Author: Game Infliction

It’s kind of insane that I never realized how perfectly Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles would work as a VR game. VR action games famously feature loads of jumping and climbing, which our turt bros do a whole bunch of on Manhattan rooftops. Sneaking around to do melee combat, and having to learn how to parry and dodge incoming attacks is also something the reptilian heroes are known for that has been done well in many VR games. And because these heroes in a half-shell appear most commonly as cartoons, you don’t have to worry about shooting for photorealistic graphics and the technical VR bottlenecks that sometimes come with it. In other words, why in the heck did it take us so long to get this pizza-powered quartet into a VR game? No matter the reason, I’m glad it’s finally happening with TMNT: Empire City, and the 15-minute demo I played was enough to sell me on this tubular action-adventure.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Empire City is exactly the kind of action game you’d expect from the titular masked heroes. I spent my time fighting members of the Foot Clan as each member of the TMNT crew (including their iconic weapons of choice, like Leonardo’s katanas and Donatello’s bo staff), running and jumping across city skylines in pursuit of justice, and hanging out back in my sewer base and eating pizza. Doing all of that in VR is exactly as fun as it sounds (meaning, it’s super fun!), and it’s especially amusing to look down at your turtle body and remember, “Oh, yeah. I’m an anthropomorphic mutated reptile.”

Unfortunately, the section I played was limited entirely to the tutorial, so I was mostly just learning the ropes, like how to hack into electronic devices as Donatello (since he does machines) or how to perform parries on those pesky Shredder-following Foot Clan. The fundamentals were definitely strong, as I was grinning ear-to-ear pretty much the whole time, but I’ll be curious to see if Empire City can build on that to keep it interesting across an entire campaign. For example, I only got to fight one boss at the very end of this introductory mission, and it lasted all of – I kid you not – five seconds as I dodged her opening attack and then whaled on her until she tapped out. Obviously this fight was also a part of the tutorial, so it’s hard to tell if things will get more challenging, but here’s hoping.

Building a Better Turtle

Something that would seem to indicate a deeper level of challenge is the fact that back at the base there’s a whole menu of upgrades to deal with. None of these were unlockable in the build I played from what I could tell, but it reminded me a bit of the upgrade system in Half-Life: Alyx, where you’re collecting parts throughout levels, then funnel it all into a machine to craft certain upgrades for your character. It’s also just great to see them using Donatello’s propensity for crafting gadgets brought to life via all the junk he stuffs in his pocket along the way, which his brothers made fun of him for doing, of course.

Which leads me to one of my favorite parts of the demo: how perfectly Ninja Turtles it was! The banter between the brothers and their recognizable idiosyncrasies left me smiling, whether it was Leonardo’s tendency to be way too serious all the time, Michelangelo’s wise cracks, or Raphael’s intensity and impatience. The unique weapon aside, I never forgot which of the brothers I was because Empire City did such a good job or reminding me with its banter that was completely on point with the surprisingly good writing for which the series is known. I could easily imagine a world where this thing felt like a reskinned ninja game that felt completely generic, but that doesn’t seem to be the case here. Huge relief.

They also do a really good job capturing the comic book/Saturday morning cartoon art style, with environments that look cel-shaded and goofy voice performances that are over-the-top and amusing. Sure, lots of the textures are fairly undetailed, but that works pretty perfectly with the straight-from-a-comicbook vibe that this game is clearly shooting for. I could easily see myself spending a lot of time just hanging out in this world, exploring and fighting alongside friends. Which reminds me: will there be skateboarding in this? Why haven’t they let me skateboard yet?!

(Multi-)Turtle Power?

One pretty huge thing I didn’t get to see in action is how this will all work in four-player co-op. I can only imagine how much of a blast it’s going to be to roll through with the full shell squad smacking enemies around, but the section of the demo I played felt pretty designed for a single player and it’s a bit difficult to imagine how this kind of gameplay might scale up for four-player bouts. Presumably there’d need to be many more enemies and fewer linear paths than the ones I crept through to make it work. Also, I can only imagine how silly it’ll look to have teammates running around as big ol’ green cartoon characters while swinging around nunchucks.

I’ll still need to see a fair bit more of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Empire City before I can speak definitively on it, but so far I’m pretty stoked by the potential here and am absolutely flabbergasted that it took us this long to get a first-person TMNT game.

At long last, Leon S. Kennedy has been confirmed to appear in Resident Evil: Requiem — via a leaked image on the PlayStation Store.

The reveal of new cover art for the game featuring Leon finally puts to bed one of this year’s biggest gaming mysteries — something developer Capcom has itself refused to address — just days ahead of Requiem’s appearance at The Game Awards. Presumably we’ll see Leon announced officially there.

This morning, Resident Evil fans began spotting the new cover art appearing on PlayStation 5 consoles in the pre-download screen for owners of the standard (non-Deluxe) version of the game. IGN has now verified this ourselves, and can confirm the image is legitimate. Leon is real.

Sorry, puzzle geeks. Don’t expect a Blue Prince 2 any time soon. Or, ever, really.

That’s what we learned from speaking with Blue Prince creator Tonda Ros last month. We asked him loads of questions and you can read our full interview right here, but one big mystery we wanted to clear up was if he’d ever make a sequel to Blue Prince. And, no, he won’t. No sequel to Blue Prince, nor to any other game he makes in the future.

But he is going to make something else.

“I can say I will never make a sequel to my work because I love creating something standalone and then going on to something completely different,” he said. “It will likely not even be in the same exact genres. I will probably be mixing it up. You’ll start to see overlap. You’ll start to see overlaps with some of my interests. So it will be familiar, and hopefully I’ll inadvertently have things that really worked with Blue Prince that I’ll carry on in terms of at least technicals. But yeah, we’ll see. I’m hesitant to do another 3D game because for my first game, 3D was so difficult. I really wish I did a 2D game. I probably could have done it in five years instead of eight. But yeah, I think it’ll be something totally different.”

This might be disappointing to hear for Blue Prince fans, especially for those still mulling over the game’s remaining unsolved mysteries and wishing there was some sort of answer to them. It also sounds like, from our interview, he won’t be doing any more major content updates to Blue Prince after the upcoming so-called “final update.” “I do love complete games,” he said. “And I do love when something is definitively done. So I had tried my best to get everything into the game at launch because that was something I just really wanted. I didn’t want to eternally be updating this.”

Whatever it is Ros is working on next, it will be a while before we see it. He says he still expects to be working on Blue Prince in small ways for the next year, finishing the final update, bug fixes, and such. And given that Blue Prince took about eight years to create, he’ll need a lot more time on top of that to create something brand new. At least Blue Prince fans have already completed a serious exercise in patience by finishing the game at all.

You can read our full interview with Ros here, and check out our review where we gave Blue Prince a 9/10. As our reviewer wrote: “If The Witness, Portal, and Myst are already emblazoned on the Mount Rushmore of first-person puzzle games, I wouldn’t be surprised to see Blue Prince carved alongside them soon enough.”

Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. Got a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.

There are a lot of skateboarding games, and I feel like I’ve played most of them. Some of them are majestic. Some are not. The Simpsons Skateboarding was the absolute pits. Tony Hawk: Ride was tortuous pain. This year’s Skate is a microtransaction hellscape.

Enter Skate Story. Like those latter examples, it too is a trip to skateboarding hell and a study in pain. In this case, however, that’s actually the whole point of this extremely peculiar journey through perdition on a piece of 7-ply. I wasn’t always aboard for the sheer and utter weirdness of Skate Story’s broader adventure, but there’s no doubt developer Sam Eng has successfully married it to a robust and approachable set of skate mechanics – and it certainly makes for a memorable skateboarding game like no other I’ve ever played.

Skate Story is a slightly tricky game to describe, if only because attempting to even discuss the plot sounds a little like you’re making it up on the spot. The deal is you’re a demon made out of glass and pain, marooned in Hell. It’s referred to as The Underworld, more specifically – but the Devil is here, either way. I know this because I have his pants.

From the Devil comes a deal. That is, you can be free on one condition: you find a way to flip, grind, and manual your way to the moon – and eat it. For some reason.

Are you still following? Because I haven’t even got to the frog barista yet. Or the subway train with legs.

I’m hesitant to say much else lest I spoil any of the particularly quirky developments along the way, so just be aware Skate Story is an incredibly weird trip through a bizarre underworld. To be candid, this isn’t really the kind of thing I’d typically seek out. That is, the stories I like normally feature big guys causing problems in small towns, assassins with grudges, or pictures of fighter planes on the cover. That is, I’m more David Leitch than David Lynch, if that makes sense. Skate Story did largely win me over, though. There were definitely moments I found myself getting a little numb to the weirdness, on account of just how offbeat it sometimes gets, but overall I admire the commitment to its surrealistic vision.

Its story is told via text that you can read through at your own pace. There’s no voice acting or voiceover – and there’s an argument to be mounted that it might’ve gained a bit of gravity from some kind of baritone narration à la The Stanley Parable or Bastion – but Skate Story’s finely honed soundtrack means there’s still plenty to listen to. Assembled by New Jersey band Blood Cultures, the music is a generous mix of the group’s experimental, electro-pop sound, and it ranges in tempo and intensity as the locations and pace of the levels vary. This sort of music is also comfortably out of my usual wheelhouse, but nonetheless I found it extremely evocative and catchy, and it suits Skate Story to a T. It fabulously complements The Underworld’s abstract environments, and the atmosphere of its eternal night backdrop.

Don’t be fooled by Skate Story’s grainy, low-fi look, either; this is one of the most eye-catching and imaginative-looking games I’ve played in recent memory. Its psychedelic vision for a neon underworld blends jagged forests of spikes with broken slabs of ancient architecture, and twisted blocks of New York City with carpets of stars. Watching this wild world refract through a sneaker-clad demon made entirely of glass is certainly something.

Pain in the Glass

The controls are not immediately intuitive, because they’re noticeably different from the approach taken by the sorts of dedicated sports-oriented skating games a lot of us are familiar with. That is, Skate Story doesn’t have tricks mapped to flicking an analogue stick around like the Skate series (or both analogue sticks, as in the case of something like Session). It’s more in line with playing something like Tony Hawk, only imagine someone remapped all the buttons.

Basic tricks are activated by a combination of either a shoulder button or trigger plus a face button, and grinds occur when you pop and land suitably on a rail or ledge. A variety of other, progressively more complex tricks are rationed out and taught to us as the story unfolds over its roughly six-hour duration. It’s not a revolutionary approach, sure, but it’s a smart one since having us always picking up new tricks keeps things fresh throughout. There was a moderate learning curve as I sought to archive decades of THPS muscle memory in order to learn Skate Story’s own specific trick system – but it didn’t take too long to come to grips with.

It’s all very grounded and weighty, which I like, and the tricks look great in motion with the low slung camera that tumbles to the ground like a physical object each time you bail and shatter to bits. I love how the powerslides feel, and I love the slow motion enders we’re rewarded with for our successes. When it comes to vibes, Skate Story nails the landing.

There’s a timing mechanism for executing tricks that results in different pop heights, which is illustrated by an on-screen doodle (a different shape for each trick). Depending on the speed of your skater, a marker will trace the doodle slowly or quickly – and there’s a sweet spot for getting max altitude – but I have to admit I generally paid little attention to it. On default settings, Skate Story never demanded a fastidious level of timing finesse to get through its levels and defeat bosses. This suits me just fine, but the fact that you can just essentially spam your way through a lot of the most frantic-looking segments may come across as a little trivial to anyone looking for a stiffer challenge.

Tony Hawk’s Underworld

Boss battles are handled in an interesting way, and to win these encounters you need to build up combos and “stomp” them down inside a marked zone. They can be cleared with a bit of mild button-mashing, but there’s certainly room to be much more deliberate about your trick selection and timing if you choose to (and you will, admittedly, accumulate better combos and deal more damage – and faster – if you do). There are also a number of small and trippy sandbox-style levels to cruise around with various objectives to complete, but some of these tasks do get disappointingly trivial. For instance, one mission that called on me to gather up a selection of floating letters sounded like a cute nod to Skate Story’s ancestors – but most of them were just hovering at ground level, turning what could’ve been a brief but fun challenge into a basic fetch quest across the map and back.

My favourite parts of Skate Story, however, were the speed segments, where you must hustle from your spawn point to an ethereal exit door – like some kind of haunted hill bomb. The music ramps up for these high-speed bursts, and I like the fast-paced trial-and-error nature of them as your fragile demon smashes to shards and you instantly get another crack. I always felt a little pang of regret when I reached the end of these runs, and I wish there were a few more of them.