This is probably a sentence that could be said literally any day of the week, but a new cosy farming sim is on the block, this time taking the form of Starsand Island. The flavour on this occasion is of the anime variety, with some slightly goofier farming mechanics (i.e. turning your watermelon patch into one singular, 10 foot tall watermelon), some very Pokemon Legends: Arceus looking combat, and some appropriately cute animals to hang out with. And there’s skateboarding! But never do launches go all that smoothly, as developer Seed Sparkle Lab have had to do a dash of damage control regarding some concerns over the game.
Firm cites Switch 2 release of Shadows as a contributing factor.
Ubisoft has released its financial report for Q3 2026, and despite expectations, it’s actually not all doom and gloom.
In fact, the firm states that the Assassin’s Creed franchise has “overperformed” this quarter, noting that year-on-year growth in active users is in “double-digits”. The release of Assassin’s Creed Shadows on the Switch 2 has been cited as a contributing factor, which Ubisoft says enabled the title to “broaden its audience”. It also mentions the Valley of Memory update for Assassin’s Creed Mirage, which launched in November 2025.
How High On Life 2’s Skateboarding Kickflips the Shooter Genre on Its Head
Summary
Chief Design Officer Erich Meyr shares with us how the High On Life 2 team brought skateboarding to their hilarious first-person shooter.
The team cites their experience working on games like Sunset Overdrive and playing Tony Hawk games to help capture the feeling of riding on a board.
High On Life 2 launches February 13, 2026, for Xbox Series X|S, Xbox on PC, and available on day one with Game Pass Ultimate with support for Xbox Play Anywhere.
When I first got my hands on High On Life 2last year, I was blown away by how well it captured the essence of skateboarding. Yes, it’s a video game, so there are some liberties taken with it, but it felt right in a way that feels familiar to skating game fans – even in a totally different perspective and genre. With large, skateable objects meticulously placed, paired with some great first-person shooting thanks to the hilarious Gatlians, it’s a mechanical change that gives High On Life 2 a truly one-of-a-kind feature, something we’ve genuinely never seen a developer try before.
This also makes High On Life 2 feel like a much faster game than its predecessor. By essentially swapping it out for your sprint button, and increasing your overall agility, the skateboard feels like an extra limb you never knew you needed – one that allows you to grind on rails, jump over objects, or even as a projectile against enemies.
Now, with release nearly here, I was able to connect with Chief Design Officer Erich Meyr to talk more about how the idea behind having skateboarding as a traversal (and combat) mechanic within a first-person shooter came about – and it turns out it was something the team had been noodling on since before the first game arrived.
“The earliest inspiration for the skateboard came back on High On Life when Concept Artist Sean McNally drew the bounty hunter riding a roly-poly type of alien,” Meyr tells me. “Unfortunately, a level-specific mechanic like that wasn’t in our timeframe on the first game, but good ideas tend to haunt us forever. When we were brainstorming for High On Life 2, the idea scuttled its way from our collective unconscious, and we thought it would be even better as a normal skateboard that helps ground your character as an Earthling.”
Parkour!
Skateboarding has embedded itself into the world of gaming over the years – there have been countless Tony Hawk games; Skate has returned in force; indie games like Session or Skate Bird bring their own flare to the skate video game genre. Now High On Life 2 is building this out as a first-person experience and is taking cues from games from both the past and the present to help it really feel distinct. But one of the big inspirations isn’t technically a skateboarding game at all:
“Three of us on the dev team were lucky enough to work on Sunset Overdrive at Insomniac Games, and while doing first-person skating is a bit different then Sunset’s grind-heavy parkour, I really wanted to capture a similar environmentally driven flow,” Meyr explains. “While working on Sunset Overdrive I was addicted to traversing across Sunset City; I’d often travel all the way across the city to play my work, instead of using developer shortcuts, just to explore and enjoy the traversal team’s amazing job. When we started seriously considering having a skateboard in High On Life, I knew deep in my cobwebbed soul we should strive for that feeling, even if it inflated the skateboard into something much larger.”
As far as digging into the classics, the team went back and analyzed a lot of Tony Hawk games to figure out what would work (and not work) for first-person skateboarding. For example, Tony Hawk’s controls don’t work as an FPS, but served as a baseline inspiration for what skating should feel like: “It really got me thinking about layering in vert ramps, half pipes, and grinds. I played a ton of Session as well, though as much as I love it for being insanely technical, we were going for a much more simplified control scheme and couldn’t fit in something like their awesome trick system.”
Finding Inspiration from Indies
During the research and conceptualizing phase of High On Life 2, Meyr was surprised to find that there were practically no first-person skating games available, beyond some mods for Skate. Then he stumbled upon an indie game called Griptape Backbone. “It’s very chill and dreamy and got us thinking about how to cheat the board placement so it’s more visible in first person and helps ground you.”
“When we were near the last year of development, [open world FPS] Echo Point Nova came out – I had a blast playing it and loved how they simply replaced sprinting with a hoverboard. We applied that same philosophy to our game (choosing what button to put the skateboard on was giving us no end of grief) and it really made combat on and off the board feel seamless. So, we pulled inspiration from a lot of different games along the whole process. The inspirations were all great references, but it really came down to some very clever engineering, solving a lot of wild design problems, tuning the controls, and a lot of playtesting.”
Once it was settled that skateboarding was going to be a key feature for the next game, the team began to tackle High On Life2’s more unique challenge – mixing both skating and shooting and making them feel fun to play. One of the largest debates that Meyr tells me about on the team was whether your aim should be independent of your movement direction while on the skateboard.
“For a long time, you could look in any direction while skating, which felt very natural and let you do some crazy moves like circling around enemies while shooting and skating backwards while still fighting,” Meyr says. “However, in playtesting, it meant we kept having to make larger and sparser arenas so you wouldn’t be running into stuff constantly because you’re not looking where you’re going!”
In the end, the team decided to lock the player’s movement to their viewpoint while skateboarding but allow free look while grinding objects – effectively, skating is all about getting to the right place, and grinding is about unleashing hell once you’re there. This simple change made navigating spaces and the overall usability of the skateboard in combat feel much better. Having navigated through a few levels in my time with High On Life 2, I get the trade-off here, as I no doubt would have bumbled into numerous walls and objects if I wasn’t looking in the right direction.
In part, that’s because of how fast the skateboard lets you travel – this is far more than a fancy sprint button, letting you cross huge swathes of a level in a way most FPS games don’t. It adds a major new dimension to combat but, given that the game has a compelling and hilarious story to tell, with tons of performances to capture, it’s also entirely possible for you to accidentally skip past a character or line of dialog if you’re not facing the right way. I asked Meyr how the team tackled this challenge, even in the moments where there wasn’t a narrative beat to adhere to.
“Well, firstly it made storytelling harder as players can now fly past everything as fast as they want! We had to get clever about how we funnel you into important moments to give players time to notice them,” Meyr tells me. “But aside from that, it was also a fun challenge to figure out what kinds of city objects make natural skate elements. One of my favorite moments was when someone put a big octopus mascot in the middle of the city, and we were like, ‘Hey, this is great, but it needs to work with the skateboard because every single player is going to grind on that shit.’ And then we exposed its brain as a bouncer to launch you crazy high. There’s no real story there I guess… we just love making stupid things fun.”
Ride, Shoot, Have Fun, Repeat
Matching that fun with a well-paced game is another element the team tackled when deciding how much influence skateboarding should have on the overall design and pacing of High On Life 2.
“In the first game we typically paced gameplay to cycle between traversal, combat, and narrative beats. The skateboard fit pretty easily into the traversal piece of that formula,” Meyr explains. “Skating has a large influence on the combat aspect of the game, but we didn’t let it take over. In the end, we wanted the game to still have a lot of what makes a traditional shooter feel fun. We didn’t want the skateboard to muddy the FPS experience by having to blow out aim assist or let you move so fast enemies have to do crazy things to keep up with you.”
The game wastes little time in getting me on the board and it isn’t long until I’m unleashing this tandem of skateboarding and shooting in High On Life 2, like sliding across powerlines as I dispatch a variety of alien goons in the opening zoo level. The skateboard never feels like it gets in the way of the shooting; it amplifies it, nudging me to mix it into my newfound ability to reach alien foes on rooftops who would otherwise be inaccessible without it.
The first game already featured a lot of verticality and unique traversal elements thanks to the Gatlians like Knifey and their grapple ability – but the skateboard only intensifies that ambition. Grinding, riding in sewer pipes, and wall riding all create opportunities for unexpectedly complex riding options in the environment. Every level features unique opportunities to test your skills, like navigating across a mix of floating rails and pools, giant balloons to bounce on, and other zany obstacles while traversing the planet ConCon as one such example.
Board riding can also be vital, as highlighted in some of the boss fights so far. With the bounty hunter Sheath, it took place in a large room with slanted, quarter-pipes that run up the walls, making for plenty of opportunities to remain on the move while dishing damage. Or fighting against Brutakis, the mini-boss of MurderCon, the entire zone felt like a skatepark with plenty of ramps, rails, and stairs to navigate. This all feels designed with purposeful intent to keep you moving to help bring a natural fun and flow to the battle.
Letting Go of Your Hands
It’s always a balance to teach a new mechanic to a player while making it not feel like you’re holding up the momentum of the game. Initially, the team did a lot of “hand holding tutorial” tests for the skateboard and found it made for a terrible experience. In the end, they pared the tutorials back until they were just hitting the essentials and letting the player grasp and play with the mechanics on their own time.
“There are elements to the skateboard we don’t teach up front and let you discover on your own, then reinforce in later levels,” Meyr says. “By that point you may have already figured them out and won’t even notice the tutorial, or you will learn them there and think, ‘Holy crap I could have been doing this the whole time, I need to go back and try this in the city!’”
Meyr tells me that, during playtesting, he was relieved to see the concept embraced by the internal team. “I was worried if we leaned fully into skating, it meant we’d need to sacrifice some of the core FPS, but it turned out when the skateboard was treated as an extension of sprinting it really helped naturally juggle between the two. I was also delighted at how much people wanted to do with the skateboard in combat. We came up with bailing on your board and having the board fly and hit enemies, and immediately playtesters wanted to bounce on enemies’ heads and bash into them. So, we made all that work! I’m curious if players will be able to beat the game just using the skateboard once you obtain it.”
Through constant iteration and driven by a passion for skateboarding, the team at Squanch Games have not only built upon the success of their first game but pushed themselves to bring something wholly unique to its sequel – while doing a kick-flip over a bunch of aliens. We can’t wait to get on our board on February 13, 2026, when High On Life 2 launches for Xbox Series X|S, Xbox on PC, and available on day one with Game Pass Ultimate with support for Xbox Play Anywhere.
Pre-order High On Life 2 now to get a “I PRE-ORDERED HIGH ON LIFE 2” hat for select weapons! It doesn’t do anything but if you don’t pre-order you’ll never be allowed to have it! (And the weapons in our game can feel real emotions so if you don’t get the hat they’ll remember it and resent you for it!)
Offer ends at launch.
You’ve done it. You’ve taken down an intergalactic cartel, brought humanity back from the brink of extinction, and hunted dangerous bounties to the far corners of the galaxy. Bounty hunting has brought you fortune, fame and love; but when a mysterious figure from your past reappears and puts a price on your sister’s head, your cushy life gets thrown into chaos.
Do you have what it takes to risk it all and bring down an intergalactic conspiracy that once again threatens your favorite species (humans)?
High On Life RETURNS as you and your beloved rag-tag team of alien misfits shoot, stab, and skate your way through gorgeous, dangerous worlds all across the galaxy to blow up the EVIL pharmaceutical conglomerate hell-bent on putting price tags on HUMAN LIFE!
Battlefield 6 and Redsec Season 2 begins on February 17 at 4:00am PT (12:00pm UTC), as the war with Pax Armata infiltrates the mountainsides of Germany in a grueling assault to reclaim a once owned NATO airbase.
Season 2 will be released in 3 phases: Extreme Measures, Nightfall, and Hunter/Prey, featuring high-intensity maps, critical gadgets, iconic new hardware, and vehicles for waging the ultimate all-out war experience.
The first phase for Season 2, Extreme Measures, takes the thrill of all-out war to another level, introducing VL-7 psychoactive smoke, distorting the battlefield with its non-lethal hallucinogenic effects, as well as new expansive map Contaminated, to be released in Battlefield 6, along with 3 new weapons, 2 new gadgets, and the return of the legendary AH-6 Little Bird in both games. The free-to-play Redsec experience will also include limited-time modes where intense, mind-bending combat will test your squad to their limit.
Later on in Season 2, Nightfall introduces darkness across Battlefield 6 and Redsec, the new Hagental Base map and a new POI. The final phase of Season 2 – Hunter/Prey – features the limited-time Operation Augur in Battlefield 6, plus a new vehicle, melee weapon, and more.
As a PlayStation Plus member, prepare for any danger that lies ahead in Season 2 with your free Toxic Tide Pack. Featuring a Pax Armata Soldier Skin, two Weapon Packages, a Vehicle Skin, and more items to help you navigate the relentless tides of war.
Following an unexpected delay in January, the first trailer for Battlefield 6 Season 2 is here, revealing a first look at its three-month roadmap, a limited-time nightfall event, and gameplay for two new maps.
EA and Battlefield Studios today offered a detailed breakdown and trailer for the second seasonal content update, along with a gameplay trailer for its troubled multiplayer FPS. Season 2 spans across three phases – Extreme Measures (phase one), Nightfall (phase two), and Hunter/Prey (phase three) – with the first set to launch next week on its previously announced release date of February 17, 2026.
The forest-covered mountains of the first new map, Contaminated, are the backdrop for most of the Battlefield 6 Season 2 trailer, providing a first look at new vehicles, such as the AH-6 Little Bird, and a new psychoactive smoke mechanic. First gameplay for the location, which supports all combat sizes, shows tanks and helicopters chasing infantry into at least partially destructible tunnels. Players can enjoy all it has to offer across standard multiplayer game mode as well as the new VL-7 Strike limited-time mode, which sees players battling (and hallucinating) through the smoke in its own dedicated playlist.
Extreme Measures kicks things off with Contaminated, the Little Bird, VL-7 smoke, new weapons, and more next week. Come March 17, phase two, Nightfall, will then finally add one of the community’s most-asked-for features… kind of.
Along with its new close-quarters infantry map, Hagental Base, Nightfall brings night gameplay to Battlefield 6. Players have wanted to turn out the lights since the sixth mainline installment launched for PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X/S last October. Unfortunately, it seems lights-out action will be restricted only to the limited-time Nightfall event, which itself is only available on Hagental Base. REDSEC players can also try out the night map via the limited-time Gauntlet mode, with the Nightfall phase also adding the Defense Testing Complex 3 point of interest to Fort Lyndon, as well as the dirt bike, CZ3A1 submachine gun, and VZ.61 sidearm across both experiences.
Finally, phase three, Hunter / Prey, launches April 14. It does not add a new map, and instead brings the Operation Augur limited-time mode, Portal updates, a new bonus path for the battle pass, the LTV vehicle, and the Ripper 14” machete.
BF Studios says update 1.2.1.0 will launch alongside Battlefield 6 Season 2 and adds “hundreds of gameplay improvements, fixes, and individual updates.” Included in the update are balance adjustments for weapons, such as what it calls “widespread recoil tuning across automatic weapons.” Patch notes are not available yet but are promised to arrive prior to the launch of Extreme Measures next week.
It’s unclear if the content revealed today will be enough to satisfy those displeased with the post-launch content so far. While we wait to see how the team plans to continue building on Battlefield 6, you can read about some of the ways BF Studios is adjusting its controversial cosmetics.
Michael Cripe is a freelance writer with IGN. He’s best known for his work at sites like The Pitch, The Escapist, and OnlySP. Be sure to give him a follow on Bluesky (@mikecripe.bsky.social) and Twitter (@MikeCripe).
The fine frigate which serves as the featured image for this article is called the Stately Gunwale. That’s not a name I, the boat’s creator, gave it. It’s a name ShipShaper’s demo automatically assigned my vessel when I picked the set of colours I wished it to be painted. Quite frankly, I doubt I could have dreamed up a more fitting moniker for my deliberate attempt to fling something funky onto the high seas.
Norwegian electronics retailer Komplett has promised it will give away free copies of GTA 6 to anyone giving birth on the game’s launch day, exactly nine months ahead of its arrival.
The cheeky store chain has even encouraged fans to, er, get busy with their efforts to ensure this happens. Images on social media and reddit show posters for the campaign have been spotted, while the retailer’s Instagram has confirmed that this offer really isn’t just a joke.
“GTA 6 dropping in 9 months ;)” declares advertising posters seen in the Norwegian capital of Oslo this week, designed to promote the country’s major electronics chain. The posters also feature an image of a messy bed, strewn pillows, and a scattering of rose petals. It’s not subtle.
You can get GTA 6 for free if you give birth to a baby on the game’s release date in Norway. pic.twitter.com/d4fANWhAnr
On Instagram, Komplett describes the idea of having a baby on GTA 6 launch day as a “life hack” — with the obvious implication being that you could time your parental leave perfectly for when Rockstar’s highly-anticipated blockbuster drops.
(Of note, Norwegian parental leave offers a total of 49 weeks at 100% salary, or a total 61 weeks at 80% salary, shared between two people.)
“This is actually not nonsense,” Komplett wrote in a caption for an accompanying Instagram video. “GTA 6 is released in 9 months (🤞) and if you have a baby on the launch date, we’ll give you the game for free.”
Of course, the campaign is primarily designed to make headlines and get Komplett some attention — and it’s certainly doing that, even if the responses on social media are full of people pointing out that having a baby is quite a time-consuming thing all on its own.
“Lol, you’re not getting time to play gta 6 if you have a screaming baby at home,” wrote Low_Possibility_8893 as part of a lengthy thread on reddit.
“That baby is gonna cost alooooot more than 70 dollars…” suggested sopedound, hinting that actually this didn’t represent much of a financial saving.
“Haven’t slept in 6 days, nipples are like bullets and I’ve been hit in the face with explosive diarrhea,” concluded the appropriately-named PloppyTheSpaceship, suggesting what life with a newborn was actually like. “I don’t even know what my name is right now let alone how to turn on a game, but I’m sure it’s good.”
WARNING: Major story spoliers for Yakuza Kiwami 3 & Dark Ties, as well as the original Yakuza 3, lie ahead.
It’s natural to spend a lot of time thinking about what games could have been, had different decisions been made. Whether the change is preferable to the reality often doesn’t come into it, the fantasy of another possible world is the draw.
Despite that, few studios choose to make major shifts – at least as far as the main stories of those games go – when they remake their previous games. This won’t necessarily be a philosophical decision: the remaster or remake has to sell. Games which get revisited are ones players deeply love, and the suits will inevitably see tweaks to their fundamentals as an unnecessary risk. Old Oblivion is loved, so Bethesda adopted a rubber glove approach to the Oblivion remaster. They limited changes to modernising visuals and snipping away some annoying features. It’s akin to polishing up a holy relic, rather than replacing the gemstones or changing the engravings.
Magic: The Gathering is kicking off its Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles set in a few weeks, and while we’ve seen plenty of deals on upcoming sets, Collector Boosters have been like gold dust… until now.
How much?! That’s right, the fee is high. The reason for this is that Collector Boosters are the best way of grabbing the most expensive cards in any given Magic: The Gathering set because they’re full of alternative art treatments and foil variants.
The rub in this instance is that we don’t know what the most valuable cards in the set are going to be because Wizards of the Coast hasn’t started card reveals outside of a handful just yet.
If you want to snag some great Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cards for your Magic: The Gathering collection, this is the way to go, but with the $37 per pack around the same price you’d pay anywhere, don’t expect any discounts.
Honestly, in the time it’s taken us to write this article, there’s a good chance a bunch more of these have been sold, and they’re not likely to be reprinted after the fact, either.
As a reminder, Collector Boosters don’t necessarily contain ‘better’ cards than Play Boosters, they just contain rarer versions. If you’re looking for cards to play with, you can grab a bundle at a discount right now.
Lloyd Coombes is an experienced freelancer in tech, gaming and fitness seen at Polygon, Eurogamer, Macworld, TechRadar and many more. He’s a big fan of Magic: The Gathering and other collectible card games, much to his wife’s dismay.
Nintendo’s relationship with the Monster Hunter series is an intriguing one – in one sense it’s at the heart of the IP with timed exclusives, but it’s also missed out on two blockbuster mainline entries in World and Wilds; perhaps Switch 2 will remedy that shortcoming. The spin-off Stories series, however, started out as a late-gen 3DS game and the series has kept on coming to Nintendo hardware ever since.
The first two games offer a good time for those new to the IP, or fans that want an adventure a little less intense and challenging. They were largely (though not exclusively) cutesy in style, and while that’s still partially true with Monster Hunter Stories 3: Twisted Reflection, this does feel like an entry that’s following its audience. If you were young when you played the original, this may now fit well into your older sensibilities. It’s still charming and easygoing at times, but the tone has shifted a little.
