biggest barrier to finding anything is the sheer rarity of the Cord End. Some players are reporting seeing their first one after hundreds of hours of play. So anyone who wants to test theories has to get extremely lucky in actually getting a Cord End to begin with, and then also getting the exact perfect other circumstances they’re looking for (specific bosses, certain locations appearing, certain characters in the party, and so forth) to test out whatever it is they want to test. So while it’s unlikely that there’s anything new to discover regarding the Cord End at this stage, there’s at least a whisper of possibility in the fact that so few people are in a position to make that discovery to begin with.
Is it a secret? Is it merely lore? Is it something we’ll be able to unlock in a future DLC, as some have theorized? Who knows! But what’s genuinely cool here is that an ultra rare item is still sparking this level of curiosity and discussion and mystery in the community months after the game’s release. Whether there’s anything deeper to the Cord End or not, its enticing rarity is sufficient to get me, at least, fired up… if I can ever get one to drop.
We gave Elden Ring Nightreign a 7/10, saying that “when Elden Ring Nightreign is played exactly as it was designed to be played, it’s one of the finest examples of a three-player co-op game around – but that’s harder to do than it should be, and playing solo is poorly balanced.” Nightreign recently saw the addition of a duos mode, and the game had sold five million copies as of July.
Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. You can find her posting on BlueSky @duckvalentine.bsky.social. Got a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.
Oh, hello there, Is This Seat Taken? The logic puzzler with a name that’s real awkward to stick midway through a sentence has surprise-released today, August 7th, right off the back of an appearance in a Nintendo Indie World showcase.
When we woke up this morning, all we knew was that this game about telling people where to stick their bottoms would be coming out in August – a vague window previously announced during June’s Whole Direct. Now, it be here.
Marshall Mathers III is no stranger to other names. You probably know him as Eminem, or Slim Shady, or as the latter half of hip-hop super duo Bad Meet Evil. Or, perhaps if you’re a little younger, you might know him as… ‘The Guy From Fortnite.’
Eminem’s involvement with Fortnite goes back several years, with a guest turn in 2023’s The Big Bang live event that saw him rapping over a post-apocalyptic skyline, before popping up in the game’s in-game shop as a skin.
Next, Eminem returned for the conclusion of 2024’s Chapter 2 Remix, this time holding a rap battle version of the battle royale’s memorable monster versus mech fight — one of the funniest things the game has done in some time. (That mini-season included Eminem’s hideout as an in-game location, and also featured an exotic minigun that rapped Eminem lyrics as you fired.)
Popular stars who have made appearances in Epic’s battle royale subsequently being referred to “as that guy from Fortnite” is not a new meme, but someone has now taken the (brave) step of referring to Eminem as such in front of his face.
Thankfully, judging by the video of this moment, the rapper took it humorously and laughed along.
Fortnite’s new season kicked off today with more characters from Halo, plus the Power Rangers battling a fresh insect invasion of the game’s beloved battle royale Island. No word on a fresh appearance by Eminem just yet — though his skin is rarely out of the item shop.
Promise Mascot Agency, Kaizen Game Works’ thing about running a business that revolves around costumed weirdos, fairly intense menu shuffling and a lot of driving around, has gotten a free update that adds in a host of new features. The ability to grind along rails like Michi’s truck’s a skateboard, for instance.
Sure, you can already unlock the ability to fly said truck around the spooky Japanese countryside, but come on, if there’s something every management game needs, it’s tricks from the X Games.
After a few lengthy delays, the tactical RPG Demonschool has finally secured a final release date for the Switch, and you’ve not got long to wait. As announced during the Indie World Japan showcase, the Necrosoft Games-developed title will launch on 3rd September 2025.
The game is influenced by the likes of Persona and Shin Megami Tensei, along with – and this is brilliant – italian horror cinema..? Excuse me?! So cool. Plenty of footage has already been made available through trailers and gameplay showcases, so if you haven’t checked out Demonschool yet, then definitely take a peek when you can. It looks awesome.
Ding ding! Time is up and we’re ready to pull our final party game creation out of the oven for a piping hot reveal. Cookie Haus is the fifth and final party game coming this fall in The Jackbox Party Pack 11.
Welcome to Cookie Haus
Cookie Haus is a brand new drawing game that puts an emphasis on silliness and simplicity. In this game, you are a decorator at a bakery undergoing some creative chaos. Patrons come in to give you their decoration requests and you have a limited amount of time to design a cookie that fits their needs. Player designs are then pitted against each other while everyone votes for their favorite.
It’s one of our most approachable drawing games yet. Players will be able to customize their icing tools and draw simple designs on pre-shaped cookies. Did we mention there will be sprinkles? Because, boy, do we have sprinkles! And the timer is ticking! You’ll need to get frosting on those cookies before the situation crumbles.
“I can’t wait for folks to meet the ridiculous customers and check out the fresh, but familiar drawing tools,” says Chase McClure, Director of Cookie Haus. “But really, this is a simple drawing game about decorating cookies and I’m excited for people to see how fun, funny, and satisfying that is to do in this game.”
Meet the rest of Party Pack 11
Cookie Haus is one of five entirely new party games in The Jackbox Party Pack 11. If you’re a fan of joke writing games like Quiplash or Survive the Internet, you’ll want to check out Doominate, a fast-paced, hilarious party game with killer style!
In Doominate, players are given a wholesome situation that they have to destroy with their response. Players work on both of their prompts for the round at the same time (as opposed to writing one and then tackling the next after you’re finished, like you do in Quiplash). This way, they can go back and edit before submitting. “We’ve found that it has led to some inspired answers and hopefully relieves some of the pressure that comes with those writing moments,” says Brooke Breit, Director of Doominate, “Players will also get a chance to save some scenarios from disaster in a heavenly final round.”
Fans of audio-focused games like Earwax or Dodo Re Mi can expect to see a new twist on the genre with Hear Say, a game that provides a prompt and then asks players to make sound effects or record dialogue in response. In a Jackbox first, players will use their phone’s microphone to record themselves before it is played back for the group. “Recording your voice is an exciting, raw and unusual thing to do in a game. Seeing it played as a soundtrack to delightfully absurd characters and videos expands everyone’s humor, and allows you and your friends to discover new sides of yourselves together,” says Alina Constantin, Director of Hear Say.
We’re taking trivia to a new world in Legends of Trivia, a fantastical game that asks players to work together to defeat monsters using their wits and smarts. “Cooperative trivia is a new feature that we’re excited to debut,” says Warren Arnold, Director of Legends of Trivia, “A lot of our games require players to communicate and interact with each other and I think it’s going to be a fun and different experience to incorporate into a Jackbox trivia game.” If you enjoy games like Quixort or You Don’t Know Jack, this could be the game for your group!
Rounding out the pack is Suspectives, a detective-inspired game that asks you to interrogate fellow players based on what you know (or don’t know) about them. “Suspectives takes that social-deduction-game moment of ‘questioning each other to see who’s hiding something’ and opens it up, allowing for everyone to signal whether they’re buying an explanation or not,” says game director Tim Sniffen. “A player can really get a sense of whether they’re losing the room or have everyone on their side – I can’t wait to see people try it out!” Fans of Fakin’ It, Push The Button or Role Models should feel right at home in the world of Suspectives.
The Jackbox Party Pack 11 releases on PS4 and PS5 this fall.
Sony remain confident that Bungie’s live service shooter reboot Marathon will launch within their current fiscal year – that is, before March 31st 2026 – and are fairly sure they’ll be able to share an exact release date this autumn. They’ve factored it into their financial forecasts, see.
They’re also pretty upbeat about their live service business at large, which accounted for around 40% of first-party software revenue in their last financial quarter, though they acknowledge that they screwed the pooch with Concord, which got to exist in public for a whole couple of weeks before Sony kicked it into the sun.
Since its debut, the Mafia series has steadily marched forward through the decades – the original is set in the 1930s, its sequel spans the ’40s and ’50s, and Mafia III unfolds during the late ’60s. If the next step was going to be the ’70s, or the ’80s – or both – I was certainly ready. Casino intrigue, shine boxes, borrowing huge kitchen knives from Martin Scorcese’s mother in the middle of the night – whatever it was, I was up for it. However, instead of moving closer to the end of the 20th century, Mafia: The Old Country takes us back to the beginning. And not just the beginning of the century, but to the formative era of the Mafia itself. Part mob drama and part Western, The Old Country may be a safe and conventional third-person action adventure on the surface, but it’s a moody and engaging one that makes great use of its uncommon setting and is brimming with old school atmosphere so heady you can practically smell the sun-dried tomatoes.
After experimenting with a more freeform open world structure in the divisive Mafia III, Mafia: The Old Country returns to the format of the original Mafia and Mafia II. That is, it’s linear and tightly story-driven, and the open world is largely just a vivid backdrop to move through between objectives, and during some missions. This has always worked well for the Mafia series, and The Old Country is no exception.
This approach gives The Old Country an effective sense of place and scale – immersing you in a rich and evocative Sicilian countryside – but without bloat. It’s a very detailed, varied, and convincing map, but there are no towers to scale or arbitrary icons to visit and clear. Your attention is simply required on the story, and the story alone. As a single-player sucker who inhales this kind of thing for its story, setting, and style, I was quickly hooked. If you’re the kind of person who might be tempted to use the Sicilian language option alongside subtitles in the language of your choice, you’re in the right place. If you’re the kind of person who pounds through cutscenes craving their next chance to slap the citizens of Steelport with a giant purple dildo, it’s possible the Mafia series may not be your speed.
Family Splatters
Beginning in 1904, The Old Country charts a chronicle in the life of young Sicilian Enzo Favara, who escapes a life of slavery in the region’s dangerous sulphur mines – run by the ruthless Spadaro crime family – to find himself working for their local adversaries, the Torrisi family. The story hits a lot of standard beats, and all the usual suspects are here. The fair and kindly mentor, and the loyal best friend with a habit of testing the patience of others around him. The stern and powerful Don and his cynical consigliere. The slimy and treacherous rival boss, and the forbidden love. There are some neat connections to the existing games in the series too, for fans who pay close attention.
So yes, it’s a fairly familiar and predictable 13-hour saga for anyone with a basic level of gangster movie literacy, but the writing is strong and the voice performances are stronger. The highlight is arguably Don Torrisi himself, whose English voice actor Johnny Santiago injects with a quiet, husky intensity that is as credibly intimidating as a man in his position would need to be. He stalks the screen as the kind of guy that men who kill for a living would actually take orders from.
It’s a fairly familiar and predictable 13-hour saga for anyone with a basic level of gangster movie literacy, but the writing is strong.
Familiar too is the third-person action, as The Old Country plays like any typical cover shooter from the last decade or so. This was the case in 2020’s Mafia: Definitive Edition, and it’s the same again here, albeit with a wild west flavour thanks to the era-specific arsenal (like revolvers, repeaters, and various shotguns) and the fact that shootouts sometimes occur on horseback, and/or against fellas who look like they’ve just stumbled home off the set of a Sergio Leone picture after a full day of making Clint Eastwood look cool.
Even without engaging much with its rosary bead system of minor combat buffs (which I did regularly forget about), it’s not a massive challenge with the default, soft-locking aiming controls. However, I don’t play these sorts of games to be relentlessly punished. Some enemies will hunker down behind large objects and walls, and others will stoically stride towards you to be blown out of their boots. The AI isn’t always sharp (and it’s definitely a little janky to find yourself completely flanked but still have the time to stand up and clumsily blast a bloke who had you dead to rights at point blank range) but the shootouts are nonetheless serviceable.
The Old Country’s stealth doesn’t rewrite the rule book either, but it does strengthen the action overall. Stealth is sometimes required by the design of the mission at hand, but on other occasions it’s available as an option. There are a number of encounters throughout with environments that have been laid out for us to be able to sneak around and pick off all the enemies one by one, but also seamlessly pivot to hosting an out-and-out gunfight should you flub it and be spotted.
You can toss coins and bottles for distraction, but unfortunately only some bottles (that is, the ones arbitrarily marked). It’s always a bit of an immersion breaker when levels are decorated with inconsistent props. I’d vastly prefer to just be able to pick up any bottle. Failing that, just delete the bottles we can’t pick up during missions. Crucially, you can pick up and move bodies, and there are boxes to stash them in. The stealth is pretty standard, but with distractions and body hiding it does feel like a proper stealth system and not a tacked on afterthought.
The stealth is pretty standard, but with distractions and body hiding it does feel like a proper stealth system and not a tacked on afterthought.
Enzo can temporarily highlight nearby enemies in the environment, which is essentially a superpower that’s handwaved away as his impeccable instincts (it probably could’ve been more logically introduced during the underground intro as some kind of innate ability he honed after spending the bulk of his childhood in a dark sulfur mine, but no matter). At any rate, once you have a feel for where your enemies are and which way they’re headed, all that’s left is to sneak around, grab them, and either button-bash to strangle them or tap your knife attack to speed up the process. That said, I actually rarely used the latter. Not because I was feeling merciful, but because stabbing your victims costs you a block of “durability” off your knife (which needs to be sharpened with a whetstone if and when it “runs out” of… stabs). It’s not a gamebreaker, but I’m not really into the idea of not being able to stab a bloke simply because my knife is immediately no longer pointy enough to do so after slaying a few of his mates (and whetstones were a consumable I didn’t always have).
I mainly just strangled my enemies to avoid this issue, but it feels like a slightly unnecessary system – particularly when durability concerns disappear during The Old Country’s new one-on-one knife fights.
These knife fights are essentially boss encounters, presented as a one-on-one showdown with another man. They occur outside regular third-person action gameplay, and you’re locked into these battles until there’s a result (or your opponent is scripted to scarper). The attacks, parries, and dodges in knife fights are bespoke to this mode alone. They’re flashy and bloody, but a lot of the time I did just feel I was simply dodging and slashing my way to a cutscene, where a further complication or a switch in momentum will occur. Sometimes you’ll trigger an animation that makes you a passenger for a while, then Enzo’s health bar recharges while your enemy’s does not. I’m not sure what the thought was there. The knife fights look cool, and they’re not like anything in the series to date, but they do feel a little low stakes at times.
Red Dead Redenzione
As a linear adventure, The Old Country admittedly doesn’t share the same scope of Rockstar’s genre-defining Westerns – but it’s certainly adjacent to them in tone and atmosphere. There’s a certain undeniable swagger that comes with riding into town on horseback (and on the wrong side of the law), and The Old County captures this with similar effectiveness to the Red Dead series.
The early 1900s setting doesn’t just shine a spotlight on the early days of the Sicilian Mafia, it’s also a window back to the Edwardian era of automobiles – when cars began competing with horses as the primary method of transportation. Developer Hangar 13 has done an exceptional job in this department, especially with the sound.
These 120-year-old cars have primitive engines, whining chain drives, and open cabins with no sound deadening, and The Old Country has captured their raw and lumpy burbles immaculately. It definitely can’t be understated how much richness this adds to driving around the map. It’s not just engine sounds, either. When a gramophone is brought on a drunken car trip, be sure to listen as it misbehaves when you bounce around off road. There’s a lot of consideration here, and I respect that.
Yes, there’s a race mission – but it’s not been shoehorned in here to taunt those who are still haunted by the infamously tricky racing event in the original Mafia. Sicily was the home of the Targa Florio – established in 1906 and one of the oldest motor racing events in the world – so it makes perfect sense in context.
The Old Country’s riff on this race is sadly all too brief – it’s over in less than seven minutes – but it is one of the most memorable and thrilling missions. It certainly made me wish Enzo could’ve cut ties with the Cosa Nostra and raced around Europe full time. I don’t know what’s more dangerous: betraying your oath to the family or trying to tame an aircraft engine that’s had four tyres and a steering wheel strapped to it.
On the topic of engines, however, it should be noted that The Old Country shifts the Mafia series off its previous proprietary one and onto Unreal Engine 5. From my perspective, the impact isn’t a dramatically profound one – 2020’s Mafia: Definitive Edition remains a handsome looking game, and so is The Old Country. What I can say is that I haven’t experienced any of the minor bugs that occurred during my first playthrough of Mafia: Definitive Edition, and that I haven’t had to restart checkpoints to overcome unexpected jankiness (or fallen through the map) – at least on PC, as we weren’t provided access to the console versions ahead of launch, so we’ll have to wait and see how those run. But outside of the occasional framerate flutter and some light pop-in, my time with The Old Country has been quite robust.
Although, perhaps not quite as robust as the incredible array of food and produce on display throughout. Games rarely make me this hungry. A game may have never made me this hungry. I’m craving cannolis and cake. I’m wading through arancini ball recipes. I’m considering a vegetable garden to grow tomato varieties I can’t find.
I’ve officially turned into my dad, and The Old Country is the game that did it.
As if summoned to do so by EA letting everyone know that this week’s BF6 open beta would necessitate a delve in your BIOS to click yes on a thing in the name of eliminating cheating, Activision have revealed Blops is doing the same thing.
