Author: Game Infliction

If your first real exposure to Ken Block was his collaboration with Codemasters for Colin McRae Dirt 2, released on PC and seventh-generation consoles way back in 2009, you may not have known what to make of him at the time. Pitched as the new face of the franchise in the early promotional materials, Block cut a drastically different figure on screen to the late Colin McRae. McRae had a famous reputation as a madman behind the wheel, but outside of a rally car the Scot always appeared calm, natural, and low-key. Perched behind a set of sunglasses indoors and flanked by Monster Energy models, Block certainly seemed like a contrasting character; a hot dog hand grenade set to blow up Codemasters’ conventions. Scotland’s South Lanarkshire was making way for the Spring Break swagger of Long Beach, California, and Block was clearly being positioned as a core part of Dirt 2’s pivot to a considerably more US-centric, X Games-inspired take on rally racing.

Of course, the sideways shift from a strict focus on traditional rallying was a natural move at the time. Rallying was building steam in the US, and even Colin McRae himself had then-recently been established as a genuine X Games star following his famous duel with extreme sports berserker Travis Pastrana in 2006. McRae and Pastrana had dominated the debut of Rally Car Racing at X Games 12, and McRae looked set to pinch the gold in the final event. That is, until spectacularly rolling his Impreza on the final jump in front of a packed stadium, landing upright in a cloud of dirt, and furiously flooring it over the finish line and securing the second-place silver medal. That Codemasters took notice of his exploits here is a given.

Still, while there’s no doubt McRae’s tragic passing in 2007 left a hole in rallying, as well as in the video games that celebrate it, you’d have probably been forgiven for wondering whether Ken Block was the right man to fill it.

However, there was much more to Ken Block than any of that early manufactured marketing bluster might have ever suggested.

Tragically, Block passed away at just 55 in a snowmobile accident earlier this month. The news sent shockwaves through the worlds of rally, rallycross, extreme sports, and even the video game industry. If you’re unfamiliar with him, his story is a fascinating one.

Ken Block’s motorsport career didn’t actually begin until 2005, during the inaugural season of the Rally America National Championship. Prior to this, throughout the ’90s, Block had been a successful entrepreneur behind the scenes in board sports – from the establishment of Blunt Snowboard Magazine to the co-founding of DC Shoes alongside Damon Way (the brother of pro skater Danny Way). During the rapid growth of DC Shoes Block had busied himself boosting up extreme sports superstars from the worlds of skating, snowboarding, surfing, BMX, and motocross. Many of these athletes remain household names thanks to such promotion. However, after Quiksilver acquired DC Shoes in 2004, Block pulled off a deeply impressive twist: he became a global sports superstar himself.

Block’s childhood dream had been to become a professional skateboarder or snowboarder, but he also loved rallying. At 37 – an age where most racing drivers are over two decades into their careers and rapidly approaching retirement – Block was named Rally America’s Rookie of the Year. He would go on to be a 16-time event winner in the series, behind only regular collaborator Travis Pastrana (19), and David Higgins (26), who replaced Pastrana at Subaru Rally Team USA in 2011.

Block would later make history as the first American to compete and earn points in the World Rally Championship, and the WRC recently announced it would be retiring the number 43 – the digits displayed on his cars throughout his career – as a mark of respect. He also had two-dozen starts in the World Rallycross Championship, picking up a pair of third-place podium finishes. On the world stage Block admittedly wasn’t the fastest in the field, but his exploits in rally would ultimately be just one part of what would make him an international auto icon.

Block’s Gymkhana videos are the defining viral automotive video content, with over a billion views and counting across all 10 short films in the series. Block and his team turned having fun in cars into an artfully mixed package of precision driving, insane jumps, and wild drifting – shot in a dynamic way that no one else seemed capable of matching. He’d basically made a skate video with cars, where the focus was exclusively on expression rather than competition. Few people were going to tune in to see Ken Block win Missouri’s Rally in the 100 Acre Wood, but tens of millions would be instantly hooked on watching him do donuts around a man on a Segway scooter.

The first, DC Shoes: Ken Block Gymkhana Practice, arrived in September 2008 and featured Ken Block shredding a decommissioned airbase in a rally-bred Subaru Impreza WRX STi. While modest by his later standards, the original Gymkhana video exploded on the internet. Gymkhana 2 arrived less than a year later, quickly followed by Block’s first appearance on Top Gear, where then-host James May referred to him as a “gamestation character who has emerged into the real world.” The comment was probably more prescient than May realised at the time.

More followed, filmed in various locations including Universal Studios, France, Dubai, and the streets of San Francisco (which has been watched over 115 million times). Sydney, Australia famously missed out on having its very own Gymkhana video in time for the arrival of Forza Horizon 3; Block and his crew were forced to abandon filming down under following the involvement of NSW Police and the opportunity was missed. Now it’s lost forever.

Block expanded on the Gymkhana concept with Climbkhana – a spin-off that saw him tackle Pikes Peak and resulted in one of the most iconic motorsports images captured this century. The sight of Block’s twin-turbo, 1,400-horsepower, methanol-powered Mustang – the Hoonicorn – perilously close to the edge of the mountain, spraying gravel into an unpictured abyss, is unforgettable. He riffed on it again in October last year with Electrikhana, fully embracing the future of fast driving and shredding the Vegas strip in an all-electric, all-wheel-drive Audi S1 nicknamed the Hoonitron.

Codemasters integrated Block’s Gymkhana into 2011’s Dirt 3, but while Block would later part ways with Codemasters after its follow-up Dirt Showdown, his influence and imprint on video games would continue. Block would go on to appear in Ghost Games’ 2015 Need for Speed reboot as himself, featuring on the cover and briefly within cutscenes. Despite the overt dorkiness of Need for Speed 2015’s first-person fist-bumping attitude, Block was an otherwise perfect fit amongst its cast of auto icons – which included Lamborghini tuner Shinichi Morohoshi and Porsche builder Magnus Walker. For all its faults, Need for Speed 2015 was deeply reverential to car culture and throughout the last decade Ken Block has helped define car culture more than most.

Block’s famous fleet of highly recognisable cars – including the Hoonicorn, the Hoonitruck, and many more – would later go on to make many appearances in the Forza Motorsport and Forza Horizon series. If you’ve spent any meaningful time with Forza Motorsport 7, or Forza Horizon 3, 4, and 5, there’s a very strong chance you’ve been behind the wheels of his rides, which are amongst the fastest in the games. In fact, Block and Gymkhana creative director Brian Scotto even put together a special video project with their Hoonigan Industries crew back in 2020 in response to the popularity of the Hoonicorn in Forza, where Block drag raced an eclectic variety of high performance vehicles on a real-life airstrip in a series appropriately dubbed “Hoonicorn vs. the World.” A second series arrived in 2021 – produced in partnership with mobile racing game CSR2 – and continued the concept, only with one twist: Ken Block had stepped out of the driver’s seat for his daughter Lia, who followed her father into motorsport and was just 14 at the time of filming.

This was the Ken Block I most admired and, from the tributes that flowed in from his friends, peers, and other extreme sports stars following his death, this was the real Ken Block. While I greatly respected his creativity and car control in the driver’s seat, Block as a slightly nervous dad who seemed happier being caught hovering just off camera than on it was more relatable. His enthusiasm for seeing Lia succeed against experienced race drivers was simply infectious.

While his most important legacy will be his family, Ken Block also leaves behind a permanent thumbprint on automotive culture, from his impact on rallying in the US to his success in bringing his unmistakable brand of action driving to mainstream social media. His string of savvy video game collaborations, all of which have helped make his vehicles some of the most recognisable race cars of the modern era, will also remain as time capsules for his fans to experience them as Block intended. He will be greatly missed.

Vale Ken Block. #43 forever.

Luke is Games Editor at IGN’s Sydney office. You can chat to him on Twitter @MrLukeReilly.

Dead Space remake’s technical director has admitted that he struggles to play the game outside of daylight hours because he finds it too scary.

As reported by GamesRadar, technical director David Robillard told PLAY magazine in a recent interview that when he plays Dead Space remake at night, he can’t use headphones because the game is extremely immersive and becomes too terrifying of an experience.

“When I’m playing it at night, I can’t play it with headphones,” he confessed. “It’s just too f***ing scary. Just the amount of realism and, again, atmosphere. Not just visually, right? In the way we handle sound, ambience, effects, having systems that will try to spook you.”

Dead Space has been rebuilt from the ground up in EA’s Frostbite engine, with Assassin’s Creed Valhalla game director Eric Baptizat at the helm alongside creative director Roman Campos-Oriola, who promised to deliver “new assets, new character models, [and] new environments.”

The game’s developers consulted diehard fans to help keep them on track with their goal of staying faithful to the vision of the original game while also crafting new gameplay content and improvements, though Robillard admits they have elevated things to a whole new level.

“These things, you know, could have been done [on PS4], but not to the level we’re doing them today,” he explained in the interview. “And they really add a lot to this sort of genre and make the whole kind of experience come together even more.

“We needed to find a way to fill those gaps, so that the player doesn’t feel like ‘Oh, I’ve been here, it’s fine, I’m safe’. No, you’re never safe. Like, you will get jumped,” Robillard added before issuing one final warning: “Somebody wants your lunch money, and they’re not friendly.”

Dead Space remake will be released on PS5, Xbox Series X|S and PC on January 27, and is available to preorder in several editions. Like its predecessor, it finds engineer Isaac Clarke among the last survivors of a deep space catastrophe on the mining ship USG Ishimura.

We recently wrapped up a month of Dead Space IGN First content including revealing the first 18 minutes of gameplay, showing off graphics comparisons with the original, and a deep dive into how the story has been rewritten and improved alongside a hands-on preview.

Adele Ankers-Range is a freelance entertainment writer for IGN. Follow her on Twitter.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: a down-on-their-luck orphan has their life turned upside-down when they get whisked away to a fantastical new world where they suddenly have magical powers, reluctantly rising to become the hero its people need to stop an evil threat. If that sounds like every fantasy book you’ve ever forgotten you read, it’s probably because Forspoken is a remarkably generic RPG – from its bland story to its lifeless open world. Thankfully its energetic combat and flashy parkour movement system do keep the relatively slim campaign decently entertaining throughout, but running through its boilerplate checklist of repetitive side tasks doesn’t hold much appeal beyond mindless trophy hunting after that.

The newest action-RPG from Square Enix puts you in the brooding shoes of Frey Holland, a well-acted but largely unlikable New Yorker who gets pulled through a portal to the fantasy realm of Athia after accidentally becoming bonded to an equally unlikable talking armband she calls Cuff. The four realms of Athia have been afflicted with a corruption that has forced its populace into the last remaining city of Cipal, and it falls on Frey and her newly imbued powers to help its citizens and face four powerful rulers called Tantas – not that she’s very interested in doing so.

Forspoken’s world and story are about as bland as they come, equal parts predictable and forgettable. That’s not so offensive on its own, but the real crime is how poorly the writing establishes any of its characters and the relationships between them – it’s like it constantly assumed I must already be invested in these people in a way it never actually made me. The most egregious example of this is the chemistry between Frey and Cuff, which frames most of the campaign as a sort of buddy cop movie but spends almost no time showing these two unlikely partners grow closer after their introduction.

Actual bonding apparently happens off-screen, and this story – which is mostly told through exposition dumps between large stretches of open-world exploration – felt fairly rushed across the 15 hours it took me to beat the campaign as a result. That means the snippy banter between Cuff and Frey come off as obnoxious rather than endearing. Frey is surprisingly vocal about her disdain for most of the tasks Forspoken asks you to complete, and Cuff constantly belittles her for no good reason in a manner that I think is supposed to come off as friendly ribbing but instead feels like awkwardly watching a couple argue at a dinner party. This dynamic never really changes, even as Frey slowly goes through the motions of her predictable hero’s journey, and it is always exhausting.

Forspoken is essentially split into two parts: talking to townsfolk and doing mundane side quests like feeding sheep or chasing cats in Cipal, and making your way to some specific point of interest on its absurdly large map to further the story. I don’t think the Cipal sections would have bothered me if conversations and cutscenes didn’t have such a stilted, strangely low-budget feel to them. The performances throughout can actually be quite good, even when the writing leans heavily into telling rather than showing – but none of it is ever very fun to listen to thanks to long, awkward pauses between lines and occasional crowd noise or background music that’s so loud it drowns out everything being said.

Between visits to Cipal, you’re generally given a target on your map and free rein to get as distracted as you’d like along the way. That involves sprinting across Athia’s rocky terrain using Frey’s magic parkour skills, flipping over obstacles and eventually using a grappling whip to swing long distances, and then beating the snot out of enemies at various points of interest for new equipment and other rewards. This is what you’ll be doing for the vast majority of your time with Forspoken, and it can be a lot of fun even if those systems never get too deep.

Frey gains four styles of elemental magic over the course of the campaign, each essentially a different weapon you can quickly swap between with its own set of alternate fire modes and unlockable support skills – all of which can then be modestly upgraded as you play. Her starting magic is basically an earth-based gun that can be fired rapidly or charged for an area-of-effect burst, with skills that root enemies to the ground, up your defense temporarily, and more. You don’t even have a melee attack until you unlock the fire-based sword option about a third of the way through the campaign, which was a little annoyingly restrictive at first.

But once you do open up more of Frey’s capabilities, Forspoken’s particle effect-filled combat becomes quite amusing. Enemy variety isn’t exactly impressive (special larger baddies in particular can be really cool the first time you fight them, but less so by the third), but elemental resistances and unique quirks pushed me to swap weapons and strategies frequently mid-fight in a way I really enjoyed. For example, I loved that shielded enemies could be dealt with either by getting behind them or by charging an AOE shot and then firing it at the ground nearby to knock them off their guard. One-on-one fights can devolve into locking onto your target and holding down the trigger while you strafe out of harm’s way with Forspoken’s extremely generous dodge system, but the group encounters often did a good job of keeping me on my toes.

Similarly, the parkour system is a mix of straightforward and flashy, sending you nimbly soaring across the environment by simply holding down the Circle button and pointing yourself in a given direction. Just like your attacks, this becomes a lot more fun once you unlock some cooler skills, like options that boost your speed with well-timed button presses. That said, it is also far more mindless than combat, requiring very little nuance even as additional techniques become available to you and rarely ever testing your mastery of those moves with difficult platforming challenges. Even still, it can be quite a satisfying way to fancifully flow from task to task without much thought.

That’s a good thing, too, because there is a considerable amount of ground to cover in Athia, and very little of it is worth stopping to admire. This world is huge, and the campaign doesn’t even send you near half of it. The map is littered with optional side objective markers, but there isn’t much reason to go too far off the beaten path to complete them when the same small handful of tasks are repeated ad nauseam no matter where they are placed. They almost all boil down to either fighting some random dudes to earn a reward or just being handed one outright, and the payoffs don’t feel particularly necessary unless you decide to up the difficulty to Hard. Plenty of open-world games follow a similar structure, but Forspoken does it with such a barebones transparency that Athia comes off less like a world for you to explore and more like a repetitive checklist asking to be crossed off.

It doesn’t help that Athia lacks much in the way of interesting visual landmarks, with different areas gated off by blatantly artificial mountain ranges and filled with piles of samey rocks and ruins to hop over. Each of the four regions offer a little twist to their layout, be that wide open fields or extra hills, but they’d still all blend together if it weren’t for the distinct color filter slapped onto each one. After the credits rolled I ran around this map for another dozen or so hours, hoping to find some exciting secrets in the hard-to-reach corners I hadn’t visited – but with the exception of an isolated trader selling a few neat items (literally the only NPC I met outside of Cipal), all I saw was the same side tasks on the same bland landscapes, over and over and over again. I’m sure there will be diehard completionists out there excited for a chance to put on a podcast and spend dozens of hours clearing every single map marker and opening every single chest (the kind of game I actually wrote about back in 2019), but I was given very little motivation to do so here.

The upside of that lack of urgency is that Forspoken’s progression systems mercifully don’t devolve into a grind on its Normal difficulty either, never forcing you to do anything you don’t want to. There are only three types of equipable items: cloaks, necklaces, and the charmingly creative nail polish designs. The first two are basically identical, increasing your health, defense, and magic while also offering special perks like increasing critical hit chance, while nails provide more unique boons like upping a specific type of magic. A light crafting system lets you upgrade your cloaks and necklaces by using resources you collect out in the field, increasing their stats and letting you swap in the perks of any gear you’ve found so far. That lends a lot of welcome flexibility to how you choose to play (and your fashion choices), but it’s also not the most exciting system since the majority of improvements are simple numerical boosts that are hard to see the effect of in the heat of battle.