Game developer Insomniac confirmed that the studio has no plans to develop story DLC for 2023’s action-adventure Spider-Man 2, likely disappointing many fans who had been hoping for more content.
Spider-Man 2’s New Web Wings Make It Feel Like A Proper Sequel
On October 18, Insomniac and Sony announced that Spider-Man 2 was coming to PC in January, just 15 months after it launched exclusively on PlayStation 5 to rave reviews. It’s one of the fastest turnarounds we’ve seen for a PlayStation-published exclusive title to make the leap to PC and seems to indicate that Sony is fully committed to bringing its hit games to Steam. But for fans hoping that today’s PC port news would come alongside the reveal of story DLC for Spider-Man 2, well, bad news: That’s not happening.
In a post on the official PlayStation Blog announcing Spider-Man 2‘s PC port and what fans can expect, Insomanic’s senior community manager Aaron Jason Espinoza confirmed that the studio isn’t working on or planning any further story DLC for Spider-Man 2 on PC or PS5.
“While we have no additional story content planned for Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, we’re delighted to bring all of our previously released post-launch content to the PC version, including New Game+, new suits and color variants, Photo Mode features, and more,” said Espinoza.
Fans had hoped for Spider-Man 2 DLC after the first Insomniac Spider-Man game received three paid DLC episodes that made up an expansion known as The City That Never Sleeps. However, Miles Morales, a standalone Spider-Man spin-off game launched in 2020, never got DLC. Still, fans were hopeful, even wondering if they’d get more Venom content. Today’s news confirms that Insomniac is moving on from Spider-Man 2. The studio is working on a previously confirmed Wolverine game as well as an unannounced X-Men game, which we learned about via malicious hack in late 2023. A Spider-Man 3 is also reportedly happening, too.
Image: Square Enix, 505 Games, Capcom, Ryu Ga Gotoku Studios / Sega, Blizzard, Sega, Blizzard, Kojima Productions, Screenshot: Capcom
It’s the start of a new month, which means there’s a host of hot, new games coming your way. It can get overwhelming, scanning through the various game marketplaces to decide what you should spend your hard-earned money on, so we’ve gathered 34 games coming out this month that we’re stoked for. We’ve also spotted some great sales you may want to take advantage of, like Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes, the original Resident Evil trilogy, Diablo 4 ahead of its huge expansion, and a bunch of turn-based RPGs at a steal.
We also beg you to check out Yakuza 0 before watching the upcoming Amazon Prime series, let you in on the things we wish we knew before playing the Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster, and highlight everything Hideo Kojima is working on. Click through for all the helpful hints of the week. You’re welcome.
We’re firmly in the era of the video-game-to-prestige-TV-adaptation pipeline, and you know what? It might not be all that bad. Coming off the impressive results of HBO’s The Last of Usand Amazon Prime’s Fallout TV show, we now have the first full trailer for Like a Dragon: Yakuza and it’s looking really good so far.
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Out on Prime Video on October 24, Like a Dragon: Yakuzaadapts the hit Sega sandbox action series beloved for mixing criminal underworld drama with fun open-world gaming hijinks. While we don’t get a ton of the off-kilter humor and quirky flamboyancy of the Like a Dragon games (previously known as Yakuza in the West) from the first extended trailer, we do get an introduction to some slick action and high-stakes dialogue.
Here’s a look:
The show will follow former yakuza Kazuma Kiryu, played by Ryoma Takeuchi of Kamen Rider fame, as he’s drawn into a conspiracy of rival factions and conflicting allegiances on the streets of Tokyo. Drawing mostly from the original 2005 Yakuza game, the first trailer shows a lot of familiar faces, including the Shimano Family mad dog Goro Majima. About a minute into the trailer, longtime fans are rewarded with his iconic “Kiryu-Chan!” line delivery.
The timing of Like a Dragon: Yakuza’s arrival has been surprisingly fortuitous. While the streaming wars appear to be losing gas, video game adaptations have helped breathe some new life into online TV. And while a subtitled Japanese thriller might have previously seemed like a tougher sell, Hulu’s Shōgun stole the show at the recent 2024 Emmy Awards, and Sony has already doubled-down on further adaptations of its Ghost of Tsushima series, including for its upcoming sequel, Ghost of Yōtei.
And for anyone who’s somehow managed to remain on the periphery of the Like a Dragon/Yakuza games these last several years, there have never been more ways to dip your toes into the Kamurochō district, from the Yakuza Kiwami remakes of the early games to recent turn-based spin-offs like Yakuza: Like a Dragon and Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth. And another game in that lineage has already been announced, with Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii starring Goro Majima arriving early next year.
I was staring at a wall. It was an early mission in Ubisoft’s latest behemothic RPG, Star Wars Outlaws, in which I was charged with infiltrating an Empire base to recover some information from a computer, and this wall really caught my attention.
Screenshot: Ubisoft / Kotaku
It was a perfect wall. It absolutely captured that late-70s sci-fi aesthetic of dark gray cladding broken up by utilitarian-gray panels covered in dull blinking lights, and I stopped to think about how much work must have gone into that wall. Looking elsewhere on the screen, I was then overwhelmed. This wall was the most bland thing in a vast hanger, where TIE Fighters hung from the ceiling, Stormtroopers wandered in groups below, and even the little white sign with the yellow arrow looked like it was a decade old, meticulously crafted to fit into this universe. I felt sheer astonishment at the achievement of this. Ubisoft, via multiple studios across the whole world, and the work of thousands of deeply talented people, had built this impossibly perfect area for one momentary scene that I was intended to run straight past.
Except I ran past it three times, because the AI kept fucking up and I was restarted at a checkpoint right before that gray wall over and over.
Screenshot: Ubisoft / Kotaku
I’m struggling to capture the dissonance of this moment. This sense of absolute awe, almost unbelieving admiration that it’s even possible to build games at this scale and at this detail, slapped hard around the face by the bewilderingly bad decisions that take place within it all.
To be excited about a beautifully crafted wall is to set yourself up for an aneurysm when you start to notice the tiny, inflecting details on characters’ faces, or the scrupulous idle animations of a bored guard. Then as I tried to conceive that this same level of care was taking place across thousands of locations in multiple cities over a handful of planets, my genuine thought was: “It’s ridiculous that we mark these games on the same criteria as others.” How can someone look at this, this majesty, and say, “Hmmm, seven out of ten?” And then a guard sees me through a solid hillside and ruins fifteen minutes of painstaking stealth, and I wonder how it can be on sale at all.
In 2024, we have reached the most deeply peculiar place, where AAA games are feats that humanity would once have recognized as literal wonders, and yet play with the same irritating issues and tedious repetition as we saw in the 90s. This contrast, this dissonance, is absolutely fascinating.
Screenshot: Ubisoft / Kotaku
Ubisoft strikes me as the leader in this bizarre space. I have, for years, been delighted and bemused by what that company is capable of creating, albeit often not in positive ways. The Assassin’s Creed series routinely builds entire cities, even countries, in authentic detail, to the point where we almost take it for granted. It has always struck me as the most horrendous waste that a game like Assassin’s Creed Odyssey can recreate ancient Greece in such wonderful detail, and then gets thrown away, that entire digital space never used again for anything else. It could be given to the world, offered as a setting for a thousand indie games, reused and recycled as such an achievement deserves. Instead, it’s there for that single game, where we reasonably kvetch about the frustrating details of a broken quest, or at how crowd AI bugs out at crucial moments.
And this is only to touch on the art and architecture. We’re not even mentioning the fantastic writing, the exquisite voice acting, the sound effects, the musical score, the lighting, the concept art that makes such designs possible, and the direction and leadership that can bring all these disparate parts together. All as a backdrop to my repeating the run across the gantry because a distant AI decided to be triggered by a Nix it couldn’t possibly see, or because that time when I pressed Square it decided to throw a punch instead of trigger a takedown.
Screenshot: Ubisoft / Kotaku
I’m old enough to remember a time when we’d lament that a beautifully drawn point-and-click adventure was no fun to play, and be so disappointed that such lovely artistic skill had been the backdrop for illogical puzzles and bad writing. Imagine the camera shot pulling out from that adventure game and revealing the room it’s in, the house that contains that room, the town that house is in, the city that town forms part of, and the country in which that city exists—that gets you close to the scale at which the same issue plagues us 40 years later.
Just that opening city in Outlaws, Mirogana, is more than gaming was capable of ten years ago, let alone 40. It, alone, would be enough for an entire game, with plots and missions and characters. And it’s a blip in this game’s mindblowing breadth. I cannot over-express the scale of what’s offered here, and how incongruous it feels that it can all feel so easily dismissed given such fundamental errors. Errors that mean the game attracts headlines like, “Star Wars Outlaws Is Too Simplistic For Its Own Good.” And I get it! I know what the article means! It’s right that its stealth is banal and badly implemented, and yet such a core element of the game. But God damn, why are we able to reasonably call this creation “simplistic”?
I’ve no idea what the solution can possibly be, but I feel it sits somewhere in a new order of priority. One that involves scaling back the ambition of everything that a large-scale developer knows it can achieve, and re-focuses resources on fixing the absolute basics that it so often cannot. Because the tragedy of a piece of art like Outlaws—or any number of other architectural masterpieces that we see come and go in this industry every month—being able to be sniffed at with a (deserved) 7/10, is too awful.
At Gamescom this year, I saw a talk (currently embargoed) about how wind will cause a game’s world to behave differently, and on one level it was incredible stuff, a technological marvel. But on another, it’s going to offer absolutely nothing if that game’s basic loops are dreary, or if the enemy AI is going to endlessly run into beautifully rendered walls. It could end up being a 7/10 game with technologically astounding wind.
And so I come back to that wall. And I thank everyone involved in making it so special, the artists who spent so long ensuring it felt authentic, and the level designers who placed it, and the people responsible for collision detection who ensured I couldn’t walk through it, and the people who coded the Snowdrop engine so it could exist at all, and the producers who encouraged the developers who implemented it, and every single person who was in some way responsible for making me that wall to momentarily stare at. And I wish I hadn’t had to sneak past it quite so many times.
Image: Activision / Liam Robertson / Did You Know Gaming
A new report claims that Crash Bandicoot 5 was greenlit by Activision, but was then canceled very early in development due to Crash 4 selling poorly and the publisher wanting to focus more on live-service titles, like Call of Duty: Warzone. Interestingly, this game would have seen the wumpa-fruit-loving marsupial cross over with another platforming mascot, Spyro the Dragon.
Kotaku’s Hopes For Spyro The Dragon’s (Reported) Comeback
According to a new report from gaming journalist and historian Liam Robertson, formerly Activision-owned studio Toys For Bob began working on a multiplayer Crash Bandicoot game after it had wrapped on the Spyro ReignitedTrilogy. But then the company took some of that work and began developing 2020’s Crash Bandicoot 4: It’s About Time. That game was well-liked by fans and critics, and Toys For Bob began planning a follow-up.
This new game, known internally as Crash Bandicoot 5, was planned to be a direct sequel to Crash 4 and would be a single-player 3D platformer, like previous entries in the long-running franchise.
Did You Know Gaming / Liam Robertson
Robertson’s video includes concept art and possible story ideas for this never-finished Crash sequel. At one point, the developers were planning to include Spyro in the sequel, with the report claiming that the two would have worked together to save their respective universes from a giant cataclysmic event. Both characters would be playable, and players would even see both characters’ universes in this multiverse pitch.
Kotaku has reached out to Activision about the report.
According to the report, Toys For Bob only worked on Crash 5 for around three to four months and largely focused on concept art and early environments. In the winter of 2020, Activision canceled Crash 5, reportedly due to Crash 4‘s low sales and the publisher wanting to focus on online games over single-player titles. Toys for Bob then worked on Crash Team Rumble, a short-lived and not very popular online game that you probably forgot even launched.
There’s a fairly good chance that you, like us, keep forgetting that Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is a first-person game. Each time we see any footage, it’s a jarring moment to remember that this isn’t a reskinned Tomb Raider or Uncharted, but instead puts us directly inside Dr. Jones’ head. This is exacerbated by so much of the stuff we’ve seen in trailers constantly jumping to cinematic third-person views, given how odd of an angle it is when trying to show off the game. But now we’ve seen ten minutes of in-game footage, and it’s starting to make more sense.
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At this week’s Gamescom, developer MachineGames, the force behind games like 2014’s Wolfenstein: The New Order and its sequel, described what has been shown before as highlighting their approach to “building an immersive narrative, full of twists and turns and exciting set-pieces.” But today we would see the enigmatic “gameplay.” They wanted to show off “what it is like to actually play as Indiana Jones and experience his adventure, to look through his eyes.” So it was perhaps unfortunate that this was immediately followed up by yet more footage of the grave robber smashing an ancient statue to recover a secret doohickey, all via a staged, third-person view.
This continued on as Indy’s thievery caused traps to trigger, closing the doors and filling the room with sand. But lo, a high window eventually comes within reach, and here, at last, we’re actually seeing the world through the behatted one’s eyes and leap forward into…a scripted series of slips and slides as the temple falls down around him.
OK, I’m being mean, but they set me up. After this, we do at last start to see some actual footage of the game as it will be experienced, and it’s a far more controlled and considered game than I was expecting. At some points, it appeared to play more like a first-person adventure game, with Indy inspecting scenes for clues, picking up objects to examine, and attempting to piece together where he needs to be. And where he needs to be is stopping evil Nazi rival explorer Emmerich Voss from finding a series of relics and returning them to his Fuhrer.
This all begins when Voss breaks into the doctor’s Massachusetts university and steals one such relic, and we begin trying to find out what he’s up to. In the aftermath of the break-in, we see Indy picking up photographs, looking through papers, snapping photographs to unlock more details about various items and areas, and arguing with Italian journalist Gina, who is only interested in accompanying him to find her sister.
Screenshot: MachineGames/Lucasfilm
But it’s not all poking around in ancient ruins and halls of academia. The other most joyously repeated theme of what we were shown was hitting bad people on the back of the head with shovels. There seems to be a strong emphasis on improvisation, with objects lying around in the world available to be grabbed and used as a one-off advantage. Those shovels, for instance, shatter at the handle once they’ve been walloped around an unsuspecting head, and Indy tosses the remains aside. The same goes for metal bars used to knock loose bricks out of walls, or staffs thrown across ravines into the rock wall, to then be swung on with Indy’s whip.
Shovels weren’t the only means of combat, of course. The real focus was fisticuffs, with fights playing out as a sort of boxing minigame, you and the enemy exchanging blows, attempting blocks, and general biffing noses. Such moments would often begin with Indiana using his whip to pull at a buddy’s ankle to bring them to the floor, and then engaging in pugilism on their recovery, swapping punches until one of you is down.
Talking of Indy being down, in a highlight of the shown footage we saw our hero losing a fight and falling to the ground, but then thanks to a skill—True Grit—gained and added to his skill tree, he was able to make a last-ditch effort to reach out for his iconic hat and rally himself for one more try. It felt so very, very Indiana Jones.
It’s also worth noting that Indy’s perspective is not stubbornly first-person, after all. When he climbs, it switches out to third-person view, looking extremely like a Tomb Raider game as he Lara Crofts his way around ledges and climbs vines. It’s almost as if…it could have been a better perspective? But the insistence on “seeing through his eyes” prevails. It’ll end up being a combination of the two as we experience the larger challenges, climbing around vast obstacles to solve elaborate puzzles.. At one point we saw Doc Jones pouring wine into ancient bowls to reveal secret numbers, then finding routes to reach a huge raised frieze of Christ and adjusting levers to match the code.
Honestly, watching the footage and realizing that this is a slower, more focused game than the frantic cutscenes we’ve seen before have suggested, has made me much more excited to play it. Stealthing into a room, ker-blamming a baddie with garden equipment, and then using a whip to kwa-ping a gun out of another enemy’s hand looks really rather tremendous, especially when such action is interspersed with both exploration and puzzle solving. As sound director Pete Ward puts it, “The focus of this game is adventure,” with a desire that players find their own uses for the tools the game offers.
I’m much more excited now to return to 1937 having seen this footage, to see how well this mix of approaches can meld together, especially with the good news that Troy Baker’s Harrison Ford impression holds up much better than I’d previously thought. This could…maybe…actually be one to get really excited about. Although I’ve still no idea what’s so great about the circle.
The Crimson Diamond is AVAILABLE NOW!! (Launch trailer)
Play it on: Steam Current goal: Solve an old-fashioned mystery
A few weeks ago, I mentioned how I was captivated by Unavowed, a point-and-click adventure from the folks at Wadjet Eye. Well, I’ve finished that one (it was great) just in time for a brand-new entry in the genre to come along. And while Wadjet Eye’s output is most reminiscent of ‘90s adventure games that offered full voice acting and elegant drag-and-drop interfaces, this new game, The Crimson Diamondfrom designer Julia Minamata, is influenced by an earlier era of adventures, ones that ran in EGA and had you typing in what you wanted your character to do. I can’t wait to explore its mysteries.
The Crimson Diamond is perhaps most reminiscent of Sierra adventures, especially the Clara Bow games which saw their plucky heroine tossed into murder mysteries during the roaring ‘20s. Itcasts you as Nancy Maple, a young woman investigating the discovery of an unusually large and valuable diamond in a town in northern Ontario, Canada. It’s clear from the trailer that her investigations will find her encountering people with motives of their own, some of them sinister, and land her in no small amount of peril. Sign me up!
People often talk about the evolution of adventure games from text parsers to purely graphical interfaces as a net good, as if text parsers were just a crutch, a relic from the genre’s early days that we no longer needed, but I’ve always thought of them as two fundamentally different approaches, each with their own strengths. I think there are ways in which the presence of a text parser can encourage creative thinking that a purely graphics-based interface doesn’t always allow for, and in addition to digging into the plot of The Crimson Diamond, I’m eager to see how it uses this design element that so rarely gets employed in modern games. All in all, it sounds like a perfect fit for a cozy weekend. —Carolyn Petit
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Austin Williams, Carolyn Petit, Moises Taveras, Kenneth Shepard, and Ethan Gach
Cat Quest III departs from the first two games of this light-hearted action-adventure series in a variety of ways, especially with its pirate-themed naval combat. Still, it also retains a lot of familiar gameplay mechanics and concepts that ensure if you played the previous games, you’ll feel right at home. Whether you’re a returning player well-versed in Cat Quest’s history, or you’re brand new to the franchise, we’ve compiled a solid list of tips to help you get started in this feline-focused adventure. – Billy Givens Read More
Prison Architect 2, set to launch in September, has been indefinitely delayed, with the studio behind the game also announcing that it will refund customers who pre-ordered the prison building sim. It’s yet another road bump for publisher Paradox Interactive following the cancellation of a Sims-like game in June.
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Originally released in 2012 on PC, Prison Architect lets players build and maintain large prisons filled with criminals and guards. The original game received updates for years and was even ported to consoles and mobile devices. In 2019, Paradox Interactive purchased the franchise from original developers Introversion Software, and in 2024 announced a full, 3D sequel. However, the game was delayed earlier this year. And now, it’s been delayed again with no new release date.
On August 2, Paradox and developer Kokku announced that Prison Architect 2 was no longer arriving on September 3. In a post on the official Paradox forums, the devs explained they “need more time to improve both the game’s performance and its content.”
Paradox Interactive
The studio and publisher also added that they “can’t commit” to a new release date or window as they are re-assessing the “scope of work needed to be done before the game is release-ready.” It also warned that communication between the team and fans will be limited until they feel more “comfortable” showing the game and talking about a release timeline.
As a result of this indefinite delay, Paradox Interactive is refunding all pre-orders on all platforms and has pledged to include all previously promised pre-order digital items in the base game.
In a Q&A included with the announcement, the studio and Paradox stressed that Prison Architect 2 isn’t canceled.
It also doesn’t help that Paradox has had a string of failures and misfires over the last year or so. Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2, first announced in 2019, was nearly canceled after multiple delays and a developer swap in 2023. The Lamplighter’s League was an expensive flop. And Cities: Skylines 2 launched in such a poor state that Paradox was forced to stop all DLC plans so the devs could focus on fixing the city builder.
Even Prison Architect 2 had some issues before this delay, with the original studio—Double Eleven—leaving the project over a financial disagreement with Paradox, leading to the publisher swapping the team out for Kokku in 2024.
As you wander the wasteland of Appalachia, you may notice what looks like an oddly dressed ghoul stumbling down the cracked pavement toward you. It’s actually a Scorched, which isn’t anything special, but lately you might’ve seen them dressed in holiday attire. The bright red and white frock of a Scorched Wanderer stands out in the bleak post-apocalypse, and if you manage to beat your fellow survivors to the punch, you can actually farm Holiday Scorched in Fallout 76 for fantastic rewards. Why would you want to? Well, read on. – Brandon Morgan Read More
We’re about halfway through the summer and I’ve given up on avoiding sweat You’re probably about halfway to giving up on Elden Ring’s Shaddw of the Erdtree DLC, but we can help with that. We’ve also got a tip for a free game for you to snag, and some FF14 advice. Read on for more of this week’s best tips.
Above all else,Zenless Zone Zero is beautiful to look at. HoYoverse’s latest action RPG gacha title, following 2020’s Genshin Impactand last year’s Honkai: Star Rail, has a lot much going for it, with a beautifully detailed world, characters, and animations. Underneath that style there is even some substance, but the game may not be able to best HoYoverse’s other successful titles in the long run.
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Smart features that lessen the gacha grind make ZZZ perhaps the most player-friendly title in HoYoverse’s growing library, but it lacks a good hook that will keep the player coming back for more. In the dozen or so hours I’ve spent with ZZZ it takes shape as a promising melting pot of useful features and gorgeous design that I’m worried won’t garner the same avid fan base as its siblings.
Damn, Zenless Zone Zero has style!
In Zenless Zone Zero you take on the role of a Proxy, a person who guides agents (the characters you control in combat) through dangerous pocket dimensions called Hollows. These Hollows have valuable resources, so the residents of New Eridu (where the game is set), are always in want of a good Proxy to guide them in hopes of turning a profit. At the start of ZZZ,you help a trio of agents escape the Hollows and fall into a rabbit hole of intrigue and mystery that only gets deeper the more you play.
Image: HoYoverse
Immediately upon starting, New Eridu and its inhabitants stand out visually, thanks to the game’s incredible urban punk aesthetic that blends the futuristic and nostalgic. The protagonist duo Belle and Wise (per HoYoverse’ tradition since Genshin Impact, you get to pick to play as a female or male main character) are another great example of ZZZ’s wonderful design. Belle has a simple gray and orange color palette only contrasted by the dark blue of her stylish short hair. She’s wearing a fashionable ensemble with geometric patterning that alternates between her main colors while also sporting a walkman-like device on her hip. It’s a fit that would be right at home in the most fashionable neighborhoods of New York City.
That high-quality design extends to the rest of the game’s cast, each of whom is stylish and could very well be your new favorite character, which is the ideal for a game that asks you to pay real-world money to get the characters you want. I especially love the variety ZZZ offers, which includes non-human characters, like a bear named Ben Bigger, a first for aHoYoverse game. Similarly, New Eridu is a shining city filled with a love of the real world’s past. The central neighborhood you explore while not actively on missions (we’ll get to those) is littered with stores dedicated to physical media (what a concept). Belle and Wise run a video rental store that you get to manage while they aren’t doing their less-than-legal activities guiding people through the Hollows.
ZZZ’s core gameplay loop is centered around the Hollows. You can accept missions that send your party of three into the dangerous dungeons to fight and gain loot. Some missions progress the story, some are side activities, and some are combat-focused challenges to test your skill. In contrast to the open-world of Genshin Impact or the more expansive space traveling escapades of Honkai: Star Rail the world of ZZZ feels small. That extends to missions, which you begin not by traveling a long distance to a location, but by launching into them from a simple menu. It reminds me most of HoYoverse’s Honkai Impact 3rd, but that’s not where the similarities end. ZZZ’s entire combat system feels most like HI3.
Image: HoYoverse
Even when it works, I kind of wish I was playing something else
In ZZZ, you control one member of your party at a time in real time combat against hordes of enemies. Each character has a basic, special, and ultimate attack, with the latter two charging up as you perform basic attacks. This alone is fairly simple and probably will feel familiar to anyone who has played HI3 or Genshin Impact. However, ZZZ’s special sauce is it sassist attacks. Before an enemy attacks, a short sparkle signals to switch characters. If timed perfectly, you dodge the incoming attack and can in turn do some big damage. With this system, combat encounters take on a certain flow that can feel exceptionally good when you string together assist attack after assist attack, unleashing ultimates and decimating the enemy in no time.
HoYoverse constantly iterates from one title to the next, and ZZZ’s combat is clearly the result of some great iteration on Genshin Impact, which to this day has a pretty boring combat loop. Combat shines even brighter thanks to some of the best animations I’ve seen HoYoverse put to screen. When compared to Genshin Impact, it’s a wonderful improvement, however it can’t reach the same heights as this year’s HoYoverse competitor, Wuthering Waves. WuWa still feels much more engaged than ZZZ, as even in the latters’ most challenging fights the combat loop can lean towards button-mashing without the need for much thought.
Naturally, ZZZ’s combat loop is in service of gaining in-game resources by which you can unlock and upgrade new characters and weapons. Thankfully, that gacha grind isn’t nearly as bad as something like Genshin Impact or Honkai: Star Rail. Everything feels more easily accessible to the player through the limited collection of activities. You can probably get your favorite character with a lot less work than it would take in other HoYoverse games due to ZZZ’s approach, which shows the developer is clearly attempting to make quality of life improvements to its games (and something I desperately hopes makes its way back to Genshin Impact and HSR). Combined with the smaller world and simple mission design, ZZZ is HoYoverse’s most approachable and player-friendly title. Yet it still hasn’t gotten its hooks into me.
HoYoverse
Ironically I think the reason for that is because ZZZ sands maybe one too many edges off the HoYoverse formula. While combat is the most impressive it’s ever been in a HoYoverse title, it feels too easy, which makes moment-to-moment gameplay unengaging. The characters and world are gorgeously designed, but the story itself isn’t very enticing as of yet. The stories of Genshin Impact and Honkai: Star Rail are what keep me coming back, but even with ZZZ’s a lower barrier to entry I find its narrative to be easy to bounce off of. To be fair, the game is in its first week and has barely gotten started on the narrative front, so things could get better, but right now, it’s not gripping me. More than anything, while playing ZZZ I find myself wishing its improved features could just be put in the HoYoverse games I’d rather be playing.
As much as I love many things in Zenless Zone Zero, I can’t quite place it in the HoYoverse portfolio. Alongside Genshin Impact, Honkai: Star Rail, and Honkai Impact 3rd, Zenless Zone Zero feels like it has the biggest hurdles in the way of its success. Genshin is already an established hit with an avid fan base thanks to a sprawling open-world matched by an equally sprawling story. Honkai: Star Rail has become popular in its own right after only being released a year ago on the strength of its tight turn-based combat and enthralling space opera adventure. Then there’s Honkai Impact 3rd, which despite releasing back in 2016, still has loyal fans. This all stretches the potential player base for ZZZ even thinner. I hope it does find its audience, however, as there is a lot to love.
Zenless Zone Zero is now available on Android, iOS, PC, and PlayStation 5.
If there’s one thing we can all agree on about Destiny 2, it’s that it has a lot of menus, where you probably spend lots of time managing all sorts of little things, from bounties to excess inventory, quest tracking, and more. Honestly, I think I spend a quarter of my time with Destiny not shooting aliens or exploring the surface of Europa or Nessus but just trudging through unintuitive menus laden with tabs and subpages.
But there’s a better way to play Destiny! All you need is an iOS or Android device. If you’re already a regular user of the Destiny companion app, then I don’t need to sing its praises to you, though it’s worth noting that with the Prismatic class introduced in Destiny 2’s latest expansion, The Final Shape, the app is arguably more useful than ever. For those who aren’t acquainted with how it dramatically improves and streamlines the experience of playing Bungie’s sci-fi shooter (especially on PlayStation and Xbox), let me outline a few excellent use cases for this more-than-handy tool.
This guide will only cover app functions that let you manage bounties and inventory. Clan and fireteam management, as well as other social features, are outside the scope of this piece. – Claire Jackson Read More
Some games make my heart bubble up with joy. They remind me of thumbing through tiny, beautiful booklets and tag-teaming tough bosses with friends. Not everyone’s childhood was easy, simple, or happy, but all of us have moments in our lives we look back fondly on and games that briefly bring them back to us. Panzer Paladin is one of those for me, and the retro action platformer is finally getting a second chance on PlayStation and Xbox.
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It was made by Tribute Games, the indie team behind 2022 GOTY contender Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge. Before that, they were best known for the puzzle RPG Wizorb and the run-and-gun side-scroller Mercenary Kings. All of the studio’s projects have showcased top-tier pixel-art and a flare for turning the fundamentals of old genre classics into homages that looked great and felt novel. Following 2017’s Flint Hook, described early on as “Spider-Man with a gun,” Tribute released Panzer Paladin, a 2D platformer where you pilot a mech and collect giant medieval weapons.
It’s structured like Mega Man with a stage select screen and boss fights at the end of each level. It borrows from Blaster Master in that you can exit your mech to navigate parts of the levels as tiny pilot with a grappling hook. It plays like Zelda II, Nintendo’s one-off side-scrolling experiment that threw Link into tense 2D duels against armored knights. What Panzer Paladin has that those games don’t is a sophisticated breakable weapon system where you collect swords, spears, axes and other deadly tools as you play, even crafting your own and sharing them online with other players.
There’s plenty of spike pits but no Castlevania-style knockback hitting you into them, and every level has optional checkpoints. The combat is crunchy, the levels are imaginative, and the art is oozing with love, respect, and appreciation for the 8-bit era. But the boss fights are tough, and there are definitely some controller-throwing platforming sections. The warm fuzzy feeling you get from the retro nostalgia does not stop Panzer Paladin from being, all things considered, a pretty hardcore throwback.
Gif: Tribute Games / Kotaku
Its development also followed a now uncommon trajectory. Announced in early 2019, Panzer Paladin was made in just over a year and came out in the summer of 2020, months into an unprecedented pandemic nobody saw coming. It launched exclusively on PC and Switch, with a free content update in the fall that added a leaderboard and challenge levels. At the time, Tribute said there were no plans to bring the game to PlayStation or Xbox, leaving retro enthusiasts on those platforms out of luck.
With Shredder’s Revenge done and its DLC out last year, the timing finally lined up to bring Panzer Paladin to other platforms. If porting was as easy as copying and pasting some code, it might have happened a lot sooner, but Tribute works with a proprietary game engine and had to bring on outside programming help, as well as navigate a byzantine platform certification process that included making sure server support for the game’s user-generated content—its player-crafted weapons—didn’t break on PlayStation or Xbox.
“You go through certification and you get bug reports for some things and there’s always the temptation to go, ‘Oh, we could correct this in a specific way, or we could add a feature to this,” Ray, a producer who helped coordinate the process, told me in a recent video interview. “But there’s also that little voice that says we need to keep it as simple as possible, so we get through certification and we introduce less risk of something breaking because we changed something else.”
With that complete, Tribute can now focus on its next project. Will it be a one-game studio or is there room for another Panzer Paladin-sized experiment in its future? “Right now we have multiple projects in the pipeline including some ports,” publishing manager Eric Lafontaine told me (several of the studio’s older games like Wizorb aren’t on modern consoles). He added that the team is currently growing, a reassuring sign at a time when lots of other indie studios are facing extinction.
In the meantime, Panzer Paladin is ripe for re-discovery like a long-lost NES cartridge juiced up on modern tech. There’s no shortage of gorgeous looking retro games on PC and console these days, but it only takes a few minutes with Panzer Paladin to see there’s much more to it than just another incredibly GIF-able pixel art game. And one of the things I now love most about it is the way it’s brain-wormed its way into my own nostalgia for the summer of its original release. 2020 was an absolute shit year in so many ways. Playing Panzer Paladin offered brief moments of retro respite I still haven’t forgotten. And now it’s back with a Platinum Trophy on PS4.
Since the announcement of The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom, fans of the series have been expressing their excitement over Zelda’s unique gameplay. Chiefly, they are overjoyed about her ability to copy (or echo) items in the environment and use them against her enemies in battle.
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Echoes of Wisdom finally drops players into a mainline entry of the series as the titular princess. When Link goes missing just as he rescues her from Ganon, dark rifts begin to tear apart Hyrule, and Zelda just barely escapes them. With Hyrule’s typical savior out of the picture, it falls on Zelda to save her land and people, and she accomplishes this with the help of Tri, a fairy she encounters as all is falling apart. Tri grants Zelda the Tri Rod, which allows her to copy objects and other creatures in the world in order to navigate environments, solve puzzles, and carry out battles, and it looks great, and indeed poised for numerous jokes and in-game hilarity.
It all started when a clip of the game’s debut trailer showed Zelda copying a boulder, lifting it and throwing it at an enemy. Many fans noted the fact that in most Zelda games, Link has needed a bracelet that allows him a similar ability, and claimed that Zelda had been quietly getting stronger than her stalwart protector and savior.
Eventually, the memes about Echoes of Wisdom’s new copy ability got progressively out of hand. Many of the ones I saw within a few hours of the announcement poked fun at how Zelda might use a table or a chair in battle, akin to a professional wrestler. By comparison, Link has largely used more typical weaponry like the Master Sword, as well as a bow and arrow or bombs. The emphasis on furniture has spawned its own series of posts about domesticity and interior decoration. From there, things spiraled out of control until we hit the natural conclusion that the internet always escalates to: giving Zelda a glock.
But if I had to pick favorites, these final three are the pinnacle of the posts I saw. Sometimes, the internet can be a really funny place.
It’s actually been really joyous to see communities getting excited for what appears, on its face, to be a novel take on the beloved series. I feel my own fervor for Echoes of Wisdom being stoked with every bit of fanart or memes that I see folks posting online, so please keep it coming. This is the kind of energy I can get behind any day of the week. And yes, you’re all right, we should absolutely give Zelda a gun.
Elden Ring’s first and only expansion, Shadow of the Erdtree, features an exciting new storyline with dozens of hours of gameplay to experience—but accessing it isn’t a walk in the park, and data suggests that there are crucial steps many players haven’t yet taken. If you want to see what the challenging new DLC has to offer, you’ll have to find your way to a well-hidden section of the main game and defeat multiple optional bosses, including one of the toughest in the game: Mohg, Lord of Blood. – Billy Givens Read More
Do you like action movies? Do you like the ones where a bunch of crazy nonsense is happening that seems like it defies all the laws of physics? Do you like video games? Good news, all three of those itches are going to be scratched with an adaptation of the Just Cause games.
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Per the Hollywood Reporter, Universal’s picked up the rights to the open-world franchise and enlisted Blue Beetle’sÁngel Manuel Soto to direct. Action movie studio 87North will produce the film via Kelly McCormick and action guy David Leitch, coming off the heels of The Fall Guy from earlier in May. Also producing is Story Kitchen, a company that’s already involved in the recent live-action adaptations of Tomb Raider and Sonic the Hedgehog.
The Just Cause games center on Rico Rodriguez, a secret agent tasked with traveling to various islands and saving the people by overthrowing the current regime of whover’s in charge. Since 2006, the series has been well-liked, largely due to the sequels enabling players to create as much carnage as they can by destroying government property with whatever they’ve got on hand. The stories are cliche and not all that interesting, but the games make up for it by allowing players to wreak havoc and pull off some wild death-defying stunts with Rico’s handy grappling hook and wingsuit. If you can imagine a Mission Impossible game that doesn’t take itself all that seriously, that’s basically these games.
Interestingly, a movie adaptation was reportedly getting off the ground back in 2010 (the same year Just Cause 2 released), but nothing came of it. In 2017, Jason Momoa was tapped to play Rico in an adaptation from Atlas director Brad Peyton, which also never happened since at the point, the two were both individually pretty busy. After another false start in 2020, it looks like the stars have aligned for a movie to finally happen. Now if only there were a game along with it: the last entry was Just Cause 4 back in 2018, and Avalanche is currently working on the open-world co-op game Contraband for Xbox, which we haven’t really heard much about since its initial reveal in 2021.
Crystal Dynamics’ Tomb Raiderfranchise is taking two interesting roads as it’s got a brand new game in the works. On one side of things, the live-action series courtesy of Phoebe Waller-Bridge has recently moved forward over at Prime Video. And on the other, more immediate end, there’s Netflix’s Tomb Raider: The Legend of Lara Croft, scheduled to drop in October and looking somewhat like a blast from the past.
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The new show comes courtesy of Castlevania studio Powerhouse Animation and stars Mission: Impossible: Dead Reckoning’sHayley Atwell as Lara Croft. In this tale set after the events of the reboot trilogy from the 2010s, Lara’s ditched her friends to run solo as an adventurer. While taking on increasingly difficult jobs, she finds herself on a new hunt after a thief’s broken into Croft Manor to steal an old Chinese artifact. The artifact’s not just old, it’s also dangerous, so it falls on her to do what she does best and save the world from peril.
Legend may be in the same continuity as those games, but it’s looking more like a globetrotting, action-packed affair. In fact, it seems like this Lara is becoming more like her original incarnation instead of getting beaten around by gravity and nature every other step. While there’s parts of the reboots that’ve carried over, like her pickaxe and bow and arrow, and her trusty friend Jonah (Earl Baylon), there’s a definite change in the air. Here, she’s riding motorcycles, skydiving, and blasting a shotgun in midair like the hypercompetent hero fans originally loved.
Netflix will premiere Tomb Raider: The Legend of Lara Croft on October 10.
One of the biggest questions heading into MultiVersus’ 1.0 launch has been answered. WB Games’ crossover platform fighter dropped in Open Beta in 2022, and the plan at the time seemed to be a smooth transition to a full launch. Instead the game was temporarily shut down, despite having run multiple Battle Passes and taking real money for skins and other cosmetics. Several months later, a relaunch is right around the corner with 1.0 scheduled for May 28, 2024. So, what happens to all that purchased content, and would there be any compensation for those founding players when MultiVersus returned? The latest wave of info from developer Player First Games has laid it all out, and we’re here with the condensed version. – Lucas White Read More
It’s the middle of May 2024 and that means we’re nearly halfway through the year. What has this year been like in video game news? Tons of layoffs (sad), lots of new games (glad), and some weird outliers, as usual. This week, we saw set photos and official shots from The Last of Us season two, dove back into the GameStop stock market, and asked the dude who nuked Phil Spencer in Fallout 76 about his motivations. Click through for all of this week’s best breaking news.
