After a significant delay and a rocky 2025, Bungie shared another look at Marathon at the February 2026 State of Play, reaffirming its March 5 release date with a weeklong server slam.
The former Halo developer took to today’s presentation to show off more of its sci-fi extraction shooter. Those excited to see how it lives up to the studio’s legacy can hop in early as part of an upcoming server slam, which is scheduled to take place from February 26 through March 2.
In a separate video, Bungie outlined exactly what the Marathon server slam grants access to and how participants will be rewarded. In addition to pre-launch access to two playable zones and six runner shells, players will be able to take on opening contracts for five factions. Progress grants bonus loot at launch.
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).
Konami has finally revealed Metal Gear Solid: Master Collection Vol. 2, promising to bring remasters for Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker and, yes, Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots, to PlayStation 5 (PS5) later this year.
The publisher pulled back the curtain to announce its long-awaited follow-up bundle at the February 2026 State of Play. It’s confirmation that two classic tactical espionage action titles are getting touch-ups, but more importantly, it means MGS4 will finally leave its PS3 prison when the collection launches August 27, 2026. It’s at least coming to PS5, with additional platforms unclear for now.
Creator Hideo Kojima’s fourth mainline Metal Gear Solid game features David Hayter as an elderly Solid Snake and was originally released for the PS3 in 2008. It’s also remained on this one platform since, meaning only those who own the 20-year-old console have been able to (officially) play it. Now, after 18 years, Old Snake’s story will be available to experience elsewhere.
Also included in Metal Gear Solid: Master Collection Vol. 2 is 2010’s MGS: Peace Walker. The game originally launched for PSP and later came to the PS3 and Xbox 360. Even without confirmation regarding what changes the Master Collection Vol. 2 brings, most fans would probably agree that ports for each of these games are long overdue.
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).
If there is anything that is concretely true about the upcoming Disco Elysium follow-up Zero Parades, it is that it is certainly a new RPG from ZA/UM. Everything else, well, that depends on who you ask, and where they lie in the messiness that has been in and around the studio these past few years, but a ZA/UM game in name it is. And now there are two opportunities for you to form a more direct opinion about Zero Parades, and its quality therewithin.
Metal Gear Solid creator Hideo Kojima and Vince Zampella, co-creator of the Call of Duty, Infinity Ward, and Respawn Entertainment, apparently discussed an “FPS version of Metal Gear” sometime after Metal Gear Solid 4 came out.
This comes from Kojima himself, speaking via pre-recorded video at the DICE Summit 2026 in Las Vegas in a tribute to Zampella, who passed away in December at the age of 55. As a part of the conference’s keynotes, industry luminaries including Kojima, Phil Spencer, Geoff Keighley, Todd Howard, Laura Miele, and others spoke at length about Zampella’s contributions to the industry as well as their personal relationships with him.
Kojima appeared several times in the video to speak about Zampella. In one of his segments, he said, “I’ve kept this quiet for a long time but after Metal Gear Solid 4 came out, we actually talked about making an FPS version of Metal Gear.”
Kojima continued, saying that he and Zampella spoke about it, but the game never happened. Zampella went on to found Respawn, but even though they didn’t make a Metal Gear together, Kojima says Zampella gave him a lot of advice and support when he left Konami. Kojima even apparently incorporated some aspects of what he saw at Respawn into his own studio, Kojima Productions.
Zampella’s sudden passing rattled much of the industry, as he was beloved by many throughout his lengthy career across multiple studios and projects. In addition to co-creating Call of Duty and the studio behind it, Infinity Ward, Zampella also founded Respawn Entertainment, which created hits such as Titanfall, Titanfall 2, Apex Legends, Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, and Star Wars Jedi: Survivor. His final gaming contribution was as director of the recently-released Battlefield 6.
Earlier, we covered other remarks from Zampella’s peers made at DICE, including comments from Keighley, Spencer, and more. As Kojima concluded, “I hope people will look to Vince as a model and aim high.”
Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. Got a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.
Image credit: Gilbert Flores/Variety via Getty Images
There is certainly something to be admired in Peter Molyneux’s commitment to infinitely overpromising right through to what is meant to be his final game, Masters of Albion. I’m not saying I admire it, but someone might. And while I truly have no horse in the race regarding the quality, or potential lack thereof, in Masters of Albion, its latest gameplay trailer certainly does at least suggest it’ll be a true as it can be Molyneux game.
Blizzard kicked off 30th anniversary celebrations for the Diablo series yesterday with a 40-minute spotlight, focusing on updates and new content for the franchise’s current games. However, one question remains unanswered: is Diablo IV coming to Switch 2? And, additionally, what about a Switch 2 Edition for Diablo II: Resurrected?
Eurogamer’s Robert Purchase attempted to get some clarity, but instead was told that “the company had nothing to say on the matter”. A little disappointing, given how successful Diablo 3 and Diablo II have proven on Switch 1, but we’d be surprised if nothing is happening.
Chromagun 2: Dye Hard Splashes onto Xbox Featuring a Robust Accessibility Mode
Harrison Floyd-Marketing Manager PM Studios
Summary
Available now for Xbox Series X|S.
Robust accessibility system for those who are colorblind.
Wield your Chromagun across dimensions and parallel universes, each with unique physics, style and tone.
Color isn’t a barrier. While ChromaGun 2: Dye Hard is built on the language of color, it refuses to let color become a barrier. A unique symbol overlay system designed for color blind players earned ChromaGun 2: Dye Hard a Horizon Award for Technical Innovation at GG Bavaria 2025. It is a colorblind accessibility system that reimagines how players read and combine hues. Instead of relying solely on visual color differences, every color is paired with a distinct symbol: clean, intuitive shapes that overlay directly onto surfaces, objects, and even blended colors. When players mix hues, those symbols merge and stack in real time, creating a clear visual shorthand for every combination.
The result is a puzzle language that stays readable no matter how the player may see the world. Whether the player is navigating a monochrome chamber or juggling multiple color interactions at once, the symbol system ensures that every solution remains just as clever, challenging, and satisfying. With the goal that every player can experience the game on equal footing.
ChromaGun 2: Dye Hard features include:
A One-Of-A-Kind Tool – The ChromaGun: Wield the titular “ChromaGun,” a versatile paint-gun used to shoot primary colors onto surfaces and objects, mixing them to manipulate the environment and outsmart puzzles. Mastering the color wheel is essentially to success. Mix and fire primary colors to bend environments to your will! Rewiring doors, redirecting drones, and unraveling puzzles that twist in increasingly clever ways. Every puzzle hinges on how well you can mix, match, and manipulate hues under pressure. Fire blue at a red block and watch it shift instantly into a purple, opening new paths or triggering mechanisms you couldn’t reach before. The deeper the game gets, the more the game asks you to think and juggle multiple color combinations on the fly. With deeper color physics, sharper puzzle logic, and environments that react in surprising layers, the sequel delivers its most ambitious, brain‑stretching 3D challenges yet.
Magnetoid Chromatism: Master the proprietary core mechanic of Magnetoid Chromatism, a system where color isn’t just visual, it’s magnetic logic that governs how the entire world behaves. WorkerDroids, platforms, switches, and even environmental hazards react to color‑charged polarity, pulling toward or repelling away from whatever hue is applied. A single color can shift the flow of a room. ChromaGun 2: Dye Hard reimagines puzzle realities with ever-changing rules and visual styles, from comic-book labs to sci-fi facilities, keeping each challenge inventive and unpredictable. You interact with WorkerDroids, beams, tools and switches in flexible systems.
Multiverse Puzzles: Set in the dangerously pristine world of ChromaTech Industries, the game’s stylized presentation and humor blend clever problem-solving with off-beat charm. Travel through time and space across five different dimensions and parallel universes, each with new physics, visual style and narrative tone. Inside the comic‑book dimension, every action explodes with over‑the‑top flair. Each shot from the ChromaGun triggers a burst of hand‑drawn onomatopoeia – Wham!, Boom!, Pow! – that pop in like a comic book. Then there’s the chicken universe, an entirely different flavor of chaos. Poultry-based problem solving. Here, puzzles revolve around a flock of hyper‑aggressive, feather‑ruffling chickens who charge the player on sight. Instead of traditional switches or drones, progress depends on coloring these furious birds mid‑attack, using their reactions and movement to trigger mechanisms, open paths, and of course solve puzzles.
Welcome to ChromaTec, the universe’s leading producer of the ChromaGun (patent pending)! Here at ChromaTec, colors are magnets! Well, not exactly. Magnetoid Chromatism—a physical property of the pandimensional realm—is a bit more complex than that. In layperson’s terms: Walls attract objects of the same color. All kinds of objects! Like large boxes. Or small boxes. Or medium boxes! Or super-safe, friendly, decidedly non-murderous WorkerDroids*. (List not exhaustive)
Use your refined painting and color-mixing skills to voluntarily solve intricate puzzles on the ChromaTec Testing Track for ChromaGun Research Purposes, Mark II — aka ChromaGun 2.
Please note the following are not valid reasons for non-participation:
– Not having participated in the Testing Track Mark I
(aka ChromaGun 1; no prior knowledge necessary)
– Color-blindness
(A color-blind accessibility mode is available at no extra charge)
– Fear of birds**
– Fear of magnets (They’re colors, not magnets)
– Fear of being involuntarily forced to perform tests on an experimental color-based firearm (this will never happen)
ChromaTec would like to remind you of the following important disclaimer:
Not solving tests as instructed is not advised.
Breaking the ChromaGun is not advised.
Activating a portal to a parallALTERNATEel uniREALITYverse is not ADVISEDadvised…
ChromaLABS would like to remind you of the following disclaimer:
ChromaLabs is the universe’s foremost—and only—manufacturer of the patented ChromaGun. Our world-class engineers are all [redacted] free [redacted] and [redacted] motivated [redacted] to [redacted] ensure that our testing grounds meet the following criteria:
– Unbreakable tests: No constant restarting of test chambers necessary
– Removable paint: Painting and mixing is fine, but undoing it is even better
– Advanced puzzles: Physics challengPUZZLes, clever paintPAINT mechanics, and even [redACTED] oh TWO i [REDacted] UNIVERSES have a CANNOT EXIST bad IN feeling THE SAME about REALITY this.
We hope you enjoy your brief, pleasant, VOLUNTARY participation in the ChromaLabs CHROMATEC Testing TRACK.
* WorkerDroids may be less non-murderous than implied.
** Except chickens
On his RTGame channel in 2021, YouTuber and streamer Daniel Condren made headlines by dragging countless NPCs from a Hitman level into a walk-in freezer, in an attempt to simultaneously kill every single NPC in one map. He didn’t quite succeed. Now, he’s made another go at it, using the gigantic grape press in the winery that is Hitman 3’s final map. And this time, it went better.
You can watch it take place in a 40-minute edit of the stream. Well, actually the edit seems to be of two streams – in the first, he drags the NPCs one-by-one to smash them after knocking each one out with a baseball bat. That takes over 15 hours, according to the timer at the top of the stream. Then, the video cuts to what looks to be another stream, started at 5 hours and 49 minutes in, after he had dragged each body to the area just in front of the press, ready to be crushed by Condren’s cruel hitman.
For over an hour after that, he hauls each body beneath the press, framerate tanking every time the pile of bodies enters the camera’s view. A few game crashes later, and at about 7 hours and 13 minutes (again, according to the timer at the top of the screen), he’s done it. Elated and sounding a little like a cartoon despot, he hits the grape presser’s start button and smashes… most, but not all, of the NPCs. A second run of the press takes care of the last few. He then finds another body elsewhere in the winery that he’d either missed or that had been glitchily hucked there.
So Condren didn’t quite meet his mad goal of simultaneously making wine out of all of the level’s NPCs like some deranged, murderous Lucille Ball, but he got close enough for blues. He certainly seems pleased at the end when he adds, “And a shout-out to the population of Mendoza, Argentina. We love you guys. And you make a great beverage.”
Wes is a freelance writer (Freelance Wes, they call him) who has covered technology, gaming, and entertainment steadily since 2020 at Gizmodo, Tom’s Hardware, Hardcore Gamer, and most recently, The Verge. Inside of him there are two wolves: one that thinks it wouldn’t be so bad to start collecting game consoles again, and the other who also thinks this, but more strongly.
Back when Lil Gator Game arrived in the forgotten year of 2022, it received RPS’ coveted Bestest Bests badge because, well, it was just so darn delightful! And in the years since, developer MegaWobble have been tinkering away at a seemingly Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom influenced bit of DLC. Which, as it just so happens, has just been released today!
There’s an old refrain among comedians that no joke survives its retelling, and you don’t need to look any further than the shoddy track record of comedy movie sequels to see the truth in that. Fortunately, funny video games tend to fare much better, from Borderlands 2 to Portal 2, and so you would hope that a weird, deeply inappropriate game about drugs and talking guns like High On Life 2 might enjoy the same kind of evolution. In some ways it does just that, with many of its existing bright spots shining even more brightly – the lovable weapons that serve as your companions are more amusing than ever, and movement outside of combat is greatly improved by radical new skateboarding mechanics. But other areas don’t hold up as well, like the significantly less polished story, jokes that don’t land quite as often, and performance issues that are even more shaky than the first game. I still enjoyed my time with High On Life 2, and truly relish the opportunity to return to a world this goofy any chance I get, but this is definitely closer to Zoolander 2 than 22 Jump Street.
High On Life 2 picks up right where our foul-mouthed cast of characters left off… sort of. After a dizzyingly fast intro recaps the events of the first game and gets you back into the action, you find yourself on the wrong side of the law and ready to begin the familiar process of hunting down a list of baddies to bring down an evil organization. Instead of a drug cartel, this time the villain comes in the form of a pharmaceutical company that I felt no guilt killing off members of over the course of the roughly 10-hour campaign, now playing the role of rogue assassin as I ply my trade of death illegally – a nice twist to the otherwise nearly identical setup of the original.
Sadly, the story built around this string of over-the-top murder missions is a bit sloppy, with a couple big reveals that don’t really land and a surprising number of monologues to explain motives and technologies. There’s a shocking amount of “tell, don’t show” for a game that is typically very intentionally about not sweating the details and following the rule of cool. It sorta reminds me of a D&D campaign that’s gone on way too long and starts to feel like the DM is twisting himself in knots trying to get to that cool payoff, missing the mark too often in the process. The good news is that the plot at least moves along at a pretty fast clip with a steady stream of silly gags to keep you guessing, even when the story gets messy.
Speaking of silly gags, like its predecessor, this is an adventure that relies a whole lot on the success of its goofiness and whimsy, and there are plenty of laugh out loud moments to be had. The high points are extremely memorable, like when you fight an incredibly annoying boss who transports himself inside your menus and starts messing with your game settings (appropriately voiced by the legendary Richard Kind), or when one mission concludes with a murder mystery that has you gathering clues and interrogating witnesses instead of shooting guns. Sometimes the lowbrow humor also just hits, like a side quest where someone wanted me to help them find a bridge troll and…y’know, I think I’ll just leave it at that. High On Life 2 is at its best when it’s trying weird and creative things, and when it manages to pull that off, there’s really nothing quite like it.
I was having the most fun when it was trying new stuff, and the least when it was retreading old bits.
That talking Aussie blade cuts both ways though, as jokes fall flat a tad too often in this sequel, and it’s pretty tough to watch when they do. Granted, it’s always harder to pull off gags in a world that has had a lot of its juice squeezed out already – we know about the species of sentient guns, for example, and have already had most of the funny moments we’re going to get out of that surreal experience – but some of the jokes are quite literal repeats of things that happened in the first game. If I was having the most fun when High On Life 2 was trying new stuff, I was having the least when it was retreading old bits or just throwing a couple curse words onto the end of a sentence in lieu of actual punchlines.
The stars of the show in the original were the gun companions you met and befriended along the way, and that certainly remains true in this follow-up. Meeting a down on his luck pistol named Travis (who has a charmingly dorky voice from Ken Marino) and reuniting him with his estranged wife is both a satisfying arc and a clever way to introduce the first dual-wielded weapon when his spouse joins the party (I do wish they’d make out less though). All four of the new gun companions are awesome and have helpful abilities in both combat and puzzle-solving, like Sheath, whose harpoon “trick hole” attack can impale people during fights and create ziplines while platforming. Plus, most of the OG Gatlians make a return as well, including my favorite partner in crime (literally this time), Gus, the shotgun who looks like a frog and has the unmistakable voice of J.B. Smoove. Hell yeah.
Unfortunately, a wider variety of guns hasn’t done much to make the sloppy and overly simplistic gunplay any better – in fact it even feels a touch worse. Some of the new weapons are quite crisp compared to the wonky slugthrowers of yore, especially Sheath’s burst-fire that reminds me of the battle rifle from Halo. But with so many enemies and projectiles flying around, claustrophobic rooms with odd geometry that enemies get caught behind and within, and weapon accuracy being a bit all over the place, combat leans into chaos more than anything else. Most of the time that’s fine because you’re playing a game that’s all about over-the-top nonsense, but when you occasionally die due to unfair circumstances or when a fight drags on for a bit too long, it can kill the mood. To its credit, the enemy variety is mostly decent, with a stream of ugly new creatures to blast apart introduced at a steady clip, from flying robotic freaks to spooky, scary skeletons – but if you were looking for a polished FPS with gunfights that feel at all coherent, look elsewhere.
The biggest and most interesting change with High On Life 2 is mobility, as you’re given a trusty skateboard in the opening minutes that serves as your travel companion throughout the adventure. Instead of fighting on foot, most encounters highly encourage or outright require you to be grinding on rails, riding on the sides of walls, and soaring through the air on your skateboard. When it comes to traveling from place-to-place or navigating your way through platforming sections, this is pretty awesome, and a shocking amount of your time will be spent rolling around like you’re playing Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater. I didn’t really expect the skateboard to play such a big role, but honestly I can’t imagine going back to the relative sluggishness of running around on foot.
In combat, the skateboard’s influence isn’t so positive. You’re seemingly expected to never stop moving while fighting hordes of aliens, which makes the already chaotic encounters even more noisy and hard to read. Many fights take place in open areas where you’re surrounded by more bad guys than you could possibly keep track of, and staying put is a death sentence with so little cover, so you’ll have to take shots at passersby while leaping from various parts of the environment to keep yourself going as fast as you can. Combine that juggling act with slippery weapons, enemies that teleport around, and weird foes that are often hard to even understand what you’re looking at, and oh boy, the result is just an absolute diarrhea of pixels.
Those pixels seem to be pushing High On Life 2 to its limits as well, because I saw frequent framerate dips (some that caused my screen to freeze for several seconds before getting it together) and progress-hindering bugs that required me to reload the last checkpoint. Developer Squanch Games did include “various performance issues across the game” on a list of known problems with the review build that will apparently be addressed by a patch, but it didn’t specify the extent to which those would be resolved – and in my experience, a day-one patch rarely makes all of a game’s performance problems magically disappear when they are this extensive. Nothing I saw struck me as game breaking beyond a simple reset, but it was consistent and egregious enough to make me worried for the stuff people will find when this is out in the wild.
