Mortal Kombat 1 DLC Fighter ‘Homelander’ Arrives Early Next Month

The new Kameo Fighter follows “later in June”.

After a long wait, we’ve finally got some proper gameplay footage of the new Mortal Kombat 1 DLC fighter Homelander. The new trailer also confirms he’ll be arriving next month on 4th June 2024.

In case you missed it, ‘The Boys‘ character will be joining existing DLC characters such as Omni-Man and Peacemaker. It’s worth mentioning this character won’t be voiced by the actor Antony Starr.

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Splatoon 3 Receives A Fresh New Update (Version 8.0.0), Here Are The Full Patch Notes

Out this week.

Nintendo has announced its next major update for Splatoon 3 bumping the game up to Version 8.0.0.

It comes with new season and catalog changes, changes to the game’s multiplayer, Splatfest, Salmon Run, and all sorts of bug fixes across each mode of the game. Below is the full rundown, courtesy of Nintendo’s support page:

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Sony Says PlayStation 5 Generation Is Its Most Profitable Console Generation to Date

The PlayStation 5 generation is officially the most profitable Sony console generation to date, according to new data shared by the company.

This comes from the company’s Game & Network Services Business Segment meeting slides and presentation, which were shared today following the company’s earnings report two weeks ago. In the presentation, Sony revealed that the PS5 generation has brought in $106 billion in sales since launch, outpacing every past console at the same point in its generation.

Let’s stick some asterisks on that figure really quick, though. First off, Sony reports that the PS4 generation brought in a total of $107 billion in sales, which is obviously more than $106 billion. But the PS4 generation is taken as whole, from fiscal 2013 through fiscal 2019, and includes three more years than the PS5 generation (which spans from fiscal 2020 to fiscal 2023). Four years into the PS4’s lifecycle, it was still well behind where the PS5 is now, and the PS5 is on pace to easily pass the PS4 generation’s total sales sometime this year.

It’s also worth noting that these dollar amounts are total sales over the course of a console generation, not a reflection of specific hardware or game sales. The “PS5 generation” encompasses not just the PS5 itself, but everything the business is doing during this generation, including PS4 sales and game releases during this period. So take it all with the grain of salt it merits.

But it’s not shocking that the PS5 generation has been so lucrative for Sony. Even with all the asterisks above, the PS5 has sold 56 million units to date. Though the PS4 has outsold it significantly (117 million at last count), the PS5 was more expensive at launch than the PS4. And continued software spend throughout the shared lifecycle of both has helped Sony’s current console generation only grow in dollar sales even if console adoption is a little slow; Sony reports both the PS4 and the PS5 currently boast 49 million active consoles per month.

The presentation also points out that even with half the unit sales, PS5 life-to-date spend is significantly higher than life-to-date spend on PS4. DLC content, services, and peripheral spend is up, but full-game content spend is down a little on PS5 compared to the PS4.

All this is to say, if there was any doubt at all, the PlayStation 5 is doing pretty well. Unit sales are a helpful way to gauge player interest, but they don’t tell the full story of how a company measures a console’s success. Amid ongoing rumors that a PS5 Pro may be on the horizon, we may not be far off from seeing Sony attempt to capitalize on its current generation in yet another new, more expensive way.

Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. Got a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.

Stellar Blade Tops April Charts, But It’s the Lowest Sales to Lead an April Since Prototype 2

Stellar Blade, the third-person action game by developer Shift Up, was the best-selling video game in the U.S. in April 2024.

Mat Piscatella, executive director of video games at Circana, noted in the latest report that Stellar Blade was the only new release in April 2024 that ranked “among the month’s top 20 best-selling premium video games,” beating out other new releases in April, such as Sand Land and Another Crab’s Treasure. Additional games that made the top 20 best-selling games for April 2024 include Helldivers 2, Fallout 4, and Tekken 8.

Piscatella further elaborated on the April 2024 report, explaining in a post on X/Twitter that although it was a great achievement for Stellar Blade to rank first in U.S. sales last month, “it did have the lowest sales to lead” since April 2012 when Radical Entertainment’s action-adventure game Prototype 2 secured the number one spot.

More interestingly, Piscatella wrote on X/Twitter that PS5 sales were trending ahead of PS4 but deduced that 2023 might have been the PS5’s “peak year” for sales in the United States. In contrast, the PS5’s competition, the Xbox Series X/S consoles, is trailing Xbox One by 13 percent, and both systems remain “slightly behind” the Xbox 360 in terms of U.S. sales.

The number for the PS5 is interesting. It comes nearly two weeks after Sony’s statistics revealed that half of PlayStation players have yet to upgrade from a PS4 to a PS5 console.

Nevertheless, despite Sony and Microsoft’s respective growing pains in terms of hardware sales, both companies are gearing up for new hardware. In the case of Sony, its rumored PS5 Pro had its hardware specs leaked online in March, with a report last month claiming that Sony told developers to prepare their games for the new hardware.

Microsoft, on the other hand, already revealed it is working on a next-generation gaming console that touts will be the “largest technical leap” in a game console generation. However, before Microsoft released this next-generation Xbox system, a leak from last year revealed that the company plans to launch mid-cycle refreshes of the Xbox Series X and S sometime in 2024.

Taylor is a Reporter at IGN. You can follow her on Twitter @TayNixster.

City 20 Is a Survival Sandbox That’s Both Bleak and Beautiful

City 20 is an upcoming survival sandbox adventure game that puts you in a quarantined secret city, one where nuclear work was done, after a radiological disaster of some kind has cut it off from the outside world. Waking up with your own past a mystery, you’re tasked to survive among the factions of people that have formed in this little, localized apocalypse. The developers have tried to create a world inspired by classics like Stalker, The Road, and La Jetée.

So far so good, right? These are all things I like to hear. I recently sat down with a demo build of the in-progress game and got a look at how it’s going so far.

The first thing that really strikes me about City 20 is the art style. It’s confident and decisive, to my eyes inspired by comics or paintings, with very stylized characters: Broad hips, bowed legs, narrow shoulders. The colors meanwhile are muted, washed out. They’re something between a set of slightly dirty pastel tones and the darker shades that have become pretty popular in the wake of Disco Elysium. Either way, the aesthetics as a whole are pretty confident and consistent, which I think is important and good to see as this sort of sandbox really lives or dies on how deeply the visuals can pull you into the unfolding story.

City 20 is supposed to be a survival sandbox, one where a realistic social and ecological simulation plays out over seasons of in-game time. Figuring out the politics of the different factions, how they relate, and how to gather the limited resources of the ruined city is supposed to be a major part of the game. The crafting and survival elements are important but relatively simple and basic, with the emphasis there on conserving resources and not overtaxing the environment—one example given by the developers is harvesting too many deer or rabbits, causing local foxes and wolves to become aggressive toward people.

In the demo, however, most of my time was spent figuring out what to eat and drink and where to get it from. Though I woke up in a cabin provided by a friendly man, the two steaks and four apples he gave me barely staved off hunger for a day. While I’m all for a hunger and thirst system, this one was a bit aggressive and will certainly need tweaks before it’s out. How do I engage with the cool social simulation if most of every day has to be spent figuring out the logistics of food?

Anyway, once I figured out I could just murder the nice man and steal all his food, I had enough to get me through my demo time without further concerns. Once I did that I saw some promising glimmers beneath the post-apocalyptic muck and rust.

By talking to people you can learn about them, and by trading with them you can figure out what they need. Every NPC I encountered had a job and a faction, ate and drank, and had a routine that included going to work and sleeping. Trading with them for what they wanted made them more favorable toward me—and presumably making enough of them favorable toward me over time would alter the whole faction’s opinion of me.

The factions themselves are also part of the balance of the in-game economy. They need resources like metal and wood to craft things and sell amongst themselves, and the characters need food and water to live. Giving lots of resources to a favored faction would, eventually, make them more powerful and wealthier than other factions simply because they have more food, better tools, and better weapons. On the other hand, losing access to an entire faction because they hate you would cut you off from a significant portion of the in-game economy—and probably make gathering resources near their territory pretty dangerous, as the pretty simple combat system goes well for you when you’re one-on-one, but the same fights get pretty one-sided pretty fast if several enemies group up on you.

Once I figured out I could just murder the nice man and steal all his food, I had enough to get me through my demo time without further concerns.

Sandboxes like this one are pretty hard to judge at this stage in development. I’m inclined to look over the frustrating bits toward the more interesting systems, but this is also a pretty tricky genre to develop in the first place. Games can have deeply interesting simulations at their heart but wind up being boring to engage with because of poor pacing, because the core gameplay isn’t fun, or because the simulation itself is too opaque for the player to manipulate. Hopefully City 20 doesn’t fall into any development traps, because I’m interested to see where it’s going from here.

No Man’s Sky Adrift update leaves you completely alone in its universe, except for sandworms and ghost ships

With an effectively infinite universe to fill in No Man’s Sky, developers Hello Games have certainly risen to the challenge of trying to fill it with as much stuff as they possibly can over the last near-decade, still managing to add major new features and modes eight years on from the sci-fi exploration game’s release. Next update Adrift is taking things right the way back, though, by emptying the expansive cosmos of almost everything except you, your ship and planets to visit.

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Capes Review

It’s probably the funniest joke in Capes – which has a lot of pretty good superhero jokes – that not one of your eight playable characters actually wears a cape. This clever and challenging turn-based tactical game does wear its heart on its sleeve, though, and a clear love of the comics that inspired it comes across as it makes its underdog vigilante squad feel powerful with creative combo mechanics. It’s a style of battle that gives you almost all the information and lets you execute a surefire plan in a way that reminds me of Into the Breach more than it does XCOM.

Every level is a tactical puzzle that tells you almost everything that’s going to happen next turn up front, and winning is all about countering the enemy’s moves before they can damage you by either taking them down, disarming them, or moving them right where you want them. Only a handful of abilities have randomized effects and there’s no chance to miss, plus you can see any enemy’s abilities and a timeline of who will get to move next. In short, you have all the information you need to succeed. I do wish it went a little further and told us specifically which target an enemy plans to attack and with what to take the last of the guesswork out of figuring out how best to thwart them, but once you understand that they’ll always go after the closest target (unless otherwise specified), it’s rare that you’ll be surprised by how a turn plays out if you’ve taken the time to read the room. Sometimes that can take a minute when there are literally 25 characters in the turn order list and you have to go through each one every turn to make certain your almost-dead character isn’t in the line of fire.

Capes’ tongue-in-cheek story grew on me fairly quickly – and when I heard that Morgan Jaffit, a writer who’d worked on the excellent Freedom Force games was involved, it made perfect sense. Sure, we’ve seen about 300 off-brand versions of the iconic Marvel and DC heroes at this point (everything from The Boys to Invincible to Watchmen has their own set of characters inspired by the classics), but it’s fun to embody the “I understood that reference” Captain America meme as Capes rolls out its parade of eight heroes that pay homage to the likes of Nightcrawler, Colossus, Storm, Quicksilver, Professor X, The Hulk, Human Torch, and… I dunno, someone who punches a lot? I wouldn’t say any of them are terrifically memorable on their own, but they hold their own well enough and only Ignis, the fired-up influencer parody, gets annoying to listen to at times.

Fights stay interesting and diverse over what turns out to be a pretty lengthy campaign.

The triumvirate of supervillains who rule over King City are entertaining megalomaniacs, and they come with creative boss fight mechanics. The Joker-ish telepath Wildstar can mess with your heroes’ heads and make them miss their first attack on him, while anti-Tony Stark Primax is completely invulnerable and has to be avoided and worked around as you achieve other objectives, rather than fight her directly. Those boss battles – and a strong variety of enemies and minibosses with tons of different abilities – keep fights interesting and diverse over what turns out to be a pretty lengthy campaign. I extended my time with it by replaying some missions to perfect them and earn more skill points, and there were a couple of very tough ones that took me a lot of tries to squeak through, but it was around 40 hours before I saw the end.

Plenty of amusingly cheesy superhero humor is thrown around – including a lot of references to Primax’s self-driving cars being death traps – but the story is also often dark, with plenty of straight-up murders and blood splashed in the streets as the villains hunt down supers and slaughter anyone in their way. There’s a fair amount of debate over whether heroes should kill, though all the while it sure seems like we’re killing a bunch of dudes by knocking them off of buildings or exploding them with fireballs, and the way it ends seems to hand-wave a lot of that moral ambiguity away. But as excuses to have superheroes beat up bad guys go, this ain’t bad.

That said, it’s very strange that while most of the story is delivered between missions with a 2D animated comic book style where characters’ lips don’t move, sometimes it will randomly switch to conversations between characters using their in-game 3D models. That works well enough, but it’s a confusing inconsistency. There’s also an annoying glitch where the frame rate regularly chugs as the camera zooms out from a cinematic, which is odd for a game that isn’t trying to be terribly ambitious with its graphics.

One of Capes’ best ideas is that your squad of four heroes work together to enhance each others’ abilities.

Even though animations aren’t always its strong suit, they successfully make this group feel like a team and bring energy to the turn-based action. One of Capes’ best ideas is that your squad of four heroes work together to enhance each others’ abilities when they’re close enough. It’s not unlike the team-up system in Marvel’s Midnight Suns, but here it’s much more based on position and they work differently based on which two heroes are collaborating. Among many other team-ups, the speedster Mercurial can leave a trail of fire behind her as she zips from next to Ignis to the other side of the map; Weathervane’s lightning storm is vastly more powerful with Kinetic nearby to supercharge its damage; and Mindfire can telepathically make an enemy turn around so that Rebound can teleport in for a backstab with bonus damage. It makes the choice of which four team members to bring to a fight hugely important – though it doesn’t cost you anything to restart the mission with a different squad if you find yourself in need of, say, damage mitigation from Facet’s crystal armor. You also have to keep your team’s position in mind, because if they stray more than a few tiles apart they won’t be able to take advantage of their team-up abilities.

Capes is very smart about layering on mechanics to think about beyond simply punching or zapping an enemy for as much damage as possible. Some attacks do disarm damage, which doesn’t necessarily reduce their health but can force a thug to drop a gun or bat, or interrupt a more powerful enemy’s super attack that they’re charging up for next turn. On top of that, each hero has an ultimate ability – such as nerdy scientist Hyde transforming into a big stompy swarm of nanobots – but they all charge up differently. Facet charges as he absorbs damage while armored, Mindfire earns his by making an enemy vulnerable and then dealing damage to it, and Ignis slurps up fire around the map like Pac-Man. Because of that, swapping out a single member of your team can pretty radically change your priorities in clever ways.

Once you get the hang of it and are reliably beating down bad guys, you can test your skills by attempting to complete each mission’s list of optional objectives. In addition to completing the main objective without a hero being downed (they can be revived with half their health), you’ll be challenged with pushing some number of enemies off ledges, disarming them, or using specific abilities, among other things. This is the main way you earn skill points to upgrade your heroes’ powers – some of which are minor half-point damage or range increases, but others unlock whole new extremely handy skills – so it’s definitely worth revisiting missions in the Simulator to mop them up, especially if you were that close to pulling off a perfect run.

However, the one type of mission I have no desire to revisit are the stealth ones, which are often obnoxious exercises in trial and error. While you can preview exactly where an enemy will patrol on their next turn and tiles they can currently see are highlighted, their gaze sweeps over the map as they walk and turn, and it can be very tricky to figure out where you’ll be safely hidden. I also had instances where I was detected despite not appearing to be in an enemy’s sight at all, and though there might be a reason for that, it wasn’t clear. That’s no fun, but the saving grace is that the quick-save button makes reloading painless, and several of the stealth missions are optional anyway.

Watch The Opening Movie For Upcoming ‘That Time I Got Reincarnated As A Slime’ RPG

Coming to Switch this August.

Last month, Bandai Namco unveiled a first look at That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime ISEKAI Chronicles, an upcoming RPG based on the popular anime series. The game isn’t set to come our way until 8th August, but to keep us going until then, the publisher has revealed the opening movie in all its animated glory.

If you were wondering how closely the game will stick to its anime source material, we’d wager that this opening movie will give you a hint. Fans of the anime will see more than a few familiar faces here, but the game promises new storylines and characters from author Fuse so there will still be a few surprises along the way.

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