Category: Video Games

Much like all-you-can-eat Pizza Huts, reasonably-priced concert tickets, and The Secret World of Alex Mack, Screamer is something I enjoyed in the 1990s but essentially disappeared from our lives decades ago. The original Screamer, released in 1995, was one of a trio of games developed by Italian studio Graffiti before it quickly rebranded itself as Milestone a year later. An over-the-top arcade racing game exclusively for PC, it arrived rapidly in the slipstream of pioneering 3D racers like The Need for Speed, Ridge Racer, and Destruction Derby (and was followed by a sequel and two one-and-done spin-offs) but has faded into relative obscurity since. However, over a quarter of a century since Milestone’s final Screamer game, the series is howling back to the track with a wild new look and an interestingly nuanced suite of controls and power-ups that shake up the slamming, the shifting, and even the steering.

According to game director Federico Cardini, Screamer is a game Milestone has long wanted to resurrect, but you should know that it’s more the name that’s being brought back here. That is, aside from the title there really isn’t anything immediately significant in the new Screamer that meaningfully reminds me of the original. Dramatic changes of identity are usually kryptonite for sequels and reboots – especially belated ones – but I actually don’t think it’s a problem in Screamer’s case. The original was an impressive game for its time, but it was admittedly otherwise largely typical of arcade racing games in that era. The new one is a bit of a different story.

You can’t describe Screamer in a single sentence the way you can with a lot of arcade racing games. A good deal of arcade racers generally allow you to count the number of pertinent instructions on your nipples. That is, there are only two: accelerate and steer. After an hour of hands-on driving and drifting with Screamer it’s clear there’s a lot more to it than this, and it’s this depth that makes it quite fascinating.

Screamer is a twin-stick racing game, and it instantly reminds me of 2020’s Inertial Drift in this sense. While the left stick is used for conventional steering, the right stick is used to add drift angle. In simple terms, the left stick controls the front of the car, and the right stick basically controls the rear. It’s easier to grasp than it perhaps sounds, but it does require a certain deftness on both sticks to make the necessary adjustments to your angle.

It goes much further than this, however, as Screamer also packs a potent range of power-ups that are extracted from two separate gauges that fill based on certain actions. Inspired by fighting games, Screamer calls this its ‘Echo’ system – where using one side of the gauge affects the other side. There’s a shotgun spray of bespoke, in-game terminology that you’ll encounter if and when you play Screamer yourself, but I’m going to avoid most of that here because I think it’ll only serve to make Screamer sound a little impenetrable. On track – and in the thick of it – it’s all fairly intuitive, so I’ll try to describe it as such.

Essentially, the left side of the gauge will fill throughout a race both passively and via certain actions – like perfectly-timed shifts. Screamer’s vehicles have semi-automatic transmissions, so they’ll shift automatically if you’re overwhelmed (or you forget), but if you nail your upshifts you’ll fill the left gauge faster. It’s not a remotely racing related comparison, but it reminded me of Gears of War’s active reload system.

The left gauge is used to provide both boosts and shields against attacking opponents. Even boosts are handled differently, with a press–hold-and-release mechanic that you need to time by using an onscreen icon. Get the release spot-on and you will earn a longer and more effective boost than standard.

So what of the gauge on the right? Well, you fill the gauge on the right by using the power-ups afforded by the gauge on the left. The gauge on the right allows you to use the offensive abilities Screamer has dubbed ‘strike’ and ‘overdrive.’ ‘Strike’ is a temporary boost in speed during which any other car you smash into will explode, and ‘Overdrive’ is an indefinite boost that lasts until you crash. Overdrive is pretty tough to use on the twistiest portions of the tracks; after a certain amount of time locked in Overdrive you’ll reach a critical state where even a brush off a wall will see you blow up. It is extremely quick, though, and it’s a power-up I observed the AI was always willing to deploy at every opportunity.

Like the 1995 original, Screamer features a roster of unlicensed cars. However, while the original game’s cars were clearly just de-badged versions of iconic ’90s sports cars and exotics with otherwise generic names, the cars in the upcoming Screamer are wild, anime-inspired vehicles covered in aggressive, time attack-style aero. The anime inspiration extends beyond the cars, too; indeed, Milestone has partnered with Japanese animation studio Polygon Pictures for Screamer’s story. We weren’t privy to any of these cutscenes during our preview, but I did get to race as a variety of different characters – each of whom have different abilities that alter how they fill their power gauge, and how their cars handle. There’s a really significant difference in car feel across characters so, even though the handling is quite easy to pick up, it’s not one-note.

Milestone achieved the improbable in 2021 with Hot Wheels Unleashed, creating a gorgeous and highly approachable arcade racing banger that far exceeded any expectations one might have had of a game based on a licensed toy. It’s a very different sort of racing experience to the Hot Wheels Unleashed series but, after my hour with it, I’m not expecting Screamer to quietly come and go when it arrives in 2026.

Luke is a Senior Editor on the IGN reviews team. You can track him down on Bluesky @mrlukereilly to ask him things about stuff.

It’s hard to believe it’s been four years since I first set sail and fell in love with Valheim. As a fan of survival crafting and all things Norse, it’s one of the best experiences out there in both regards. And while it still feels fairly familiar at the outset – and somehow it’s still calling itself “early access,” whatever that means anymore – it’s gotten a mountain of patches since launch, with a list of changes that would take longer to read than the rambling tangent about some side character’s great-grandfather in a viking saga. From new biomes and new bosses to crafting and combat improvements, the version of Valheim you can download today cuts like a blade that developer Iron Gate has been sharpening winter in and winter out.

All of that still holds true today, except that the world has gotten much bigger and just about every system has been improved on in some small or large way. Except greydwarves. They’re still annoying as hell. But we’ll get to that.

Good news for melee builds

This revisit is based on the opt-in beta patch announced at Gamescom 2025, known as the Call to Arms update, and that’s fitting because it’s brought some of the most significant changes to combat yet. Trinkets are a new equipment slot that lets you build up adrenaline by skirmishing – basically a super meter if you’re familiar with fighting games – with different effects at full adrenaline for different trinkets. They’ve also added a “perfect dodge” that makes it possible to run a melee build without a shield, as long as you’re good at timing enemy attacks. And perfect blocks no longer cost stamina, which makes that build way more viable too. Finally, the reign of the stealth archer may be coming to an end! Well, probably not entirely, but at least it won’t be so far ahead of other playstyles. Just like nearly everything else that’s changed in Valheim over the years, combat is the same system that’s always been here but just a bit better and deeper.

We finally get (killed by) bears!

The mascot for this patch, though, is the lumbering bear enemy. Why did it take this long to put a bear in the viking survival game? I don’t know, but I’m glad she’s here now. Sitting somewhere between greydwarves and trolls in terms of difficulty, bears add some much-needed enemy variety to the early areas where most people end up spending a majority of their time anyway. And collecting bear parts lets you build a new weapon and armor set that really lean into the super-aggressive melee playstyle. I’m worried that these items will be completely underpowered in the mid-late game, but it’s nice for the first leg of your adventure to be able to go full berserker.

Journeying through mist and flame adds mythological flair

In the bigger picture, Valheim has become a much more complete saga since I originally reviewed it. Two additional biomes, the foggy Mistlands and burning Ashlands, have been added along with their attendant bosses, but I haven’t been able to check the latter out yet on this fresh save I made for the patch where I’m about 25 hours in. As a matter of fact, even with well over 100 hours in Valheim overall across multiple playthroughs, I’ve still never seen the Ashlands – added just last year – at all, actually. The world is huge! And that’s very exciting. There’s still a bit left to go on the roadmap, with one major boss and one biome still missing, but it’s much closer to the finish line than it is to the start.

Even in my initial Early Access outing, I said I could barely tell this is an Early Access game, and that’s only become more and more true. The amount that’s already here could take you months to chew through playing off and on like I do. The final 1.0 release might be out already by the time you finish the Ashlands if you start today. The sheer amount of time it would take to even run into a proverbial Under Construction sign puts them out of reach of what most of my playthroughs have even come close to accomplishing. And I have to ask: if it takes 60-plus hours for me to even notice something isn’t finished, is it really unfinished at all? Or am I just waiting for an expansion to come out? It kind of feels more like the latter.

Swamps are still a bummer

Every new area has fresh enemies, unique survival challenges, new recipes to discover, and a strong theme. Higher-level biomes pull in more mythological elements that really remind you you’re not in Kristiansand anymore. Moving from the Black Forest into the Swamps is still a rough transition with how much more unforgiving the terrain, enemies, and status effects become – right at the same time that travel distances are becoming an issue, and before you can unlock portals. It’s no surprise to me that that’s where a lot of my runs have ended. Plus, who likes a stinky poison swamp anyway? It’s definitely my least favorite biome, even in the latest patch. But it’s worth getting through to see what comes after it.

Greydwarves are still annoying as hell

Greydwarves in the Dark Forest remain annoying little pests that come to bother you all the time and present very little combat challenge. If we could craft a trinket that scares away lower-level enemies, I think that would be great. Remember the Morrowind mod that added a belt that would zap cliff racers out of the air? Are Valheim players too young to remember Morrowind? You know what, don’t even answer that. I don’t want to know.

Mining feels less grindy, but maybe that’s just character development on my part

Gear progression feels a lot less grindy now as well. I haven’t compared the numbers to see how much of that is actual changes to ore drop rates and carry weights and how much it’s just that I’ve gotten used to how time-consuming it is. I no longer feel like I’m spending hours and hours teching up from stone to bronze. And while I was initially annoyed by the lack of realism in the fact that repairing items doesn’t cost crafting mats… I have to admit I was wrong. It’s a great little quality-of-life feature that I don’t have to go hunt down extremely rare materials to keep my best gear nice and shiny. It’s good to know that once I craft something, it’s mine forever.

The building system could still use some work

Building is one area where I think other survival crafting games have kind of left Valheim behind, mainly in terms of how fiddly it can get. I know part of this is that it’s meant to be fairly realistic, and I respect that. But the variety of structural building pieces, especially early on, is still kind of disappointing. And it remains a massive pain to work on rooftops or anything high up due to how stairs, ladders, and slopes behave. As unrealistic as it is, I find myself wishing for something as simple as Minecraft scaffolding, which lets you ascend up to whatever height you need just by holding jump. I know we can’t have Dune: Awakening-style hovering in fantasy Scandinavia. Maybe I could send a raven up there to help me place stuff? Just some ideas.

One of the best survival crafting games ever has only gotten better

I adored Valheim when it was roughly half the adventure it is now. The world has gotten so much richer and the progression so much deeper in the four years since, while even mechanics I was interacting with on my first day of a new playthrough have improved in small and subtle ways. If it doesn’t lead the pack for the whole genre outright, it’s at least very close to the front, howling gleefully as its charming, low-res 3D art style beckons me into calm meadows and foreboding dungeons. I haven’t ever really stopped playing it for more than a handful of months at a time since it launched in early access, and the idea of starting a new world always gets me excited even if I know the first few verses of the saga by heart at this point.