Category: Gaming

Earlier today, Sony announced a handful of games on the way to the PlayStation VR2.

Posting these announcements on both the PlayStation Blog and the social media platform X (formerly Twitter), Sony shared new details on six games that will be playable on its headset. With release dates varying from next month to next year, here’s a roundup of the six VR games Sony highlighted that are coming to PS VR2 soon.

Among Us

PlayStation’s first announcement was that Among US VR will arrive on PS VR2. Though no release date was announced, the news is great for PS VR2 fans, as it was released on Meta Quest and Steam VR headsets nearly a year ago; it seemed only a matter of time before Schell Games released a PS VR port.

Journey to Foundation

Inspired by the Foundation novel series by the late American author Isaac Asimov, Journey to Foundation is an upcoming VR sci-fi RPG where players will explore uncharted regions of outer space. Players assume the role of an agent for a shadowy organization and become involved in a battle for “control of all humanity.”

The game was actually revealed in February, but today’s announcement revealed that Journey to Foundation arrives on PS VR2 (plus Meta Quest) on Oct. 26.

Heroes of Forever

Lucky Mountain Games, the developers behind Hotshot Racing, are making a new fast-paced arcade shooter, Heroes of Forever. In Heroes of Forever, players will jump through various dimensions and timelines to stop as many bad guys as possible and maintain order in the multiverse.

Heroes of Forever is slated to release sometime next year.

Tin Hearts

Tin Hearts is a puzzle game that originally released earlier this year as a non-VR game for PS4 and PS5. After demands from the VR community, developer Rogue Sun announced today that it was releasing a PS VR2 version of the game.

Set in the Victorian era, players control Albert Butterworth, a toy maker, with gameplay akin to the 1991 Amiga game Lemmings. While no release date was revealed, a demo for Tin Hearts is out on November 2.

Tiger Blade

A slash-and-dash arcade game originally announced back in June, Tiger Blade developer Ikimasho Games announced that its next project is out on Nov. 17, exclusively for the PlayStation VR2.

Inspired by Korean neo-noir action cinema, Tiger Blade combined fast-paced sword combat with gunplay. The game’s trailers remind me a lot of the 1999 PlayStation 1 game Rising Zan: The Samurai Gunman, where the titular character also dual-wielded a katana and a pistol.

The Foglands

An anti-Western rougelite, The Foglanss is a new action game coming to PS VR2 on Oct. 31. The Foglands has players control Jim as you venture into parts unknown to fight monsters, collect loot, and make your way back before the fog swallows you.

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

If you, like me, are a fan of Avatar: The Last Airbender, the promise of playing through its fantastic story yourself is an enticing concept that, shockingly, has yet to be truly delivered on in the 18 years since the animated show premiered on Nickelodeon. Avatar: The Last Airbender – Quest for Balance set out to change that: finally you and a co-op partner will be able to relive iconic Avatar moments, like that time Aang had to save a village from an angry monster by solving a sliding block puzzle, or that other time he had to enter the Spirit World to… solve a sliding block puzzle. Quest for Balance is easily the worst adaptation of the series since M. Night Shyamalan’s abysmal live-action movie. It picks baffling moments from the story to highlight, fills them with awful combat and bottom-of-the-barrel quests, and tops itself off with a healthy coating of jank that leaves fans still waiting for a decent Avatar game to emerge from the ice.

Quest for Balance splits Avatar’s three-season tale into 18 chapters, each loosely retelling an episode or portion of the cartoon. The word “loosely” is doing a lot of heavy lifting there, too, as the events of each chapter frequently focus on the most mundane parts of Aang’s incredibly rich adventure while breezing over many of the exciting bits in text transitions between scenes or 2D animatics that separate levels. For example, the first level has Katara and Aang exploring the rather ugly wreckage of a Fire Nation ship where nothing of note happens until a text box at the end of the stage explains that they set off a trap, saw the Fire Nation attacking Katara’s home, and had to rush back… by doing an incredibly bland Temple Run knockoff where you collect coins while sliding on an otter penguin.

It’s not a problem for an adaptation to make changes to its source material in order to better fit its new medium, but the scattershot way it’s been done here leaves the story completely unintelligible for newcomers and totally unsatisfactory for longtime fans. Huge sections of the show are reduced to half-hearted “and then this happened” exposition sessions while Quest for Balance asks you to complete exciting missions like delivering fruit tarts or punching faceless bandits for a meager reward instead. Some moments are even told incorrectly or out of order, and they are frequently warped into strangely anticlimactic versions of themselves. Almost identical fights against Prince Zuko are the boss encounters for three of the first four chapters, while the fight against the fierce panda spirit Hei Bai is literally a sliding block puzzle. Yes, another one.

Reusing the same mediocre activities is one of Quest for Balance’s favorite tricks, with multiple Temple Run-style sections (none of them fun), lots of recycled enemies and fights, and such a large number of decent-but-thematically-irrelevant block puzzles that it almost feels like this started as a completely different game that was then retrofit with an Avatar theme. A downright ludicrous amount of its puzzles are based around the idea that nobody, including the literal Avatar, can jump while holding a torch. To its credit, there is a respectable amount to do overall; it took me about nine hours to complete all 18 chapters, you’re allowed to revisit them with all your characters and upgrades for 100% completion after the fact, and there are even 19 bonus trials to complete. The trouble is that piling on more low-quality content doesn’t improve a game that wasn’t fun to begin with.

Squandering the flashy bending powers that scream for an excellent fighting system, combat is a clunky, button-mashing mess. It’s only ever incredibly easy to spam through waves of bandits and evil benders, or frustrating as the sheer quantity of them and their wildly inaccurate hitboxes causes you to get locked into constant knockdown animations. Perhaps the best example of how laughably inaccurate Quest for Balance has made itself is that Sokka is by far the most powerful fighter the whole way through, able to spam similarly strong attacks faster than any bender, and with an ability in his skill tree that eventually makes him totally immune to knockdowns. I did have to occasionally be thoughtful with my dodge (while not using Sokka), focus on enemies that put shields on others, or use special abilities that provided some crowd-controlling stuns, but the fights are such a one-note jumble the entire time that any subtlety gets waterbended away.

The skill trees for each of the nine playable characters are actually a small bright spot, if a very dim one, letting you use Pai Sho pieces collected from quests to improve stats and abilities – sometimes with boring statistical bumps, but other times in more noticeable ways (like that Sokka ability). It’s actually a nicely tuned progression system, making me consider which character to spend that limited resource on as I went… or it would have if any of it mattered even slightly in the actual combat, where swinging wildly and occasionally using a healing item was all that mattered.

(The first playthrough also has a few trap characters – it lets you dump points into skill trees of people like Suki or the Blue Spirit, who show up briefly only to basically not be relevant again until the end of the campaign.)

The way in which Quest for Balance is also fundamentally janky cannot be overstated. It’s not the most buggy game I’ve played in recent years, but to say its edges are rough would be to overstate how much they’ve been sharpened into edges at all. The controls are an unsatisfying mess, and it’s not uncommon to get stuck on geometry or for its rigid camera to completely cut off parts of the action. It’s also broken in some hilarious ways: most notably, healing items sell for more than they cost at shops, letting you get infinite money any time you want and rendering nearly all of Quest for Balance’s breakable objects and hidden treasure chests pointless in the process. It’s one of those “How did this make it out of testing?” kind of flubs.

What’s particularly disappointing is how easy it is to see the bones of what this game could have been underneath all that grime. It probably wouldn’t ever have been great, but not all of its ideas are ill-conceived. While the 3D animations are pretty much terrible throughout, the 2D animatic cutscenes are actually pretty cute. The whole thing is framed as a few members of the White Lotus recounting the Avatar’s tales, chiming in to provide all those hastily glossed-over details as they do – and while many of the voices seem to be soundalikes, the handful of moments where conversations are voiced really aren’t bad.

The 10 Best Avatar: The Last Airbender Episodes

If that’d been paired with a game where the side activities were actually entertaining instead of pointless fetch quests, where switching between your teammates provided interesting bending playstyles instead of different flavors of the same button mashing, and where this legendary story was retold in a way that respected the source material rather than using it to shoehorn in overused and only loosely related minigames, Quest for Balance might’ve actually fulfilled its promise. It’s not unthinkable that with a bit more time (probably a lot more) the fun could have been found here, but what we got instead feels like the bare minimum required to look like it might be alright and get it out the door so that Quest for Balance could live as yet another trap on store shelves, laying in wait for well-meaning parents who don’t know any better.

PlayStation has detailed the wealth of accessibility features coming to Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 at launch on October 20.

Revealed on the PlayStation Blog, Insomniac Games’ advanced senior UX researcher Michele Zorrilla outlined the new and returning features intended to let as many people as possible play the game. Accessibility design researcher Sam Schaffel also took to the PlayStation Blog to explain how the PlayStation Access controller can be used effectively with Spider-Man 2.

Alongside the previously revealed ability to slow down gameplay, Insomniac has also added shortcuts that allow players to assign a variety of options to the Left or Right D-pad buttons.

Level modifiers take difficulty options one step further, letting players individually customise each gameplay element such as enemy health, enemy damage, stealth awareness, puzzle complexity, parry timing, and more.

Other gameplay assists look to make other parts of Spider-Man 2 more accessible, such as the chase assist which returns to reduce the speed of targets and increase how long players have before they escape, amongst other features. Quick time event autocomplete also looks to reduce motor fatigue by changing repeated button presses from taps to hold and more.

Audio frequency controls will also allow players to disable uncomfortable sounds like high-pitched ringing with high frequency cut-off, the bass of an explosion with low frequency cut-off, or modify things further with a custom setting.

Insomniac also has plans to add more accessibility features like audio descriptions, a screen reader, and captions, but these won’t be available at launch and will instead arrive in a free update in December.

A Spider-Man 2 trailer released in July gave fans a pretty in depth look at the big bad Venom and finally settled a hot debate over his true identity. While fans were torn over Harry Osborn, Kraven the Hunter, or Eddie Brock, Insomniac all but confirmed who’s really behind the mask (or goo).

Despite his intensity of the trailers, the baddie has also been the subject of a laugh amongst internet users after PlayStation offered Spider-Man fans “19 inches of Venom”.

Ryan Dinsdale is an IGN freelance reporter. He’ll talk about The Witcher all day.

Epic Games, the North Carolina-based studio behind Fortnite and Unreal Engine, has suffered a significant round of layoffs.

First reported by Bloomberg, Epic Games is laying off 870 employees, or about 16 percent of its workforce. The layoffs were announced via a memo to staff, Bloomberg wrote. Epic Games shared the memo CEO Tim Sweeney sent out to staff in a new blog post. The memo reveals that the studio is “divesting” music service platform Bandcamp and would spin off most of SuperAwesome, a kid-safe technology company. Both were acquired by Epic Games in 2022 and 2020, respectively.

You can read the full memo below.

Founded in 1991, Epic Games is best known for creating Unreal Engine and has developed a long list of games, including Unreal, the first four entries in the Gears of War series, and most notably the free-to-play battle royale game Fortnite.

Fortnite, in particular, has become an extremely profitable game for Epic. In 2021, Fortnite was reported to have generated $9 billion in two years and had 400 million registered users at the time.

News of layoffs comes just weeks after Epic’s Chief Fortnite Architect Donald Mustard announced his departure, with Charlie Wen, a Marvel veteran who helped design God of War protagonist Kratos, replacing him.

Epic Games was embroiled in a legal feud with tech giants Apple and Google. However, Epic lost the case in 2021, with the ruling upheld by the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals earlier this year. Epic recently requested the U.S. Supreme Court weigh in on the antitrust case.

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

Mortal Kombat 1 players have spent the game’s early life experimenting with the new Kameo system, which lets you call in other characters to perform an action. Using Kameo characters, players are working out how to do elaborate combos that involve “juggling” their opponent with multiple hits. But this new combo from evil sorcerer Shang Tsung is perhaps the most ridiculous yet.

Mortal Kombat professional player Jarrad “NinjaKilla212” Gooden, who won the Mortal Kombat 11 tournament at Evo this year, took to Twitter to publish a video showing an 89-hit combo from Shang Tsung, who, in old form, repeatedly juggles poor Baraka with Ground Skulls fireballs, and keeps the fun going by calling in Scorpion for a cheeky Kameo juggle. There’s even a fancy side switch. (For more, check out IGN’s Shang Tsung character guide, which includes a move list and Fatalities list.)

“Your opponent hits you with this in a tournament, what you doing?” asks NinjaKilla212. I don’t know about you, but probably put my controller down and put the kettle on.

It’s worth pointing out that your average Mortal Kombat 1 match will not see combos like this. NinjaKilla212 is a professional player after all, and the combo itself only causes 45% damage due to scaling. Also, you can use meter to break out of combos in Mortal Kombat 1. Depending on how much meter resource you have going in, you’ll probably be able to put an end to Shang Tsung’s tyranny in 30 hits or less.

Mortal Kombat 1 players are, generally, positive about the new Kameo system because of the flexibility it gives combo construction. But perhaps this is one combo that might need a nerf.

While it’s looking at this combo, developer NetherRealm is also taking a look at a bug which gives Player 1 an advantage over Player 2. Meanwhile, the Nintendo Switch version of Mortal Kombat 1 has become the subject of ridicule for its eye-popping visuals. NetherRealm development chief Ed Boon has promised updates.

Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.

Sega has cancelled Hyenas, the multiplayer extraction shooter in development at UK studio Creative Assembly.

Issuing a warning to investors that it will record a loss for the financial year, Sega said “profitability has been lowered mainly in European bases”. As a result, it has implemented “structural reforms aimed at increasing efficiency”, and reviewed in-development games. “We have made the difficult decision to cancel some titles under the development as well as to reduce the fixed expenses,” Sega said.

“In response to the lower profitability of the European region, we have reviewed the title portfolio of each development base in Europe and the resulting action will be to cancel Hyenas and some unannounced titles under development,” Sega continued. “Accordingly, we will implement a write-down of work-in-progress for titles under development.”

It sounds like Creative Assembly staff face the threat of redundancy. “We will implement reduction of various fixed expenses at several group companies in relevant region, centered on the Creative Assembly Ltd,” Sega said. “We expect to incur one-time expenses related to reduction of fixed expenses.

“We will continue to consider measures to improve profitability in European bases apart from above. We will announce the specific details and impact from them as soon as we make decision.”

Creative Assembly, best known for the Total War series, recently brought Hyenas to German show gamescom for the public to play. A beta concluded mid-September.

Last month Sega admitted Hyenas was a “challenging” title. “We are unable to talk about this title because the details have not yet been announced at this time,” Sega said at the time. “As this is a challenging title, we are striving to improve its quality towards the release on the front line of development. We are also making final adjustments to its business model in parallel.”

Hyenas, announced last summer, resurfaced on August 16 with a new gameplay trailer showing chaotic, zero-G heist action. Hyenas was described as a hero-based multiplayer extraction shooter that pit five teams of three against each other and NPC security teams known as MURFS. The idea was to steal pop culture memorabilia from Plunderships.

While Creative Assembly had previously indicated Hyenas was not free-to-play, Sega’s mention of “final adjustments” to the business model suggested this might have changed. Sega issued IGN the following statement last month:

“We have dedicated the past year to reviewing our business model alongside months of extremely valuable player testing of the gameplay experience. We’re very excited with this progress and the reaction to yesterday’s gameplay reveal. We’ll build on foundation with our Closed Beta test beginning 31 August and use this insight to finalize our plans for launch.”

Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.

We open this week’s busy episode of Unlocked by discussing two big new games we just played a bunch of: Cyberpunk 2077 Phantom Liberty and Alan Wake 2. After that we discuss Phil Spencer’s wish to bring back MechAssault and have a fantasy draft for which Xbox developer should make it — along with our own picks (complete with preferred developers) for other dormant Xbox franchises we’d like to see return. Plus: we get lost wondering how the heck we’re going to play all of the games in this historically busy stretch of major game releases that we’re in right now, and more!

Subscribe on any of your favorite podcast feeds, to our YouTube channel, or grab an MP3 of this week’s episode. For more awesome content, check out my Alan Wake 2 preview mentioned in this episode!

For more next-gen coverage, make sure to check out our Xbox Series X review, our Xbox Series S review, and our PS5 review.

Ryan McCaffrey is IGN’s executive editor of previews and host of both IGN’s weekly Xbox show, Podcast Unlocked, as well as our monthly(-ish) interview show, IGN Unfiltered. He’s a North Jersey guy, so it’s “Taylor ham,” not “pork roll.” Debate it with him on Twitter at @DMC_Ryan.

Valve surprised everyone when it announced earlier this year that it was making a Counter-Strike 2 – and after months of limited testing, it’s now available for PC players via Steam.

The company announced the news with a new trailer today, which you can watch below.

Counter-Strike 2 was announced back in March. Running on Source Engine 2, the same game engine used on other Valve games including Dota 2 and Half-Life: Alyx, Counter-Strike 2 is not a separate sequel to the original game but rather a major free update to Counter-Strike: Global Offensive.

As we have previously seen, Counter-Strike provides a graphical facelift to the popular first-person shooter while adding upgrades and redesigns to the game’s maps. More importantly, Counter-Strike 2 introduces the ability for players to refund their weapons if they accidentally purchased the wrong item.

Counter-Strike: Global Offensive was originally released in 2012, and despite being over a decade old, it remains one of the most popular PC games on Valve’s digital distribution platform, Steam. Being a good game aside, CS: GO’s staying power among the most popular games on Steam is also helped by the fact that the game went free-to-play in late 2018.

In our review of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, IGN said CS:GO is a “top-tier tactics game that will probably share the long-tailed legacy of its predecessors.”

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

Xbox announced another September update for its consoles: the option for players to automatically have their screenshots and captured game footage uploaded to OneDrive.

In a new Xbox Wire blog post, players will be able to set up OneDrive to automatically receive captures by clicking the Xbox home button and heading to “My Games & Apps,” “See All,” Apps,” and “Captures.” In the “Captures” section, a prompt reads “Tell Me More”. It will allow them to set up their future captures to go automatically to OneDrive instead of manually adding their content to the file hosting service.

Microsoft’s gaming arm goes on to explain how it is overhauling how it stores your favorite gaming moments with clips and screenshots stored on the Xbox network, which will be deleted after 90 days. But Xbox notes it will notify you if anything currently stored on its network is about to be deleted just in case you want to transfer the content elsewhere.

Automatically having your console upload clips to OneDrive is super convenient for those who like to capture their greatest moments, from a sick kill streak in Halo Infinite to an epic spaceship fight they won in Starfield. More importantly, it makes obtaining those clips much easier to transfer onto your PC or mobile device and share them online on social media apps. This is especially helpful for X, formerly known as Twitter, since earlier this year Xbox disabled console screenshots and clip sharing on the platform directly.

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

Netflix’s Castlevania showrunner Adi Shankar is officially developing a new anime series for Netflix based on Devil May Cry.

Announced during Netflix’s DROP 01 virtual event, the Devil May Cry anime was also given a short teaser that shows a smiling Dante flipping while shooting his guns (which may be Ebony & Ivory!) and dodging attacks from an off-screen enemy.

We don’t know exactly when this new series will arrive on Netflix, but the streamer provided a description of the anime that will undoubtedly get fans excited for what’s to come.

“In this animated adaptation of the popular Capcom game, sinister forces are at play to open the portal between the human and demon realms,” the official description reads. “In the middle of it all is Dante, an orphaned demon-hunter-for-hire, unaware that the fate of both worlds hangs around his neck.”

The Devil May Cry anime is being developed by Netflix, Capcom, Studio MIR, and Shankar. Shankar will also serve as executive producer alongside Capcom’s Hideaki Itsuno and Studio MIR’s Seung Wook Lee. Itsuno served as director for multiple Devil May Cry games and Lee is from a team that also helped create The Legend of Korra, My Adventures with Superman, Netflix’s Voltron: Legendary Defender and The Witcher: Nightmare of the Wolf, and much more.

Shankar shared a few thoughts about the new series, which will run for eight episodes in its first season and will be written by Alex Larsen.

“I’m honored that Netflix and Capcom have entrusted me to shepherd the DEVIL MAY CRY franchise. Alex Larsen and I love these characters, we are part of the fandom, and vow to surpass the exceptionally high bar we set for ourselves,” Shankar said.

Devil May Cry was first released on PlayStation 2 in 2001 and many sequels followed. The last mainline entry was 2019’s Devil May Cry 5, and we said its “trio of outstanding combat styles set a new high bar for the series, and its mysterious story keeps things interesting along the way.”

For more from Netflix Drop 01, check out the first look at Netflix’s Tomb Raider series, a clip from Scott Pilgrim Takes Off, the teaser trailer for Blue Eye Samurai, and the release date, trailer, and cast announcements for Captain Laserhawk: A Blood Dragon Remix.

Have a tip for us? Want to discuss a possible story? Please send an email to newstips@ign.com.

Adam Bankhurst is a news writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @AdamBankhurst and on Twitch.