Take a deep breath! Slayers X: Terminal Aftermath: Vengance Of The Slayer is releasing on June 1st with a simultaneous Game Pass drop. It’s an old-school shooter set in the same retro-futuristic universe as Hypnospace Outlaw, but this time the focus is on fan-favourite character Zane Lofton, who actually “made” Slayers X in the fiction of the game.
I’ve been playing a lot of The Legend Of Zelda: Tears Of The Kingdom this week. It’s good. Really good. I know you’ve all been waiting for your favourite PC gaming-focused website to offer their take on it so there you go. It’s properly, properly good. The best open-world adventure since Elden Ring, except arguably better because it doesn’t pull your trousers down and point out the colour of your underwear every time you dare to explore a forest or watch a sunset.
As you’ve probably seen, the game’s biggest new draw is “Ultrahand”, which allows Link to pick up loose objects and glue them together. Three logs make a raft. A plank and four wheels make a car. Two stones and a log make a… Ahem. You get the idea. In addition to this are “Zonai Devices”, components that give life and movement to your doohickeys. A fan pushes your raft across the lake. A steering stick lets you manoeuvre your little car. It’s a marvellous construction system that leverages the pre-existing physics engine seen in the game’s predecessor, Breath Of The Wild, to startling results. Does this all sound familiar?
Co-op horror prequel The Outlast Trials is out now in early access. Playing under-the-bed peekaboo with brainwashed killers can be an overwhelming ordeal, so now you can drag along a friend and spread out the trauma. This time, those snotty shakycam Blair Witch-type chases are set in a Cold War-era facility where you’ll be put through some gruelling experiments. The early access launch trailer below lays out some of the titular trials you can expect.
Download Part One now.
PlatinumGames has today announced that some brand new DLC for 2020’s The Wonderful 101: Remastered is finally available to download. What’s more, this new content — originally promised as a stretch goal via the game’s Kickstarter campaign — is completely free.
Part One of the DLC is available to download today and the story will continue next week as the second part releases on 26th May.
Read the full article on nintendolife.com
We’re back with another amazing The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom deal for Nintendo Switch. This time the deal comes at Currys, where you can get the game for £44.99 when using code SAVE5 at checkout. This is a great deal, and overall saving you £15 compared to the original list price on the game. If you’re not interested in Currys, you can also pick up the game for £44.99 when buying from Argos and using this £5 off promo for signing up for their marketing emails. If you’re looking to get the game a little faster, we’ve also left links below to buy the game from Amazon for £49.99.
Click here to skip past all Tears of the Kingdom deals and preorders.
Other deals today include a huge discount on PlayStation Top-Card cards, £30 off Apple AirPods Pro, the best Ninja Air Fryer with a £50 discount, alongside the new Tears of the Kingdom Collector’s Edition guide, with preorders now available for £29.99 as well (or there’s the paperback edition for £19.99), the release date is June 16. Otherwise, check out all the discounts below with our handy links, and follow @IGNUKDeals on Twitter for more updates.
If you didn’t secure a preorder and were waiting for reviews (we gave it a 10/10 Masterpiece in our review), then look no further as we’ve already found you an awesome deal to check out (with a fast delivery or pickup time as well). It’s just £44.99 at Currys with code SAVE5, and you also get up to 3 months of Apple Music, Apple Arcade, Apple TV+ and Apple Fitness+ for free!
While I’m here, quick shout out to IGN’s Tears of the Kingdom Wiki guide, it is legit incredible and the team has knocked it out of the park with this one. If you’re looking for a physical guide, which will likely end up being more of a collectable by the time it releases on June 16, you’ve got a couple of options right now. The Collector’s Edition is beautiful and can be preordered at £29.99 from Amazon, while the standard paperback edition is £19.99. Both are out on June 16, and can be preordered using the links just below.
Not only are there a bunch of Zelda amiibo back available in the UK and Ireland, but there are a ton of incredibly rare figures now back down to just £12.99. This includes some fan favourites from Twilight Princess, Skyward Sword, Majora’s Mask and more. As some of these have been out of print for years, they were typically going for £20-£50 or more on re-sell sites like eBay.
When new games like Star Wars Jedi Survivor are starting to take up around 150GB of your SSD, it might be wise to consider an expansion. If you haven’t gotten around to expanding your PS5 storage just yet, then you’re in luck, as this is an excellent price on the highly recommended Corsair MP600 PRO LPX. Down to just £74.99, this is IGN’s top rated PS5 SSD, and you’re getting it at an absolutely exceptional price!
It’s a roll of the dice. These are my absolute favourite deals that are available right now, but don’t necessarily fit anywhere else, making them a little bit more random compared to everything else in Daily Deals.
UK online retailer ShopTo has currently got a brilliant selection of PlayStation Gift Cards at discounted prices; for example a £45 for £36.85, or the £84 card for £69.85. In fact, both of these cards have some of the highest saving percentages vs their list price. You’re getting an 18.11% saving on the £45 card, and a 16.85% saving on the £84 card.
Mortal Kombat 1 is the new MK game, and is set to release on September 19, 2023. Hit has its preorders live already, and you can preorder the new game for just £49.85, £10 off the RRP list price. Hit also doesn’t charge until release, so you can preorder now and pay nothing until September.
The latest freebie we’re looking to highlight is Metro Last Light – Complete Edition on PC. You’ll be able to claim a free copy of the game from May 18-25 on Steam. This is a fantastic offer (on a fantastic game), and well worth picking up, especially as it won’t cost you a penny. Death Stranding is also free on Epic at the moment, and you’ve got until May 25 as well to claim it.
With Keeper, you can store all of your passwords, credit card info, and other sensitive data in one secure, encrypted digital vault. Plus, they use top-notch encryption technology to keep your stuff safe and have added bonus features like password generation, password sharing, and two-factor authentication.
Robert Anderson is a deals expert and Commerce Editor for IGN. You can follow him @robertliam21 on Twitter.
Developer Strange Scaffold have announced another genre-blending adventure, Teenage Demon Slayer Society, this time mixing turn-based strategy combat with some character action flare. The game follows teen figurines, who are already struggling with the hellish world of high school crushes when an army of demons invades their world. Demonic invasions and teenage angst are – as we all know – a match made in heaven. Or hell. Either way it looks cool.
LEGO 2K Drive may sound like it was named at 5:40 on a Friday afternoon – seriously, if blending the publisher’s name and a five-letter verb describing what you’ll be doing most is all it takes these days, I look forward to the next Call of Duty being christened Activision Shoot – but hey, don’t hold that against it. Highly charming and imaginative, 2K Drive fuses confident kart racing with a virtually unlimited custom garage, making it a place where you can spend just as much time fastidiously building vehicles as you do frantically racing them.
LEGO 2K Drive cribs from a lot of existing racers, which makes it fairly easy to explain. Forza Horizon 4’s dearly-loved LEGO expansion rates as an automatic mention as a fellow open-world, LEGO-themed racer (and they certainly both share the idea of having races and challenges spread out across the map to organically discover as we explore). However, despite that obvious LEGO link, 2K Drive is arguably more in-line with Ubisoft’s The Crew 2 and its hot-swapping system. Vehicles in 2K Drive transform between street rides, offroad racers, and boats as the terrain changes, complete with a satisfying brick-clicking sound effect.
The ability to have multiple different trios of vehicles saved in your loadouts is very handy, though I would say the system is a little overzealous when set to shift automatically. The effect of your ride rapidly blinking from street to offroad and back again, after spending just a split-second on the shoulder, is a bit manic – but you can turn automatic switching off if you’d rather swap manually. If you’re unfamiliar with The Crew 2, Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed’s similarly mighty take on morphing motors may give you some idea of what to expect – their brands of multi-terrain, vehicle-swapping racing around regularly crazy courses while blasting opponents with weapons are very alike.
2K Drive definitely deviates from the Horizon brand of LEGO racing in terms of scale, too; it’s far more akin to Hot Wheels Unleashed in this regard. That is, there’s an effective feeling that bucketfuls of LEGO have been assembled within life-sized environments, with huge, non-LEGO items like tools, tyres, and tree roots scattered amongst colourful plastic dioramas in each of its four separate open worlds. Unfortunately, 2K Drive doesn’t nail this toy-sized idea quite as consistently as Hot Wheels Unleashed does. The lighting isn’t as convincing, and the illusion is occasionally disrupted by items that feel out-of-place at the scale it’s trying to suggest – like, say, miniature real leaf litter that should’ve been life-sized. Also, unlike Hot Wheels Unleashed, 2K Drive doesn’t measure distances in centimetres or inches, which is a slight shame because it’s those last pieces of attention to detail that would make a pint-sized toy racer like this really sing, if you catch my drift.
On that note, drifting is executed in a slightly peculiar way in 2K Drive, and by default it requires us to hold both the brake and throttle at the same time throughout an entire drift. It’s actually very easy to grasp, but it does feel a little odd to have the brake squeezed fully down for considerable parts of a race. It’s possible to switch to a more typical tap-to-drift mechanic but that’s a little less predictable and I have found my drifts ending prematurely, leaving me to battle understeer or jam down the brake mid-corner to get another drift going.
That said, the sensation of long, high-speed powerslides is well translated by 2K Drive’s handling model. It’s simple to pick up and play but arguably more complex than it first seems – especially once you start to exploit the mild air controls possible via the rocket jump and nitro boost, or feel the subtle effects of weight as your vehicles lose bricks from collisions and combat (in a clever touch, crashing through trackside objects will replenish the LEGO in your own damaged ride). Also, the dedicated handbrake button – or quick turn, as 2K Drive dubs it – is a crucial and welcome addition. It’s very useful for tight switchbacks and an absolute necessity to effectively complete some of the missions – particularly the destruction-based ones that require swift changes of direction.
The rubber-banding might be a fraction too flagrant at times, but it does at least keep the racing chaotic and close, and it rarely feels unfair. The track design is also generally strong, with plenty of technical segments, environmental hazards, and rewarding shortcuts. 2K Drive performs smoothly on Xbox Series X, but I have had a friend lose hours of save game progress on PS5 without warning, which appears to be a known issue.
2K Drive is probably guilty of leaning a little too heavily on some of its non-racing mission types, some of which are riffed upon several times throughout the career mode. The collection missions are the most egregious and they’re essentially just padding to stretch out proceedings. The story itself lasted me around 10 hours sticking at it, but I have been left with a lot of uncompleted side objectives. It does a slightly poor job of spelling out why certain later missions are unavailable until you unlock the next batch of races, especially since younger players may just stumble across them and think they’re broken, but the story is very cute. I absolutely found myself smiling along with the cutscenes, which emulate the same photoreal stop-motion style nailed by The LEGO Movie. My kids loved the villain, who is frankly far funnier than the token bad guy in a licensed racing game probably had any right to be.
Now, the last LEGO racing game I played – beyond Forza Horizon’s take on it – was LEGO Racers back in 1999, which is fondly remembered by gamers of a particular vintage for its rudimentary custom car building. 2K Drive pays homage to that game with a customisation tool of its own that would’ve seemed like witchcraft in the late ’90s. Seriously, if you can dream it – and it fits in the allocated space – you can build it. It’s honestly quite remarkable. In fact, my stats tell me I’ve spent more time building than I have driving. The amount of options and controls was a little intimidating at first but after a few hours I felt quite comfortable relaxing and piecing together my first project – which became a chunky caricature of Mad Max’s iconic Interceptor.
Snapping pieces together is occasionally finicky, but generally it’s very cooperative. Pieces can be painted any colour you want, whether they’re officially available in the real world that way or not. You can group pieces, duplicate them, mirror them, and make fine angle adjustments. You can even delete and add pieces without pulling entire segments apart, like you’d have to do in real life. A range of pieces are held in reserve as rewards or available to purchase for credits from the in-game store – meaning you may not be able to perfect your build immediately upon booting up – but the customisation system in 2K Drive is nothing short of excellent.
It’s not mandatory to spend a bunch of time here, though – if you don’t want to start from scratch, you can edit the existing models for a head start on builds. Don’t feel you have to put together large projects like mine, either. If you want to keep it simple, you can grab a palm-sized chassis and simply whack together a quick little kart with a handful of bricks. You’ll be back in 1999 in no time.
Moreover, if a meathead like me is able to put something like this together after just several years of riding shotgun on my kids’ LEGO building, imagine what true LEGO experts are going to be able to assemble. Finding that out is where 2K Drive stumbles, though, as the ability to share creations is not available presently. It’s been clarified that custom vehicle sharing is a feature that will be included in a post-launch update, but what form that takes is a mystery. Will it be limited to friends? Or will there be an in-game browser to see the best models from anybody? I hope it’s the latter.
The Wonderful 101: Remastered has received a free DLC update, shadow-dropped by PlatinumGames today. Available now, The Wonderful One: After School Hero Part 1 is an additional game mode that was promised as a stretch goal for the game’s 2020 Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign, originally announced under the working title ‘Luka’s First Mission’. You can see some gameplay in the trailer below.
Part 1 will be followed by The Wonderful One: After School Hero Part 2 next week, on May 26. Part 2 was originally promised as the Kickstarter stretch goal ‘Luka’s Second Mission’. A trailer for Part 2 will be released the same day.
The DLC focuses on protagonist Luka Alan Smithee from the original game. As he sets his sights on becoming a member of The Wonderful 100, first-grader Luka appends his elementary school education with after-school training missions, showing a side of the character players haven’t seen before.
Unlike the 3D action of the main game, the new DLC mode is a side-scrolling action game with stick-shooter elements. Players proceed through screens filled with enemies and collectibles, making use of Luka’s weapon the Stingy Eye, which are goggles on his forehead that shoot lasers. Players can fire in 360 degrees, controlled with the right stick, and a set of three of different lasers with distinct abilities give players the freedom to conquer each screen in their own way.
While the base difficulty level in Arcade Mode will pose a moderate challenge, the DLC comes with a Challenge Mode to make progress considerably more difficult, plus a five-minute survival attack mode called Caravan Mode where players aim for the highest possible score before time runs out. Access to Caravan Mode requires first beating all of the Arcade Mode stages in Part 1 and Part 2 of the DLC.
The Wonderful 101: Remastered was released back in mid-2020, and IGN’s review called it every bit as good as the 2013 Wii U original. It is available on Switch, PlayStation 4, and PC.
Ryuichi Kataoka is a freelance writer for IGN Japan.
Rollback netcode has also been confirmed.
Mortal Kombat 1 got announced by Warner Bros. and NetherRealm Studios yesterday, and the good news is it’s launching for Nintendo Switch on 19th September 2023.
The brutal and bloody trailer helped set the scene for this new era in the iconic fighting series, but there’s also an FAQ on the official game website revealing one other interesting detail – Kameo Fighters.
Read the full article on nintendolife.com
Releasing on 26th May.
Nintendo has announced a new batch of games for the Switch Online service. The latest additions are part of the expansion tier – adding three Super Mario Game Boy Advance titles to the service.
The games included are Super Mario Advance (2001), Super Mario World: Super Mario Advance 2 (2001) and Yoshi’s Island: Super Mario Advance 3 (2002). They’ll be arriving next week on 26th May and include some additional ‘Advance’ features.
Read the full article on nintendolife.com
