“Zero Parades is an exploration of failure,” explains Jim Ashilevi, writer and VO director at ZA/UM. “What it means to lose everything and then keep going regardless. And then, since it’s such a painful question, it inevitably becomes an exploration of what it means to be human. How uncomfortable and strange it is to exist in a body that has thoughts and feelings and responsibilities, and a past that they can’t go back and fix.”
“This is why I love working here,” says ZA/UM’s head of studio, Allen Murray, with a smile. “I never had these conversations making Halo games.”
The studio behind Disco Elysium was, of course, never going to follow up its 2019 “disaster cop” RPG with a game about heroes saving the world. That’s not to say that it hasn’t moved into slightly more traditional video game territory, though. Its new game, Zero Parades: For Dead Spies, is an espionage spy thriller set in a dark, almost psychedelic reflection of the Cold War’s closing years. Global powers conspire, enemy agents lurk in the dark, and the entire world sits on the doorstep of the end of history. But while that could theoretically be the elevator pitch for any number of mainstream, combat-forward RPGs, ZA/UM is doing spycraft the only way it knows: Disco style.
“I think the one North Star that we have is that we have to be genuinely interested in the stories that we are choosing to tell,” says Ashilevi. “If we were to start mimicking someone else, or go bigger and more expensive and add production value and fighting mechanics and multiplayer, I think we would just destroy ourselves in the process.”
This “North Star” means that, on the surface, Zero Parades looks almost identical to Disco Elysium. It’s another dialogue-centric, introspective, isometric RPG with striking art direction. But that’s not to say it’s the exact same game dressed up in a John le Carré skin.
“I think you can see the team has really wanted to exceed their production chops with Zero Parades,” explains Murray, “in terms of having the world seem more reactive, more lived in. There’s more action, more people walking around doing things.”
While ZA/UM had no intention of creating a “traditional” video game RPG, it did want to dig deeper into the genre’s more crunchy elements. This time around there are more skill checks, alongside a mental and physical health system that can be exerted to increase the chances of passing those checks. There’s further emphasis on multiple solutions to individual problems, the very foundation of BioWare’s celebrated Infinity Engine games. By pushing the depth of choice available and enhancing the world’s reactivity to those choices, the team saw the opportunity to create something that stood distinct from Disco Elysium.
“Sophomore efforts are really challenging,” Murray admits. “You don’t want to repeat your first hit, nor can you really.”
It took a lot of time for the team to come to terms with that. During the years following Disco Elysium’s release and subsequent “Final Cut” version, ZA/UM experimented with a number of concepts – some were effectively direct sequels, while others explored “a completely different direction,” according to Ashilevi. The path to Zero Parades arrived with the decision to “not fully reinvent the wheel.” The goal, Murray says, was to “expand on what we know how to do, and make a bigger game, both mechanically and in terms of production scope, and do it well.”
Mission Control
Murray acknowledges that there were “years of drama” before the studio got to that point. For many fans of Disco Elysium, that will mean only one thing: the firing of several key creatives in 2022 and their subsequent accusation that ZA/UM’s executive management had seized control of the company through fraud. It’s a complicated chapter in the studio’s story, in which those exorcised from the company – including game director Robert Kurvitz, writer Helen Hindpere, and art director Aleksander Rostov – are characterised as either toxic disruptors or the victims of corporate conspiracy, depending on your source.
But there’s more to ZA/UM’s troubled recent history than those controversial dismissals: this is a studio that has repeatedly cancelled projects and, in early 2024, made 20 of its staff redundant. It all paints a picture of an inexperienced studio struggling to adapt to life after releasing an unexpected mega hit on the first attempt, with the workers caught in the crossfire. Perhaps unsurprisingly, ZA/UM’s UK-based workforce unionised last year.
The artistry comes first, the storytelling comes first. It still feels like the whole video game development side of things is just like a happy accident.
But while collective bargaining is undoubtedly important, those workers also need strong leadership to avoid the woes of the past. Maybe they’ve found that in Murray, a 20-year veteran of the video games industry with previous tenures at Microsoft, Bungie, PopCap, and Private Division. He was appointed as ZA/UM’s new head of studio shortly after news broke about those painful redundancies, and over the past two years his goal has been “coaching the people in the studio, maturing our processes, helping people to really focus on what we’re making, how we’re making it, and why we’re making it.”
“It was easy to have a lot of things sort of floating around,” he admits. “But how are we actually going to animate this, or how are we going to light this? What does this story really mean? What are you really trying to get across to the player?”
Today, ZA/UM is made up of around 90 members of staff. Several of them have, like Murray, been recruited from established developers such as Rocksteady in order to arm the studio with specialist video game experience. But the remaining members of the Disco Elysium team, which makes up approximately 35% of the studio’s total roster, plus many of the new recruits, “come from a background that has nothing to do with game dev,” says Ashilevi.
“As a studio, we still view ourselves pretty much as a collective of artists,” he explains. “The artistry comes first, the storytelling comes first. To me personally, it still feels like the whole video game development side of things is just like a happy accident.”
The Price of Power
That brings us back to Zero Parades, which tells the story of Hershel Wilk, codename “Cascade”, who’s pulled out of retirement for the all-time classic spy trope, One Last Job. By moving into the espionage genre, ZA/UM has been able to work at a notably different scale than it did with Disco Elysium. While Zero Parades takes place in a physical space not too dissimilar to that of the studio’s previous game, by stepping into the shoes of a spy rather than a local detective, the story naturally explores a much grander stage.
“You do have to contend with world powers,” Ashilevi reveals. “It’s not just wallpaper, or stuff that you read from notes that people leave in drawers, or newspapers left on tables. You do have to come into close contact with some of the big players as well.”
This global stage is explored through Hershel’s very personal lens, so while the stakes are certainly heightened this time around, your actions are still conducted at street level. You may be able to turn the cogs of a mega corporation and shift the balance of worldwide politics, for instance, but to do so may require betraying your closest friend. Hershel’s own pain will be tangible, whereas those rotating cogs will feel distant, perhaps even unimportant, to her own life. Such is the toll of espionage.
To create something that reflects Disco Elysium’s triumphs, though, you can’t just tackle issues of the human condition. You’ve got to get at least a little eccentric. And that’s where Hershel’s hobbies come into play.
“She’s deeply fascinated with comic books, music, you name it,” Ashilevi reveals. “So the story is also an exploration of pop culture and what soft power means. Why is it important for us to be obsessed with pop artists and cartoons, and films and pulp novels, and things like that? Why are people so deeply obsessed with retro tech and bootlegged media, like underground forbidden films? What does it do to your soul, and how does it define your identity?”
While music, fashion, TV shows, and retrofuturistic music formats all contribute to the city of Portofiro’s vibrant texture, there is a dark side to it all. What is a consumer as a political entity? How do tiny decisions, like tuning into a particular show or buying a certain magazine, tie into the movements of the big powers? These are potential avenues for Hershel – for you – to investigate.
The battle for soft and hard power, waged between international banks, imperialist states, and communist unions, is something that goes beyond just Hershel’s current mission. “We need to come up with an inspiring enough sandbox so that whatever we choose to do with those characters or this universe next, we can just jump right into it and keep telling stories because the groundwork has been laid,” says Ashilevi. Zero Parades is the starting point for something bigger, then.
At least that’s the hope. The world of Elysium was also envisioned as a space for multiple stories, but it seems that book is now eternally closed. And while Zero Parades may not necessarily need to be as significant a breakout hit as Disco Elysium was to unlock the potential for sequels, it does need to stand tall in a world where the “Disco-like” is a rising genre, made up of games developed both by fans inspired by that RPG masterpiece and new studios set up by the scattered former members of ZA/UM’s original creative team. But by following their own creative North Star, the team behind Zero Parades hopes to captivate players once more.
“We have no clue what kinds of games or stories people are hoping to get out of ZA/UM,” Ashilevi says. “The only thing we can control is whether we’re staying true to our own vision and voice. And that’s what we have done with Zero Parades.”
Matt Purslow is IGN’s Executive Editor of Features.
Sports are foundational to gaming as a medium. From Pong to NES Baseball, the infancy of the medium was littered with just-about-recognisable renditions of real-life sports in an attempt to conjure a degree of familiarity to this fledgling form of entertainment. But in the mid ‘90s, the developers at Nintendo collectively had a light bulb appear above their head housing an idea that would change gaming forever – what if Mario and his friends played tennis?
The greatest Mario sports games are a perfect blend of those two words: Mario and sports. It has to be a simulation worth its salt, giving you a reasonable adaptation of what it’s truly like to play the sport in question. However, just as vital is the Mario part, splicing the sport with the Mushroom Kingdom’s trademark personality. In the decades following 1995’s Mario’s Tennis, Nintendo’s sports games evolved from simple sims to wacky adventures, before retreating back to a steady, if uninspiring, run of titles. The early days of Camelot Software’s handheld RPGs and chaos-inducing console sims are seemingly long gone, and today many of Mario’s sporting outings are greeted with more of a shrug than with anticipation.
But with Mario Tennis Fever releasing this month on Nintendo Switch 2, we could be about to enter a new era. So in celebration of a joyful future (or just a magical past) here’s the top 10 Mario sports games, ranked.
10. Mario Hoops 3-on-3
If many modern Mario sports games are poisoned by a lack of personality, games like Mario Hoops are the antidote. 3-on-3’s unique presentation blends 3D models with excellent sprite work, a striking approach that bridges the graphical styles of the GameBoy Advance and Nintendo’s then-new DS handheld. Nothing represents this mix better than the character select screen, the single greatest in all of Mario history, which lays the groundwork for a charming basketball romp.
Hoops could easily claim to be the best use of the DS’ touch screen. Tapping in different areas sees Mario and his friends dribble around the court, keeping the ball away from opponents and collecting coins and items. It’s an intuitive motion, and that use of the stylus extends to all the basics of basketball, like shooting and passing. Regrettably, Nintendo has rarely returned to the idea of basketball in the Mushroom Kingdom, but even if it did try again, few consoles would execute the idea better than the DS… well, as long as you’re not left-handed, that is.
9. Mario Tennis (Game Boy Color)
The early days of handheld Mario sports games produced some of the most unusual oddities in Nintendo’s history, and their lack of Mushroom Kingdom whimsey and focus on regular human characters is often looked back upon with a raised eyebrow. However, actually dive into the Game Boy Color’s Mario Tennis and you’ll find that eyebrow is put firmly back in place.
Mario Tennis features a wonderful RPG “Tour” mode that nails the genre’s basics. Being locked into three-set matches with a far more powerful opponent is akin to boss battles in a more traditional RPG. They become challenges that you relish, always pushing you to move more quickly after a serve or time your smashes to perfection. Working through the tour sees you levelling up your original character via a very satisfying process, with the grind required to improve specific skills never feeling like a chore. The graphics and controls are inherently limited by the console, but that simplicity lends Mario Tennis a lovely rhythmic quality that encourages repeat replays even a quarter of a century later.
8. Mario Golf: World Tour
For as slow and ponderous as the sport of golf can be, it’s a miracle that it consistently dovetails so beautifully with the chaotic and colorful world of Mario. World Tour nails the balance between both sides of the Nintendo sports coin, offering a quick and snappy way to execute precise and considered rounds of golf. With no need for complicated button schemes or deep systems, World Tour gives you a great sense of control that allows you to cut through the fiddly stuff and get to work on the eternal quest of improving your swing, just like a real casual golfer.
The 3DS and Wii U era was a difficult one for Mario sports titles, but World Tour stands out from a lacklustre crowd thanks to its personality-packed game modes like Point Tourney, Star Coin challenges and Speed Golf. Castle Club also adds a story mode centred on your Mii, complete with a fun upgrade system with stat-boosting cosmetics like clothes and clubs, which is reminiscent of Camelot’s handheld glory days.
7. Mario Superstar Baseball
Much like basketball, Nintendo has barely paid any attention to baseball across the past couple decades, despite knocking it out of the park on the first try back in 2005. Mario Superstar Baseball is a wonderful marriage of addictive baseball mechanics and Mushroom Kingdom chaos, played out in iconic Mario locations that have been contorted into baseball fields. Only in Wario Palace could a barrage of environmental hazards turn a home run into a devastating out.
Superstar Baseball boasts one of the Mario sports series’ most engaging story modes thanks to its “chemistry engine”. The relationships between your teammates dictates the speed and accuracy of their passes, meaning you won’t want to pair Mario with Wario and Bowser, but he’ll combine beautifully with Luigi and Peach. It’s a simple and effective way to bring depth to an already smooth experience that belongs in the Nintendo big leagues.
6. Super Mario Strikers
It’s amazing what a little pop of 2D animation and a few guitar riffs can do to make a subset of Mario sports games feel completely unique. Super Mario Strikers, the jumping plumber’s first foray into the world of soccer, has always had a rebellious edge. Anyone who was glued to their GameCube in the mid-2000s will look back on it with a special kind of fondness, especially in the light of its disappointing revival on Switch.
The nostalgia for Strikers isn’t just due to its bold presentation, though: its gameplay is perfectly calibrated. Each character controls just loosely enough to invite exactly the right amount of chaos into each and every match. If the dial was turned too far towards clean passing and shooting, Mario Strikers would be nowhere near as fun. Instead, developer Next Level Games created something aggressively competitive, wholly chaotic, and vibrantly unique – everything a Mario sports game should be.
5. Mario Golf: Advance Tour
Mario Golf: Advance Tour is one of the Game Boy Advance’s true gems, launched during a time when developer Camelot was proving itself as a Nintendo sports powerhouse. Compared to its predecessors it is genuinely beautiful; the GBA was an absolute haven for bright and colorful adventures and Advance Tour benefits greatly from the system’s then-advanced capabilities.
Those vibrant visuals are just the face of a game that takes the proven and perfected RPG structure from Camelot’s previous sports games and introduces even more Mario characters and locations to the mix. On the gameplay front, despite only having two face buttons available, Camelot designed a great-feeling, tight control scheme that ensured each shot you took felt measured and clean. That sharpness became a design philosophy that continues to stick around throughout every installment in the Mario Golf series. Advance Tour remains special to this day, though, thanks to its unique pixel art rendering of otherworldly courses, and the GBA’s form factor making it the perfect game to pack for on-the-go strolls through the Mushroom Kingdom’s premier golf courses.
4. Mario Tennis (Nintendo 64)
The moment you play your first shot in the Nintendo 64 version of Mario Tennis, something just clicks. The responsive gameplay, smooth animations, and freeing analog control creates an indescribable sense of elegance. Long rallies become like trances in which you find yourself less determined to win the point and instead simply addicted to the sensation of knocking the ball back and forth. Well, until you completely mistime a shot, Toad falls flat on his face, and you’re suddenly a couple sets down, that is.
Released in the year 2000, Mario Tennis is another example of deep gameplay that requires just two face buttons and directional controls, representing Nintendo at its most simple and effective. Subsequent tennis games went on to add ideas, gimmicks and modes that undeniably helped them surpass the offerings of this N64 title. But the bones of modern Mario Tennis are all here, a timeless gameplay loop perfected 26 years ago that endures throughout Nintendo’s history.
3. Mario Golf: Toadstool Tour
So much of what we expect from modern Mario sports games originated back on the GameCube, and the brilliant Mario Golf formula established by Toadstool Tour is one that Nintendo has defaulted to over the last couple decades. Its use of normal and power shots, manual or automatic swinging, and approach to camera control are all now staples of 3D Mario Golf titles for good reason: the simplicity just works.
That simplicity gives Toadstool Tour plenty of space to carry out an overwhelming charm offensive. There are so many different ways to play, especially in multiplayer, from the conventional Doubles and Tournament modes to the more eccentric Coin and Ring attacks, giving Toadstool Tour a shot at being the best party game on this list. It’s also the Mario Golf game that does the sport itself the most justice while still feeling quintessentially Mario. It’s simply a great bit of goofy, golfy goodness.
2. Mario Power Tennis
Everything that made Mario Tennis on the N64 so brilliant is preserved and built upon with the GameCube’s Mario Power Tennis. The console’s extra horsepower is used to add wild flourishes to the courts and characters, allowing the established, excellent 3D tennis formula to thrive alongside a deep collection of crazy Mario-isms. Smartly, developer Camelot decided against making full use of the GameCube’s iconic multi-button controller, understanding the enduring appeal of a simple control scheme, while still finding a way to add deeper mechanics, such as offensive and defensive skill shots.
Along with fun challenge courts that test specific tennis skills and Item Battles which create chaos over the net, Mario Power Tennis boasts feats of creative genius like Artist on the Court, a mode in which you use your tennis skills to paint a mural.These may not be flagship modes, but they add the kind of personality and flavour that you can’t get from anyone else but Nintendo in today’s gaming landscape.
1. Super Mario Strikers Charged
Much like how Power Tennis and Toadstool Tour benefited from the excellent foundations of their predecessors, Super Mario Strikers Charged takes every beloved detail from the original Strikers and advances them several steps further. Its refined design places increased emphasis on tactics; each character now has stats and special abilities, which makes playstyles and team composition as vital to victory as actually kicking the ball.
What makes Strikers Charged the very best game in this list, though, is how that tactical play is enhanced through Super Abilities and Mega Strikes, AKA the greatest gimmicks ever introduced to a Mario sports game. Abilities like Yoshi turning into a giant egg and flattening people across the pitch, or Bowser setting players on fire, or Petey Piranha spraying mud in every direction provides a variety of incredibly silly, yet highly tactical opportunities. The Mega Strikes, meanwhile, increase the level of hype around the proceedings, triggering a cut scene and allowing you to score up to six goals in one go. This is a great arcade soccer game, but Super Mario Strikers Charged is also completely out of its mind, and it’s that wonderful blend that makes a Mario sports game truly great.
And those are our picks for the very best Mario sports games. Did we get a hole in one, or have we suffered a triple bagel? Let us know your thoughts and favourites in the comments.
After last year’s swashbuckling Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii triumphantly hoisted the black flag, this year developer Ryu Ga Gotoku has set its sights on elevating the Yakuza series’ black sheep. While well-received critically upon its original 2009 release, Yakuza 3’s sluggish combat and uneven story pacing has seen it age about as well as leftover sashimi, leaving it to linger at the back of the pack while the Like a Dragon series has pushed forward into exciting turn-based twists and experimental spin-offs. Yakuza Kiwami 3 & Dark Ties, then, is a much-needed retooling that ratchets up the fun factor of its fighting and smooths out most of its unwanted story creases, resulting in an enjoyable return to the largely underused island setting of Okinawa – even if not all of its changes and additions were powerful enough to uppercut me off my feet.
Although it received an HD remaster in 2019, I must admit I haven’t revisited Yakuza 3 since it first debuted on PlayStation 3 because I couldn’t bear the thought of once again battling my way through its annoyingly block-happy hordes. The bulk of Yakuza 3’s enemies were so stubbornly resilient to Kazuma Kiryu’s attacks that getting further than a few hits into a combo was a struggle; instead of gleefully breaking jaws, Yakuza 3’s fighting felt more like painfully pulling teeth.
Thankfully, that has all changed with Kiwami 3, which dramatically speeds up enemy encounters and endows Kiryu with two flexible fighting styles to cover all his thug-bashing bases. His default stance is classic Dragon of Dojima, a mix of satisfyingly weighty combo attacks and wrestling-style grapples that hit harder than a shotgunned can of Suntory Highball. As entertaining as that is, however, I found myself largely relying on his secondary stance, which arms him with eight different weapons. Those range from the baton-like tonfa to inflict stun, a pair of scythes to inflict bleed, brass knuckles to break guards, a shield to deflect blades and bullets, and a pair of nunchucks to regularly look like a total badarse with.
It’s a versatile and violent fighting style that transforms Kiryu into a lightning-fast, leisure suit-wearing shinobi, and it’s supremely intuitive to pick up. There’s no manual weapon switching or inventory management to fiddle with, since everything in his sharp-edged arsenal is triggered by a seamless combination of tapping and holding the three main attack buttons, allowing you to go from slapping a group of gangsters with a wooden boat oar to flinging a pointy pair of sai at their throat without even the slightest pause in the action. The original Yakuza 3 may have ultimately had more weapons to choose from, but given how quickly they would break I rarely bothered to actually use them, and thus I found Kiwami 3’s Swiss Army Knife-style fighting stance a vastly improved method for dealing out wanton destruction using the contents of a Ninja Turtle’s toy chest.
Kiwami 3’s Swiss Army Knife-style fighting stance [is] a vastly improved method for dealing out wanton destruction using the contents of a Ninja Turtle’s toy chest.
Kiwami 3’s combat doesn’t just feel smoother and more satisfying, it looks a lot flashier too. As was the case with the previous Kiwami remakes, Kiwami 3’s visual design has been boosted to bring it inline with the more modern entries, from the vastly improved character models to the firework-like particle effects that spark off Kiryu’s furious fists. This aesthetic overhaul extends to the environments too, and I was particularly pleased to explore the remodelled slice of Okinawa that features heavily in Kiwami 3’s opening half, since it’s a region that’s rarely been revisited in subsequent Yakuza and Like a Dragon adventures. Its sun-kissed coastal town vibes contrast nicely with Kamurocho’s hustle and bustle, making it akin to Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth’s Hawaii – albeit on a significantly smaller scale.
What’s the Story, Morning Glory?
While Kiwami 3 broadly retains the same outline of the original game’s story, which centres on a spiteful turf war in Okinawa, the developers have treated the plot like a street thug and given it a good punch up. In the original Yakuza 3, certain chapters confined Kiryu to the Morning Glory orphanage he runs for lengthy periods of time, presenting precious little beyond slowly paging through text-based conversations with its pint-sized residents. Thankfully, Kiwami 3’s structure has been reshuffled to make these sleepy seaside sections entirely optional beyond an initial set of mandatory tutorials, meaning you now have the choice of either taking the time to forge bonds with these little Okinawan Oliver Twists, or just hurrying back to black-belting the Pocari Sweat out of every mobster yakuzin’ for a bruisin’ in the world outside the orphanage’s walls.
If you’d have given me the option of skipping these slice of life segments in the original Yakuza 3 I’d likely have taken it, yet surprisingly in Kiwami 3 I found myself growing more invested in the plight of Morning Glory’s munchkins than I ever did before. That’s thanks to a smart use of snackable mini-games that transform humdrum domestic chores into stimulating diversions. You can complete the kids’ algebra homework against the clock, go spearfishing for flounder and then transform those ingredients into a meal in an energetic burst of Cooking Mama-inspired culinary chaos, or, my personal favourite, steer a sewing machine needle around a Super Hang-On style circuit made of fabric in a delirious bout of high-speed hemming that regularly left both me and the handcrafted tote bag onscreen in stitches. As I ticked off each enjoyable household task, I found myself bonding with these little wide-eyed waifs in a more organic manner. That meant the stakes felt appropriately heightened later on when Kiryu’s criminal past inevitably catches up with him.
That’s not to say that Kiwami 3 completely sharpens the original’s storytelling, and there are still some of the series’ signature attention span-stretching conversation cutscenes present here – including one marathon meeting room exposition dump in its ninth chapter that’s so comically drawn out it actually gives you the option of taking regular breaks for Kiryu to stretch his legs by walking around a tiny office he can’t leave. There’s also a surprising twist in Kiwami 3’s post-credits epilogue that will likely raise a few eyebrows among series purists (though was really neither here nor there for me), but by and large Kiwami 3’s main story has been reworked for the better and it kept me hooked for the 17 hours it took me to reach its cathartic, combat-heavy climax.
Japanesey Rider
Elsewhere Kiryu goes from playing daddy to slaying baddies in Kiwami 3’s other major addition to its main story, Bad Boy Dragon. This biker gang-based riff on the Devil Flags subquest from Pirate Yakuza tasks Kiryu with rescuing new recruits from bullies on the streets, splitting them into squads, and accompanying them into large scale clashes against other rival leather-clad clubs, from the easybeats of Okinawa’s streets to the more fierce fighters from Tokyo’s Night Terrors outfit. In between battles you can hold gang rallies to boost the XP of your members, customise your gang colours, and invest in special attacks to unleash in a scrap, from humble hand grenades to spectacularly silly stampeding bulls.
However, Bad Boy Dragon’s novelty wore off far sooner for me than Pirate Yakuza’s equivalent seafaring mode did, because Kiwami 3’s gang-based brawler is considerably more repetitive by comparison. Whereas Pirate Yakuza featured a healthy mixture of cannon-based naval warfare and on-land scraps, Bad Boy Dragon is mostly just a series of samey skirmishes held in copy-and-pasted warehouses that quickly blur into each other. Despite the fact you’re in a biker gang, there’s very little actual biking to be done – you can’t get stuck into Road Rash-style battles on Tokyo’s expressway like in Lost Judgment, for example. Kiryu’s chopper is strictly used to rapidly ferry him between the four squads under his command before resuming the button-mashed biker beatdowns. Bad Boy Dragon ultimately feels a little half-baked – if you’re going to build a mode around biker gangs, you really need to go the whole chrome-covered hog.
Still, even though I parked Kiwami 3’s biker mode fairly early on, I found plenty of other things to do outside of the main story. In one moment I’d be struggling to deliver towering ice cream cones through streets lined with waddling sumo wrestlers, while in another I’d be customising my 2007-era flip phone with dangling tchotchkes to boost Kiryu’s health and damage. Later I found myself posing as a host at a cabaret club and disappointing the customers with terrible jokes, as well as indulging in optional mainstays like karaoke and the baseball batting cage. Sure, at this point a lot of these amusements have been repurposed more than the fabric of Marge Simpson’s pink Chanel suit, but I was pleased to find that collectible Game Gear games have been included for the first time in the series – even if it is a bit odd that handheld Sega classics like Columns and Sonic Chaos can only be played back at Kiryu’s hideout rather than pulled out of his pocket on the fly. (Perhaps that’s a tacit admission that the Game Gear’s godawful battery life made portable play too impractical?)
Admittedly I was surprised to find the substory count in Kiwami 3 had been whittled down to 31 from the original game’s 100 or so, but then I remembered how many of Yakuza 3’s optional quests were just clones of the same small handful of ideas. Kiwami 3’s substories focus on quality over quantity, and I have no objections to that approach.
The Ties that Grind
Outside of its remodelled main campaign, Kiwami 3 features an entirely new story mode called Dark Ties, which puts the player into the shoes of the sharply dressed and amusingly sardonic antagonist, Yoshitaka Mine. Dark Ties explores Mine’s first steps into the Tokyo underworld, his reluctant alliance with the lecherous Tojo clan heavy Tsuyoshi Kanda, and the complex motivations behind his devastating actions in Kiwami 3’s main campaign. It also allows us to let loose with his ferocious ‘shoot-boxing’ fighting style, which blends fast flurries of punches with acrobatic flip-kicks and the ability to pinball off one enemy and completely redirect your attack towards another to seamlessly continue your combo. He can also unleash devastating ‘Dark Awakening’ special attacks, such as spiking an enemy’s skull into the ground and dragging their faces along the pavement like a bloodied bowling ball.
Mine is limited to the one fighting stance, however, and his skill tree is stumpier than a yakuza’s left pinkie. That’s because his quest simply doesn’t last long enough to allow room for any real evolution of his abilities. Dark Ties has been marketed as a fully-fledged game in its own right, but that seems slightly disingenuous given it only features three chapters versus Kiwami 3’s 12, restricts the action to the same Kamarucho setting that Yakuza fans know better than the calluses on the back of their face-mashing fists, and pits you against just two bosses in two fights a piece.
To be fair, it still took me just over five hours to roll credits in Dark Ties, but that runtime didn’t feel as substantial as it sounds since Mine’s mode regularly gates its story missions behind the arbitrary completion of agonisingly menial tasks. During Dark Ties’ prolonged middle chapter in particular, the advancement of Mine’s story is dependent on performing good deeds for Kamarucho locals in order to slowly boost the reputation of his unlikeable cohort Kanda. A few of these are genuinely entertaining, like being asked to pose as a bouncer outside an adults-only club and evaluating the clientele, but the bulk of them are boring chores like legging it to the nearest convenience store and back so that you can bring a hungry man a bento box.
Dark Ties has been marketed as a fully-fledged game in its own right, but that seems slightly disingenuous.
Tasks like these are made all the more arduous given that Mine isn’t equipped with the same segway-like Street Surfer that Kiryu can whip out on a whim to speed things along in Kiwami 3. I wanted to enjoy Mine’s calculated ascension towards the top of the Tojo clan, but for extended periods, Dark Ties made me feel less like a dragon and more like a dogsbody.
Mine does have one ace up his pinstriped-suit sleeve, however, and that’s the dungeon-brawling roguelike minigame unique to his adventure. Dubbed ‘Survival Hell’ – despite the fact that ‘Roguelike a Dragon’ was sitting right there – this strictly-timed dash for cash and collectibles takes place across five underground arenas, each consisting of four floors of increasingly challenging goons and culminating in an imposing boss fight. Die during a run and you lose it all, but each floor has an optional exit point should you wish to bank your winnings early and invest them into buffs like special weapons and CPU-controlled bodyguards to better your chances of survival on subsequent runs. It’s compelling, chaotic, and stuffed with countless surprises. Having rolled credits on both Kiwami 3 and Dark Ties, Survival Hell is the one feature of either story that is still calling me back for more.
Helldivers 2’s next big update, Machinery of Oppression, launches the Battle for Cyberstan, and sees players head to the alien homeworld and take on the Cyborgs, a new Automaton-adjacent enemy type that’s set to usher in a new round of terror — and chaos — to Arrowhead’s explosive third-person shooter.
Machinery of Oppression also triggers the next big narrative beat in the Galactic War’s ongoing meta narrative, a community-driven story that has captivated fans ever since Helldivers 2 set PlayStation sales records two years ago.
Two years ago! Where has the time gone? For the developers at Arrowhead, the launch and ongoing development of Helldivers 2 has been something of a rollercoaster, with ups and downs dominated by community love and hate. But now, as Helldivers 2 enters its third year, Arrowhead is coming to understand the game it has on its hands, and how to fuel the live-service beast in a sustainable way while keeping player numbers healthy. Steam concurrents are there for all the world to see, and even now, they are in a good place.
So what happens next? The Battle for Cyberstan is yet another player-directed update. Players will take Cyberstan, or they will fail — Arrowhead doesn’t know how it’s going to go. But can Arrowhead make meaningful updates to Helldivers 2 beyond the sort of things we’ve seen in the last two years? In December, Johan Pilestedt [CCO of Arrowhead and creative director on Helldivers 2], talked about the possibility of a Helldivers 2 rogue-lite mode. But can the developers expand the scope of the game to, say, increase the squad count? Increase the number of players in a squad? Release bigger maps?
Ideas aren’t the problem, of course. The problem, as with everything, is time, energy, and ideas. But, as game director Mikael Eriksson tells me in the interview below, these sorts of game-changing updates are being worked on. They are possible. And, he insists, the future of Helldivers 2 is bright indeed.
IGN: Players have spent the week marching towards Cyberstan and they have tanks as well. I know you have big ambitions for how this new update will let the community direct the events of the Galactic War in an even more direct way than before, but how exactly will it work?
Mikael Eriksson: February 10, that’s when Super Earth will commence the battle for Cyberstan. And you’re right, this is the most ambitious one yet for us. One of the central points of Helldivers is that we play the game together with the community, and the actions of the community are not known to us and the outcomes are not predetermined. This has been the case since launch, but of course we’ve tried to expand on this with almost every update to make this more impactful, and to make it more obvious what the different outcomes are and what the consequences will be.
We still have many ambitious plans on how to expand on this even further, but for this time, the Battle for Cyberstan, will be the most ambitious one yet with a new type of meta gameplay. So it would be much more clear now for players what the consequences would be depending on how they choose to tackle this. So they can attack the planet from many different angles and it would be very obvious when players get there, what the consequences are and what’s at stake.
But again, the outcome is not predetermined, so we don’t know what will happen. Players can win and players can lose, and it’s going to be super fun to see that play out. Last time, with the Battle for Super Earth, which I think was maybe the biggest one before this, we also didn’t know. Eventually players actually managed to defend Super Earth, which was super cool to see. Following that was pure fun for everyone at the office except for maybe the Game Master who was sweating a little bit, but for everyone else it was fun to see.
IGN: Are you suggesting significant differences between outcomes this time around in a way that players haven’t seen before, where things you might have created for one outcome just might never see the light of day?
Mikael Eriksson: I want to make sure to set the right expectations here. Our primary inspiration for the Galactic War is tabletop role-playing games. And in tabletop role-playing games — for anyone who’s played this — they know that there’s a story that you can follow. This story is basically set, and the Game Master tells this story, but the players engage with the story in different ways and they create memories together, really powerful memories together that they share. It’s a shared fantasy that they have. And this is unique, because how things play out in the tabletop role-playing game is not predetermined, but you take these memories with you and they can be and often are very powerful.
I would say that what we’re aiming for with Helldivers is similar, where we do want things to be consequential, and the type of consequences that we talk about is, for one, the story plays out in a way that we don’t know, and this is up to the players to determine, or the story outcomes I should say, because we have the story that we’re telling, we know what’s going to happen. We know that players will now go to Cyberstan, but we don’t know how it will play out. We don’t know if they will win. We don’t know if they will lose. And there will be impacts on the Galactic War level. So the story that is being written in the Galactic War will change depending on what they do. And it can be quite consequential. Planets can get destroyed to never be able to be played on again. That sort of thing can happen. Or they don’t get destroyed. This has happened in the past. Players have even voted to blow up planets, and they show us what to do.
So what we are trying to do is we’re trying to go as deep as we can, and deeper with every update, into this kind of experience where it really feels impactful on the meta layer, where you can see afterwards on the Galactic War screen. You can see it only looks like this because of all the actions that we took. But then there’s of course additional things that we’re talking about, which is impactful and persistent gameplay changes as well.
So we’re playing a little bit with all kinds of things here for this experience, and I don’t want to spoil things so players will know what I’m talking about as soon as they’re fighting this battle. But for the future, the summary of what we’re doing is that we really want to have persistent story changes depending on community actions, and also persistent Galactic War consequences that you would be able to see and shape for all future time, and also tie rewards and actual gameplay differences to these things as well. That’s the more high-level goal. And I think it is one of the most fun things with this game, the stories that the players create together when they interact with this game. I do think that’s extremely powerful and it’s one of the most fun things that we do with this game.
IGN: So are you looking to improve how the game itself helps players understand their role in the Galactic War and how they impact it?
Mikael Eriksson: Yeah. Okay, so I’ll jump ahead a little bit. Even though I do think that we make strides in this direction with this upcoming update, the one that’s going live right now, I also agree completely with what you’re saying. As a new player or even an experienced player, when you come into the game, it can be confusing. What’s happening in fact right now? For what reason? What’s the context? Do I have to understand the full Galactic War to be able to understand this? Or is it okay if I just understand the current event? This can be quite tricky for players, and this is not what we want. So I can openly say that we are actively working on getting to a point where regardless of if you’re new or if you’re experienced, you should just be able to get into the game and understand very easily exactly what’s happening and why we’re fighting the fight that we’re doing right now. And additionally and more importantly for me, what the consequences are, or rather what’s at stake. So that’s something that we are actively working on. It’s one of the key things and key focuses for upcoming updates. So I’m happy to say that this is a really big part of what we’re focusing on for the future.
IGN: It must be an interesting design challenge for you to maintain what makes Helldivers special, but also accommodate people who are either newcomers or returning players who haven’t played for a while in a gameplay sense?
Mikael Eriksson: Yeah. I think one of the strengths of Helldivers is that it is very easy to understand the fantasy and get into it quickly. You can watch the opening cinematic with our John Helldiver character — named by the community — you can watch that and you can get it immediately. Then you can just participate in the fantasy and have fun. And we never want to stray away from that. We never want to get to a point where we’ve built so much complexity into the game that it’s a real uphill battle to get into it. That’s not what we want to do.
We of course think a lot about this. Players will leave for a while and then will return, and we think it’s very important that when they return, they can very easily get back into it and they can participate in this epic fantasy together and create these great memories that they can then bring with them for, I mean, ideally their entire lives. We want to believe that we actually add real value to the lives of real people. And so we do not want this to feel like an uphill battle.
With this new update, I do think that it will be quite straightforward what the goals are. Everyone’s marching towards Cyberstan and there will be an epic battle on Cyberstan, and I do think it’s going to be easy to understand what the stakes are and what’s at play. But yes, for every coming update that we’re going to do now, this will increasingly be a focus. So that should always be easy to get into and always be easy to understand.
IGN: Last month Johan Pilestedt [CCO of Arrowhead and creative director on Helldivers 2], talked about a rogue-lite mode casually on Twitter as if it was nothing. I’d love to pick your brains about what’s going on there.
Mikael Eriksson: Rogue-lite is a very big umbrella. I’m always happy when the community is active and speculating and coming up with ideas and just participating in the conversation. We have a really awesome community, so the more the merrier, keep it coming! I’m very happy about all this.
Rogue-lite, very big umbrella. A lot of people hear it and a lot of them have different opinions about what this sort of means. What I can say is with this new update, players will see that there’s at least some similarities to rogue-lite with how the meta game plays out on Cyberstan. There’s going to be some elements there that the players will think are quite interesting. But tempering expectations here, it’s not full rogue-lite. We do draw some inspiration from that in some aspects with this new updates.
For the future, here’s what I’ll say without confirming anything: we are experimenting with many different game modes. I can tackle it actually from this direction with this game: we want to basically offer all kinds of experiences that make sense in this universe. The way I view this game is I view it as a living universe. It’s actually out there, where things are happening and players can be invaded from nowhere with an enemy that they didn’t anticipate and so forth. And in this kind of universe, it makes sense that it would have an impact on what you choose to do. So if you choose to defend one planet or you choose to do a mission on this specific location, that should have an impact that should be persistent, and you should carry that with you to the next mission in the operation and so forth.
So I do think that with the game that we have right now, it’s actually not as consequential as it would actually be in this actual universe. Do you see what I’m saying? So it makes sense to draw inspiration from that kind of game in our universe, not because we want to emulate any other game, but rather because yeah, this actually does make sense in our universe. So for that reason, we are experimenting with all of these different kind of modes, but it’s coming from a place of, how do we make sure that this game delivers on the promise that this game is, to deliver on this universe and everything that makes sense within it? That’s why we choose to go to Cyberstan. Of course, in this universe, Super Earth should be able to attack the enemy home planets, right? You couldn’t do that when we launched the game, but of course we should be able to do that.
And of course that home planet should look different and play different from if we are being invaded, or if we’re playing out in an open landscape. And of course it should make a difference if the battle goes very quickly or if it takes a long time. There’s also a resource war going on. We don’t have to build a super advanced strategic game, but we still need to stay true to this fantasy. So yeah, there’s a lot of stuff that we still want to do, and we’re exploring many things, but it’s all coming from a place of how do we deliver on the full promise of what this game is and what it should be.
IGN: Helldivers 2 is two years old now. Do you have a better understanding of what Helldivers 2 is, how to work on it, how to meet community demands? Do you feel like you’ve gotten to a place that is better for you guys as well as players? How would you assess the state of things now?
Mikael Eriksson: When we launched the game, we were not really used to being a live-service studio of this size and with an audience of this size either. So we were really finding our way in this new environment. We’ve come to a point now after many ups and downs where we’re starting to really find our identity as a live-service studio that is in it for the long haul. We can have this conversation again when Helldivers 2 is 10-years-old! We can talk about it then! But that’s where we’re going. We’re in it for the long run. And I do think it’s getting way more stable. So we still have some issues lingering in the game, but we’re dealing with them one at a time. And I really believe that the future is looking bright and that we can get away from the really big ups and downs. Hopefully we’re looking at this year being the most stable and most predictable yet I think in terms of just quality of our updates, and to be able to deliver a consistently smooth experience to players. So I’m very happy with where we are heading, and I really do believe that the future is very bright for Helldivers in this year and many years to come.
And it’s also super fun. Working on Helldivers as a live-service game is just bliss, because it’s such an interesting universe, endless possibilities, and we have many, many ideas that have yet to come to fruition. And I just want to see what the future holds and stick around for long enough to build everything that we want to build. That’s what I’m hyped about.
IGN: Would Helldivers 2 need a significant tech overhaul, almost like a tech rebuild, for you to implement really game-changing systems and mechanics? The first two years we’ve seen great updates. You’ve added new vehicles, various new weapons, strategems, new planets of course. But I mean to the point where it would be considered significantly game-changing — if you’re talking about a 10-year plan, something really attention grabbing that fundamentally changed the way the games works — would it need something like that to support it? Or do you feel like the way the game is now could support those game changing updates?
Mikael Eriksson: I think what I can say there is that when we launched, we had to prove to ourselves and everyone that we had a good formula for live-service games. So you’re right that we have added a lot of really interesting, cool updates and I think that we have a good formula. We are doing what we call ‘good FOMO,’ that’s what I call it at least, where we do these really cool updates where the outcomes are not predetermined and the community comes together, and they really love it, we really love it, and it’s super fun to play with them. And so we got to a point where, alright, we believe that we have something that works and we have many awesome plans for the future — this being one of them with The Machine of Oppression. And you’re right that we’ve had these tech issues lingering in the meantime that we’ve had to deal with. I won’t speak to any sort of tech overhaul that we need to do or not, but what I can say is that we’ve invested heavily into tech improvements over the last year, and these things can sometimes take a while to cook, but we’ve already managed to, for example, reduce the fight size by over 100GBs on PC.
So that was a massive win for us, and there’s many other initiatives that’s happening. We brought many more people in to work on these tech performance improvements. More is to come with every other update. I really do believe that we would be in a better place. And we fully intend to keep developing our tech and keep building on it to allow for even more things in the game, more variety of the sort that we struggle to do now because we are limited by tech. So yeah, we’re committed and we are spending a lot of time and effort just working on these improvements.
IGN: Helldivers 2, you are a single squad of four players that drops down onto a planet and goes about its business and escapes having completed various objectives, and it’s wonderful fun, I absolutely love it. But when I’m talking about the previous question, it’s setting up the idea that that scope could be significantly expanded. What if there were two squads competing against each other in some way or working together in some way? What if there were three squads? What if a squad was bigger? Or the play space was bigger as a result? And that sort of tech question comes from a place of wondering about whether those sorts of things are possible in the current Helldivers 2, or it would require significant work to be able to enable those things. That’s more what I was getting at with the previous question, but it’d be great to get your take on that.
Mikael Eriksson: One of the best things about working with this game is that the cool things that you can do in this universe are kind of obvious, at least many of them are. So having multiple squads working together, or bigger squads, or way more enemies, or way more friendly NPCs by your side, like with the SEAF soldiers that we have in the Super Earth cities, these are things that we know — at least we think we know — can be super cool. What I’ll say is of course we’re experimenting with this and we do have grand plans in this sort of area.
Getting the game to be a consistently smooth experience for everyone is a number one priority. This has to be the case across all platforms and on the recommended specs for PC, on the lower end hardware and so forth. That will be the first priority and that’s what we’re doing first. But then yes, we are of course looking into how to expand the game in ways that is not currently possible with, for example, more players and so forth. But I really want to make this clear: I’m not promising anything or announcing anything with that. But what I want to emphasize is, we are working with a game that has these quite obvious things that you would want to test, me included. And I’m very hyped about pushing this game to say, okay, what can it be? It comes back to the delivering of the fantasy of this game is delivering on the promise of this universe. That’s where we keep going, and we want to keep going for many years. And assuming that we can do that, then I’m sure that there will be many, many things of this sort that will come up as we go into the future.
Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.
PlayStation will stream a major State of Play broadcast this week, featuring over an hour of news and reveals, including the latest updates from its own teams within PlayStation Studios.
The event will be held this Thursday, February 12 at 2pm Pacific / 5pm Eastern / 10pm UK time — and as ever, IGN will be reporting live.
Sony has said that the broadcast will run to “60+ minutes” — suggesting fans have a meaty show to look forward to. But what could PlayStation have up its sleeves?
Sony’s last major State of Play broadcast, held back in September 2025, finally treated fans to a good look at Marvel’s Wolverine, which is in development by the talented team behind the console’s various Spider-Man titles: PlayStation studio Insomniac Games. Other games showcased included Saros, the next project from Returnal studio Housemarque, as well as third-party titles such as Battlefield 6 and Nioh 3.
PlayStation fans will certainly be keen to see more of Wolverine and Saros, and potentially discover a release date for the former. We’re also likely to see something of Bungie’s long-delayed Marathon, which will finally arrive on March 5 — less than a month away.
Saros has already been dated for April 30, though currently all we know for certain of Wolverine’s arrival is that he’ll land in the second half of this year. (With GTA 6 due on November 16, it’ll likely be earlier, and well clear of that.) Last week, a tease from Insomniac Games hinted at Wolverine meeting Daredevil in the game.
Third-party games set for PS5 in the coming months include Capcom’s Monster Hunter Stories 3 and Pragmata, which just got a showing in Nintendo’s Partner Direct, Square Enix’s climactic Life is Strange Reunion, Hitman developer IO Interactive’s 007 First Light and Lego Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight from Warner Bros. Games.
The confirmation of a State of Play this week will mean that all three major platform holders will have held some form of announcement broadcast within the first six weeks of 2026 — though Nintendo fans still hope there is a dedicated first-party Nintendo Direct also waiting in the wings with more news on the company’s own games (and perhaps a new 3D Mario).
For now, though, join us here on IGN for all of the news and reveals from this week’s State of Play in just a few days.
Tom Phillips is IGN’s News Editor. You can reach Tom at tom_phillips@ign.com or find him on Bluesky @tomphillipseg.bsky.social
Epic Games has hit back at claims it made “provably incorrect statements” about controversial horror game Horses, and instead insisted it was transparent with developer Santa Ragione about its inability to sell the game via the Epic Games Store as planned.
Horses, the indie horror game banned from both Steam and the Epic Games Store ahead of its launch in December 2025, is an indie first-person horror game with live-action sequences set in a horse farm. Over the course of 14 days, it “welcomes you into encounters that test your obedience, complicity, and restraint.” The player experiences “the farm’s unspeakable horrors through daily unique interactions,” as they must “withstand 14 days of spiraling dread as the reality of the farm unfolds.”
Horses was first banned from Steam two years ago after the team submitted an in-progress prototype. While some feedback was provided, Santa Ragione insists that no specifics were shared with the team at the time, nor was there an opportunity to appeal. It was banned again in December due to its disturbing imagery, and while violent and sexual content is hardly new for either Steam or Epic, Santa Ragione took issue with what it deemed to be censorship, calling for “clearer rules, transparent processes, and meaningful accountability from near monopolistic distribution platforms and the systems they enforce.”
Fast-forward to this past weekend, and Santa Ragione posted a statement refuting Epic VP Steve Allison’s comment that said “we love [its] studio,” blasting the firm for “refus[ing] to provide details supporting their claims,” and accusing Epic of making “provably incorrect statements about the game’s content.”
“Epic made provably incorrect statements about the game’s content, refused to provide details supporting their claims, and has not shared their claimed AO IARC certificate, which normally includes a link for the developer to appeal,” the studio posted in response to an interview with Game File. “They do not ‘love that studio’, they have effectively ghosted us.”
“The fact that the game does not deserve an AO rating is apparent from the widely available full walkthroughs on YouTube and Twitch, as well as from its distribution on the Humble Store.”
Epic Games, however, has remained adamant that the game violated the Epic Games Store’s Content Guidelines. In a statement to IGN, Epic Games’ senior communications manager, Brian Sharon, said: “Our team played the game and found it violated the Epic Games Store’s Content Guidelines, specifically the ‘Inappropriate Content’ and ‘Hateful or Abusive Content’ policies.
“We did a secondary check by filling out the ratings questionnaire for the game ourselves and the content got an Adults Only (AO) rating — which we do not allow on the Store. Because this wasn’t an official submission, we do not have a certificate to share with the team. We did give the developers context around the policies they violated. When they appealed, we reviewed the content again, and let them know the decision was appropriately applied and will remain in place.”
Despite the distribution issues, Horses has managed to sell over 18,000 copies. Though that’s not enough for the publisher to fund a new game, it says it has been able to generate $65,000 in net revenue by mid-December, which was enough to pay off loans and settle royalties owned to creator Andrea Lucco Borlera. Our own reviewer gave it a 7/10, calling it “an affecting first-person horror game that, despite some repetitive tasks and signposting issues, delivers a harrowing story you won’t forget in a hurry.”
Vikki Blake is a reporter for IGN, as well as a critic, columnist, and consultant with 15+ years experience working with some of the world’s biggest gaming sites and publications. She’s also a Guardian, Spartan, Silent Hillian, Legend, and perpetually High Chaos. Find her at BlueSky.
Pirates of the Caribbean director Gore Verbinski has said that his scrapped BioShock film adaptation would have somehow included both of the original game’s endings to mess with the audience’s heads.
Verbinski was attached to make a movie version of the beloved game back in 2008 alongside Universal Studios, with a script in place from Gladiator and Skyfall scribe John Logan.
Alas, the project never materialized due to lengthy wrangling over its planned $200 million budget — deemed risky due to it also aiming for an adults-only R rating. Verbinski has previously said the movie came within eight weeks of shooting, before plans faltered. Work continued to try and get the film financed for several more years, though BioShock creator Ken Levine confirmed the project had been fully cancelled by 2013.
“I loved this project when we were getting close to making it at Universal,” Verbinski has said now, discussing the project in a reddit Q&A. “I was going to dive deeply into the Oedipal aspect and definitely keep it hard R with the Little Sisters, and the ‘choices’ the protagonist makes… and the consequences.
“I had worked out a way with writer John Logan to have both endings and I was looking forward to bringing that to the big screen and really f***ing with people’s heads,” he continued. “[We] had some great designs for the Big Daddies and the entire underwater demented art-deco aesthetic. Every year I hear something about the project, but I’m not sure any studio is quite willing to go where I was headed.”
The original BioShock has two endings, based on the player’s choices to either rescue or sacrifice the game’s Little Sisters — and the two very different outcomes you get based on your level of mercy. The game’s ‘happy’ ending — seen if you rescue every Little Sister — rewards the hero with a long life and the surviving sisters present on his eventual deathbed. However, if you harvest any Little Sister, your character is shown instead having influenced Rapture’s citizens to believe that power is all that matters. An ominous final cutscene then shows what looks to be a nuclear submarine being taken over in an attack.
The two endings are pretty different, then — a long and happy life or potential nuclear apocalypse — and it’s unclear exactly how Verbinski’s movie would have shown both. Could one have been a dream sequence, showing what might have been the alternative outcome? Or would the movie have presented audiences with two possible futures, and left viewers unclear as to which actually played out?
The later BioShock Infinite played on the multiverse theory (“there’s always a lighthouse”!) but it’s worth pointing out that this was still years away at the point of Verbinski being involved. Still, it’s fun to ponder how an adaptation might treat the game’s two endings now. Especially as plans to adapt BioShock have since resumed — with Netflix now involved in a potential adaptation.
Netflix announced plans for a fresh adaptation back in 2022, though recent years have seen the project stall again, as cuts changed the scope of the movie, necessitating changes to its script. In September 2025, producer Roy Lee confirmed the project is still in active development, with director Francis Lawrence on board to direct after finishing his work on the forthcoming The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping.
“It’s a tricky adaptation, so there’s lots of things to figure out and to get right,” Lawrence told IGN previously. “There’s regime changes at Netflix, and so things stall out and get re-energized and stall out and get re-energized, and I think we’re in a pretty good place, honestly.”
Back in the world of video games, 2K confirmed last summer that it had overhauled the similarly long-awaited BioShock 4, which has been in development for the last decade. Amid layoffs and a further delay to the project’s release, former Gears of War head and Diablo franchise lead Rod Fergusson will now oversee the project. Fergusson will also head up the game’s development studio Cloud Chamber, as it attempts to finally wrestle the project to release.
Tom Phillips is IGN’s News Editor. You can reach Tom at tom_phillips@ign.com or find him on Bluesky @tomphillipseg.bsky.social
More details of the unannounced Rayman remake have bubbled up again, this time from the creator of Rayman himself, Michel Ancel.
In a new interview with RetroGamer, Ancel discussed the secret project, confirming that rather than a remaster that simply presents the same game with slightly snazzier visuals, the re-release — which Ancel calls a “remake” — will also address some of the original platformer’s pain-points, including additional checkpoints to “make it a bit less frustrating.”
“I think Rayman is still a fun game, and there’s a lot of content,” Ancel said in the interview that was shared by fan account, Rayman Merchandise. “The pacing is a bit slow because you have a big character on the screen. It also has pixel-precise gameplay, so it’s not always easy, but it’s interesting that the constraints of yesterday make it still feel original today. Even though it’s complex, I think there’s a kind of remake planned.”
NEWS: Series creator Michel Ancel reveals in a new Retro Gamer article that Rayman 1 will be receiving an HD rerelease! This follows previous reports of a “Rayman 30th Anniversary Edition” being rated. (I apologize for the new post; my prior post was incorrectly worded) pic.twitter.com/jzKlTg6on3
“I don’t remember when specifically, but it will be in HD and I think Ubisoft is adding a few more checkpoints and things like that just to make it a bit less frustrating. I think it’s a nice move, because that’s the only point that could be a problem for non-skilled players. But yeah, I think it’s still a very nice game.”
“Rayman turns 30! Join us on our official channels to celebrate an incredible legacy,” the account exclaimed at the time, attaching a brief video. In the video, brand producer Loic Gounon — who has been working on the Rayman franchise since 2006 — revealed that “a very talented team at Ubisoft Montpellier and Ubisoft Milan are currently working together on the future of Rayman.”
Back in October 2024, Ubisoft confirmed a new Rayman project was currently in the “exploration phase” at its Montpelier and Milan studios, after it was reported that Ancel had been contacted to act as a consultant.
Ubisoft began this year by announcing a sizable company restructure, resulting in the cancelation of six games, including its Prince of Persia: Sands of Time remake, and a delay to a further seven titles. Two Ubisoft studios will close completely as a result of the changes, while others are subject to further layoffs.
Of the half-dozen games that have been fully scrapped, Ubisoft only publicly named one: its long-awaited Sands of Time remake that had been rebooted once already. Three of the other canceled games were new IPs, while one was a mobile game. We’ve received no specific details of the seven titles that Ubisoft has delayed, either, though this number does include the unannounced game once set for launch before March 31 that is widely expected to be the company’s Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag remaster. This will now launch in the coming financial year — so before March 31, 2027. With Ubisoft’s core focus going forward being open-world and live-service games, it’s not clear how — if at all — a Rayman remake fits into those plans.
Ubisoft quietly released an NFT game featuring Rayman at the end of 2024, of course. Captain Laserhawk: The G.A.M.E. was barely advertised or given the kind of showy spotlight reserved for major releases, quite possibly because it’s a Web 3 game that uses cryptocurrency and blockchain. A top-down multiplayer shooter available on PC, it featured a number of Ubisoft characters, including Rayman.
Vikki Blake is a reporter for IGN, as well as a critic, columnist, and consultant with 15+ years experience working with some of the world’s biggest gaming sites and publications. She’s also a Guardian, Spartan, Silent Hillian, Legend, and perpetually High Chaos. Find her at BlueSky.
If Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater has been on your list to jump into, but you missed out on the holiday sales price drops, we have good news: Amazon’s currently offering its PS5 version for just $29.99 on both PS5 and Xbox (see it here). What a thrill, indeed.
When it was first released, Metal Gear Solid Delta was listed for $69.99, so this deal makes for 57% in savings overall. For a game we consider to be one of the best video game remakes of all time, that’s a discount worth making a move on. Head to the link below to scoop it up for your PlayStation or Xbox library while the deal is still available.
Alongside the base game, this version also includes the Sneaking DLC Pack, which comes with an array of gear for Snake to wear in the game. Here’s everything included:
Uniform: Battle Dress (PW ver.)
Uniform: Sneaking Suit (PW ver.)
Uniform: Crocodile Suit
Uniform: Naked (Woodland)
Uniform: Naked (Ammunition Belt)
Uniform: Gold
Face: Glasses
Face: Sunglasses
Equipment: Kerotan Mask
Equipment: GA-KO Mask
What is it that makes Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater stand out as one of the best video game remakes of all time, though? Well, it “collects together years of improvements and enhances them all with incredibly glossy modern graphics and an updated control system that finally turns Snake into the nimble operator he was always meant to be.”
Our review from IGN’s Michael Higham also highlighted that, “Between its old-school stealth-action gameplay and engaging spy-thriller story, Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater largely succeeds as a faithful, visually impressive remake of the 2004 classic.” If you’ve been on the hunt for a thrilling adventure to keep you occupied this winter, Snake Eater can provide. And what better time to grab it than when it’s on sale, too?
Hannah Hoolihan is a freelancer who writes with the guides and commerce teams here at IGN.
Pokémon’s promised ad spot at the Super Bowl just aired, and in it we got a glimpse into the Pokémon preferences of celebrities such as Lady Gaga, Trevor Noah, Charles Leclerc, and more.
The minute-long ad shows Lady Gaga, Trevor Noah, Formula One racer Charles Leclerc, singer Jisoo, actor Maitreyi Ramakrishnan, Spanish football (soccer, for the Americans) player Lamine Yamal and rapper Young Miko all describing their favorite Pokémon before eventually revealing them.
Lady Gaga (of course) picked Jigglypuff, and Jigglypuff even did a brief little duet with her singing its signature song. Trevor Noah prefers Psyduck, Leclerc chooses Arcanine, Jisoo picks Eevee, Ramakrishnan chooses Luxray, Yamal picks Zygarde, and Young Miko’s partner is Gengar. Shockingly, The Pokémon Company managed not to put Pikachu in this ad anywhere (except in the logo, of course)!
The ad ends with all the celebrities asking the audience, “What’s your favorite?” This question is the start of a year-long campaign put on by The Pokémon Company in celebration of its 30th anniversary. In addition to the ad, The Pokémon Company is kicking things off by introducing a new camera feature to Pokémon GO (which is somehow ten years old this year!) that allows users to participate in the campaign.
Additionally, The Pokémon Company has promised various events including “Day Out” and “Night Out” experiences designed for fans to celebrate Pokémon, with daytime events more family-focused and nighttime events more for adults who grew up with the series. The Pokémon Company has also already announced other celebratory events, such as a themed TCG collection and Pokemon LEGO sets.
Pokémon’s 30th is a big moment for the franchise, and we’re expecting them to celebrate in style. Historically Pokémon has thrown a big digital showcase entitled Pokémon Presents on or around Pokémon Day (February 27), where the company lays out its plans for the year across video games, the TCG, and merchandise. Fans are eagerly hoping for the announcement of a new Pokémon game, perhaps a remake of beloved DS games Black and White, or the kick-off for the next generation of Pokémon, Gen 10. Heck, at this point, I’d just be happy to have the classic games on Nintendo Switch Online!
Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. Got a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.
