Category: IGN

Right from the start, Wuthering Waves’ odd mix of swords, guns, and spirits caught my eye, somehow combining disparate ideas into a combat spectacle. This story-driven gacha RPG will have you twirling like a ballerina to dodge attacks before passing the baton to a teammate that then slams the enemy with a fish-like dragon. Unfortunately, while those flashy, fast-paced fights and the exciting parkour-like movement quickly endeared Wuthering Waves to me, it also failed to impress in a few other key areas – including a lackluster story that sometimes tempted me to use the skip button.

Wuthering Waves is all about action. Every character has an element and weapon type associated with them, as well as individual skills that you can level up. However, how you use those characters isn’t quite a copy-paste of similar action-RPGs like Genshin Impact. That’s thanks in part to the intro and outro skills that can be used when you swap between each character in your three-person team, which activate cool special attacks like triggering a fire-infused shootout. You also charge up a separate skill gauge by dishing out damage or successfully dodging and parrying enemy attacks, and these systems add an appreciated layer of strategy to how you build your party and when exactly to change teammates.

Characters also have unique combos you can activate during combat, all of which you can practice in dedicated tutorials for each one. To use them, you might need to press the same button four times, press and hold a button after performing a different attack, or jump in the air for an aerial attack before activating an alternate combo. It can take a bit to memorize those inputs, but doing so for your favorite fighters makes using them even more satisfying. It’s nice that Wuthering Waves encourages you to try them all out at least once, too, even offering some small rewards for your trouble.

All that nuance makes combat a lot of fun, though it stumbles a bit with its element system, which doesn’t feel like it contributes anything significant. None of the six elemental types inflict status effects like you might expect – fire doesn’t deal damage over time and ice doesn’t immobilize enemies, for example – so it doesn’t really matter if your character is Fusion (Fire) or Glacio (Ice). It’s the variation in their actual movesets that matter, and their different elements are essentially just color-coding. Those movesets still differ enough that experimenting with team comps feels fun, but it’s a little disappointing that a character could be any element and they would play essentially exactly the same way.

They could hit just as hard as well, assuming you can equip them with the right gear to raise their damage. Rather than using traditional equipment like helmets and gloves, you strengthen your characters with Echoes: animal-like companions that increase your attack, elemental damage, and so on. The strength of those buffs depend on how many of the same type you equip at once, and each Echo takes up some of the limited space in your equipment slots. These restrictions encouraged me to strategize about how I could squeeze the most benefit out of the space I had, even if that meant temporarily using Echoes with suboptimal stats. Tuning, the process of unlocking additional stats for Echoes, unlocks those stats at random. This makes optimizing Echoes more difficult to achieve, but I didn’t feel like it hindered things too much – it was more of a bonus rather than a necessity.

The best part about Echoes is how they tie into the environment. As you fight enemies and bosses, they will sometimes leave behind ghost-like shells of themselves for you to absorb and convert into Echoes. I felt more compelled to explore because finding different types of monsters could mean getting access to Echoes with new effects. Not only does this system reward you with interesting gear for your characters, it encourages you to fill out your map as you go. Capturing Echoes even gets you points in a collection tracking guidebook, as well as a battle pass full of rewards, so there are reasons to hunt them beyond just upping your stats. Gotta catch ‘em all!

The hunt for Echoes also motivated me to keep fighting enemies in the overworld, even if I could blow through them with a high-level team. Clearing out smaller enemies like this was especially satisfying when every part of the map was shiny and new. However, after playing over 30 hours of Wuthering Waves, bulldozing through the same enemies over and over does start to feel repetitive, even as I continue to discover new parts of the map. On the bright side, at least you can farm for Echoes as often as you want – that’s much nicer than Genshin Impact’s artifact system, which is locked behind a daily currency.

Even when I am happily farming, one part of Wuthering Waves that totally falls flat is its story. Developer Kuro Games has openly spoken about how it had to revamp the entire story ahead of launch, and it pains me to say it that the version we ultimately got still falls short, with uneven pacing and too much exposition. The beginning is full of unnatural, lengthy conversations that use cryptic terminology you need to look up in encyclopedias and loading screens to actually understand, and it doesn’t get any more compelling once you do.

Your main character follows the classic trope of an amnesiac protagonist that seemingly appears out of nowhere, with a generic story that revolves around the secret of their past. That can work if done right, but this setup feels confusing and undeserved because of all the history and jargon thrown at you without any explanation as to how all of it connects. Things start to clear up in the later acts of the first chapter, only for it to introduce more characters that divide your attention before you can get to know them. It doesn’t help that the voice acting sounds borderline monotone across the board, even during intense cutscenes. When comparing it to contemporaries like Honkai: Star Rail, which flaunts expressive voice acting even in its side quests, it’s difficult to stay entertained throughout.

Most side quests I’ve seen haven’t done much to connect me to the other characters or the setting, either. You can witness the dangers of this apocalyptic environment, like dying NPCs and comrades that melodramatically tell you to go on without them, but there’s nothing that truly makes you think anyone important will get hurt. Small things, like the very few moments when your hero suddenly speaks despite otherwise being largely silent, are also jarring. At some points, I even preferred to mash buttons to quickly skip through a tedious conversation or leave a scene on autoplay so I could just listen without reading all that text.

Kuro Games occasionally attempts more meaningful side quests, like one about a monster mourning its mate and a researcher who similarly lost their partner, but not enough of them stand out. These memorable quests are more of a rarity than the norm. I still have a handful of big side quests waiting to be completed, but I’m already dreading the text blocks I’ve come to expect from them. At this point, I’m more compelled to play through these missions for their rewards alone rather than out of curiosity to see if they will somehow change my mind. Either way, I’m not perched on the edge of my seat, expecting some big surprise.

It took me about 20 hours to complete the main story that’s currently available, and I’ve played around 10 more in the endgame past that. Many free-to-play RPGs tend to slow down towards the end, leaving you to raise your level through farming the materials needed to level up characters and weapons or hunting down new Echoes. At level 32, I’ve reached a point where I spend most of my time either experimenting with team composition and finding new ways to earn rewards. Waveplates, the currency used to claim rewards like character-building materials from challenges, generate at a rate of 10 for every hour. It isn’t sinfully slow, but when the most satisfying parts of Wuthering Waves are its combat rewards and progression, it feels like a waiting game for new Waveplates.

That said, the rewards for climbing the ranks are tantalizing enough that they’ve also encouraged me to dig deeper on their own. Gacha games have fail-safes called “pity systems” to make sure players eventually get a high-quality reward for their banner pulls (the fairly standard system where you trade in-game currency for random characters and weapons). For what it’s worth, Wuthering Waves has been more generous with its pity system than many other games in this genre, only taking 80 gacha pulls to get to a guaranteed 5-star character or item versus the 90+ pulls I’m used to seeing. It also offers tons of resources during the initial honeymoon phase, handing out dozens of pulls whenever you climb 10 or so ranks, along with other systems that make them particularly easy to earn at the beginning.

You’re guaranteed to get at least one random 5-star character from the beginner’s banner, plus another banner that gives you a 5-star character of choice after 80 pulls. And on top of that, Wuthering Waves handed out a free pass (that will be available until next year) for another 5-star character, which means you could have at least two top-tier fighters in your party within the first few hours of playing and a third if you stick around for a couple more. You’re still at the luck of the draw beyond that, but it feels generous out of the gate, especially for any gacha game fans burnt out on bad pulls elsewhere.

Some of the characters I’ve seen do feel underpowered compared to others, which is sort of inevitable in games where the cast grows over time like this. However, Wuthering Waves does its best to offer “future-proof” free-to-play characters that make it easier to build optimized rotations without having to constantly keep up with new releases. You unlock six 4-star characters for free through the story and challenges that can charge your party’s energy, strengthen their attacks, and heal as needed. It’s great that this foundation plus the 5-stars mentioned earlier make it so that beginners can start building strong team comps that feel satisfying right away.

Kuro Games also offered heaps of rewards as an apology for bugs that were reported around the initial launch, though I didn’t see anything nearly as bad as some others did. I used Wuthering Waves’ cross-progression to try it on three different devices: a high-end gaming laptop, a Legion Go handheld PC, and an iPhone 12 Pro. Apparently some bugs have made Wuthering Waves essentially unplayable on certain devices for many people, but I haven’t experienced anything significant enough to make me stop playing. I’ve suffered from occasional lag when fighting bosses or after playing long amounts of time, but only small blips that were quickly forgotten across dozens of hours. That said, it was still nice that the apology rewards made the slower endgame progression move a little bit quicker.

Happy Volvy’s birthday, I guess? Devolver Digital just wrapped its annual Devolver Direct which, among plenty of weirdness, included a number of big game announcements. We got two new game reveals, including one from the devs of Hyper Light Drifter, new DLC for games like Cult of the Lamb, and release dates for The Crush House and Anger Foot.

A time was certainly had by all, but if you missed the show and don’t want to go back and watch a 30-minute video of a lonely man trying to prepare for a birthday party, here’s a quick recap of the announcements:

Tenjutsu

The first of two brand new games announced during the event, Tenjutsu comes from Dead Cells designer Sébastien Benard. It’s a “rogue-jutsu” game set in a crumbling city, where you play as a renegade yakuza taking down her former colleagues. Tenjutsu looks to be something like a combination of Dead Cells, Streets of Rage, and Sifu — your goal is to take down four crime syndicates, which you can tackle in any order as you slowly improve your skills at a complex brawler fighting system. You can also use resources you collect to build up the city with shops and restaurants, but spending too much time preparing will result in stronger enemies. Tenjutsu is coming to PC and consoles, but no release date just yet.

Possessor(s)

In Devolver’s second game announcement of the evening, we took a look at Possessor(s). Art style look familiar? Yup, this is from Hyper Light Drifter and Solar Ash developer Heart Machine. It’s a side-scroller action game with sci-fi horror elements where you play as Luca and her counterpart Rehm. The two explore a city wrecked by an interdimensional catastrophe. Possessor(s) has an open-ended world structure with multiple possible paths available at any given time, and focuses on tight combat, challenging bosses, and exploration. Possessor(s) is coming to PC and console in 2025.

The Crush House

I’ve been obsessed with The Crush House since it was first revealed earlier this year. It’s a novel premise for a game: you’re a producer on the titular reality TV show set at a Malibu mansion. Every week, you select a four-person cast from 12 total actors and let them loose in The Crush House, filming spicy moments over several days to satisfy your drama-loving audience. When you’re not filming, you’ll likely spend your time obsessing over details like decorations, props, or other ways you can capture different audience segments…though you’ll also quickly realize there’s a deeper mystery going on beneath the brightly color veneer of the house. During today’s Devolver Direct, we saw a new trailer for The Crush House capped with a release date: it’s coming out on August 9 on PC, with a Steam demo available now.

Anger Foot

Free Lives, developers of Broforce, Gorn, and Terra Nil, were also at the Devolver Direct with their upcoming game, Anger Foot. We actually went hands-on with Anger Foot not long ago, and really enjoyed its compelling take on the stylings of Hotline Miami, but with a lot more kicking. It’s a first-person…shooter? More like kicker. You kick your way through a place literally called Shit City, bringing down enemies, replaying levels with different types of kickers, and upgrading your weapons and sneakers as you go. Anger Foot is coming soon — it’ll be out on PC on July 11.

The Talos Principle 2 – Road to Elysium

The Talos Principle 2 came out late last year, and we praised its simultaneous exploration of both puzzling and philosophy in our 8/10 review. But Croteam showed up to the Devolver Direct to expand on what it established in the base game with the Road to Elysium DLC, now with a release date of June 14. Road to Elysium takes place after the events of The Talos Principle 2, bringing back familiar characters and expanding on certain major moments from the game. It takes place over three distinct chapters, each with a different vibe and a different character perspective.

Cult of the Lamb – Unholy Alliance

Finally, Cult of the Lamb stopped into the birthday party to share some news about an upcoming free update, Unholy Alliance. Unholy Alliance brings a new playable character, the Goat, to the game for the addition of local co-op. Local co-op brings with it certain new challenges, such as twists on existing minigames, the ability to swap weapons between the two characters, deal extra damage if fighting back to back, and plenty more. There are also new rewards being added to the game for solo players, so don’t worry if you don’t have a Goat buddy. Unholy Alliance will release on August 12 for PC, PlayStation, Xbox, and Switch.

That’s it for Volvy’s Birthday the Devolver Direct! You can catch up on everything from Summer Game Fest and Day of the Devs earlier today with our round-ups here and here, and stick with IGN for everything else Summer of Gaming all month long.

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

Black Myth: Wukong is now up for pre-order, including its planned physical and collector’s editions. But it looks like none of the physical editions will actually include a physical edition. It’s just a code in a box.

Today, alongside a new trailer shown at Summer Game Fest, developer Game Science put Black Myth: Wukong up for preorder and shared some details about how those preorders and physical editions will work. According to the developer, both the physical Deluxe and Collector’s Editions will come with digital activation codes for the Digital Deluxe edition of the game, but will not have a disc.

In an FAQ, Game Science explained that this was due to limitations on resources, but said it was looking into releasing discs in the future.

It is the first time for Game Science to release a console game globally, and we are currently facing limitations in offline resources required for the import, export, transportation, distribution, and sales of physical discs. These factors have made it difficult for us to sell physical discs simultaneously with the official release of the game.

Our publishing team is actively working on resolving these issues and exploring options to offer physical discs.

In the same FAQ, Game Science also announced its Xbox edition of the game would be released sometime after the PlayStation and PC editions, as the studio is “currently optimizing the Xbox Series X|S version to meet our quality standards.”

Last year, IGN wrote an extensive report examining a number of sexist remarks and attitudes made by Game Science founders and members over the last decade. These comments have sparked criticism from a number of Chinese gamers, especially women and their allies, though others have stepped up to defend Game Science. Game Science has yet to respond to our request for comment on the subject, either at the time or since.

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

Monster capturing, gun shooting, crafting survival game Palworld made an appearance at Summer Game Fest today with news about an update, and it’s a big one. On June 27, Palworld will see the Sakurajima update add a higher level cap, new Pals, a new raid, a new faction and boss, a whole new island, and more.

The Sakurajima update sounds like one heck of a doozy. In a new trailer, we got a look at a brand new island being added to Palworld with a distinctly Japanese theme. We see cherry blossoms, something that looks like a bath house, and plenty of architecture and nature pointing toward that theme.

The island comes complete with new Pals, new subspecies, new buildings, a new raid, a new stronghold called the Oil Rig, an arena, a new faction, a new boss, and a raised level cap. This update will also come with Xbox-dedicated servers, something the game had conspicuously lacked up to this point. A number of the new Pals hearken back to the game’s heavy Pokemon inspirations – there’s one that looks a lot like a Dusclops, and another that reminds me of Golisopod.

Palworld has seen a flood of regular updates since its early access release earlier this year, including new raid battles and new Pals. Developer Pocket Pair previously unveiled Arena Pal PvP back in April, and more updates are planned throughout the year. Our early access review of the game called it “amusingly irreverent” and “absurdly difficult to put down.”

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

My time with Slitterhead started with roaming the narrow alleyways of a fictional Asian city as a stray dog. I was instructed to follow red swishes on-screen that visualize a trail of scent to get to the next destination, but I preferred to just look around and savor every detail of this masterfully crafted urban environment.

Hailing from the creator of the original Silent HiIll, Siren and Gravity Rush games, in many ways Slitterhead feels like a culmination of legendary developer Keiichiro Toyama’s legacy. While going back to Toyama’s horror roots and implementing an Asian setting once again, Slitterhead also succeeds in portraying a city that – while much more grounded – feels just as inspiring as Gravity Rush’s Hekseville. The dirty alleyways of Kowlong are so detailed and realistic that it was easy for me to believe that I was actually wandering through a foreign city, yet so eerie that if a scary creature would suddenly appear I would have totally believed it.

Slitterhead is an action adventure game with a horror setting that involves possessing victims as its key gameplay mechanic. Before playing, I was told that the game is focused mainly on action. While indeed most of my playtime involved melee combat, I found Slitterhead’s environments so appealing that I often ended up just aimlessly wandering the city.

The dreamy Cantonese pop song that plays during the game’s opening scene invited me straight into Slitterhead’s setting, and Cantonese chatter on the streets makes the city feel even more lived in, but it is the attention to the environment’s details that really did it for me. Bright neon sign boards, graffiti, signs and flyers on the wall, dirty air conditioner outlets, laundry hanging on balconies, local eateries serving fried noodles or hotpot, cozy mom-and-pop stores – you name it. Everything I saw made the city feel believable and lived in. It reminded me of walking Tokyo’s famous Shibuya scramble crossing in Ghostwire: Tokyo for the first time.

That said, Slitterhead is not an open world game; it unfolds in stages, with the early stages I played feeling spacious enough to be considered a wide-linear area. Above all, though, the streets of Slitterhead’s city prove that density can be more important than scale when it comes to delivering a believable environment.

In 2020, Toyama left Sony’s now defunct Japan Studio to become independent, opening Bokeh Game Studio. Now, four years later, Slitterhead is set for release in November as the studio’s first title. As an independent game, Slitterhead may have a smaller budget when compared with Toyama’s previous games, but clever choices have allowed his team to deliver a game that looks impressive nonetheless.

Similar to Ghostwire: Tokyo, Slitterhead plays out entirely in the nighttime, a great match for the game’s horror setting that simultaneously allowed the team to skip the hassle of also creating daytime environments. While the same craftsmanship as Gravity Rush can be felt when it comes to designing a believable cityscape, Slitterhead is a more focused experience that mostly skips side quests and other arbitrary activities.

One area in which the development team have gone full-on is Slitterhead’s NPCs. The city’s streets are constantly filled with detailed characters that perfectly match the Asian cityscape. A city without people could have worked for a game with a horror setting, but the city’s people play a key role in Slitterhead’s game design.

After wandering the streets as a stray dog for some time, a tall fence was now blocking my way. However, I could see a person standing on the other side of the fence. At this point, the ability to possess other characters was unlocked, which is Slitterhead’s key mechanic. After moving the camera with the right analog stick to find a target, you can possess a different character with the press of a button. No longer confined to the body of a stray dog, now I was walking the streets as a human inhabitant of the city.

However, at the next corner a woman who appeared to be a sex worker was standing in front of me. She seemed to be trying to seduce me, but I soon realized something was off. By the time she had transformed into a worm-like monster, it was already too late. Before I could run away, she had knocked me to the ground.

But while in most games that would mean game over, Slitterhead allowed me to find a new target to possess while lying on the ground. I quickly realized that serially possessing far-off targets was a more effective strategy than running with my own feet, and I transferred myself from one body to the next. From a young guy with bleached hair to a middle-aged lady with an off-trend blouse and then a topless pot-bellied man, each of the bodies I possessed on the way became prey for the creature that was hunting me. But as long as my spirit was safe, their individual lives didn’t seem to matter.

This escape sequence functions as a tutorial for quickly switching from one body to another. Later I would learn that this skill can be applied to both Slitterhead’s combat and exploration.

During exploration, possessing a fresh body can be used as a way to pass through walls, gates or fences, and also to reach higher places. You could for example possess someone standing on a balcony, transfer to someone walking the corridor of a high-rise apartment building, then switch to someone standing on the roof of a skyscraper. With Slitterhead’s possession mechanic, you’ll be looking down at the bustling city in no time. This vertical exploration again reminded me of Ghostwire: Tokyo, which has you reach the top of Tokyo’s skyscrapers by grappling the claws of flying Tengu demons.

Possessing and walking the city as different people is even fun when there’s no real purpose to it. Anyone who has played Watch Dogs: Legion probably remembers how funny it can be to run around as an old lady or any other type of character that normally wouldn’t be the most obvious pick for a playable character in a videogame. Movement and control feels different from character to character, too. I was also surprised that when a cut scene began mid-level, it would show whichever random dude you just happened to be possessing at that point in the game.

Not every single character walking the streets can be possessed, though. Targets who can be possessed are indicated by a blue light. The amount of characters you can possess is still staggering, though, especially in more crowded areas. Sometimes, it can actually become a bit difficult to choose which character you want to become next. Luckily, while you hold down the possession button, everything slows down, giving you time to choose. While holding down the button, you can leave the body you’re currently possessing and freely move around in first person to look for a new target. This feature not only allows you to choose at ease, but also makes it possible to find targets that were out of sight from where you were standing. It also comes in handy when you have to jump off a skyscraper, giving you time to find a new target to possess before your previous possessed body splats on the ground.

As someone who enjoys observing environment details in games, I also found myself using the feature to zoom in on objects, to read the menu of a restaurant, or to take a better look at the Kowlong souvenir T-shirts for sale on a market stall.

With the necessary tools to observe things from a closer angle, exploring this Asian urban environment became even more rewarding for me. That being said, there’s not really a whole lot to do when it comes to Slitterhead’s exploration. In the beginning of the game, I was tasked to find memories of my spirit that were scattered throughout the city, but there were no side objectives to enjoy along the way. While there are some hidden secrets, Slitterhead has no side quests, no shops that allow you to purchase items and no characters to engage in conversation. Unless simply observing the environment is enough for you, you might find this action adventure game leans more toward action than adventure. I found Slitterhead enjoyable as it is, but its environments are so well crafted that I couldn’t help but hope that Bokeh Game Studio will someday reuse the city to create a game with more adventure elements.

While horror games traditionally have you shoot at enemies from a distance, Slitterhead incorporates a melee combat system. You can attack, block, dodge and deflect, covering all the standard bases for a modern action game. It has a weapon durability system that reminded me of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, while the heavy emphasis on deflecting is something many games have done since Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice. Deflecting is made a bit more interesting by demanding the player flick the right analog stick up, down, left or right to match the direction of an incoming attack. This system as well as the UI that indicates the direction of enemy attacks reminded me of Ubisoft’s For Honor.

For the rest, most of Slitterhead’s combat itself felt pretty standard. There’s not a wide array of attack patterns to choose from, and while it gets the job done, there are plenty of action games that feel smoother.

Luckily, the possession mechanic brings something unique to Slitterhead’s combat as well. You can freely possess nearby bodies during battle, and choosing when to switch to what body makes battles more strategically interesting. For example, it is probably for the better to quickly transfer to a different body when an enemy is about to unleash a heavy attack or when you’re cornered against a wall. If the body you switch to happens to be just behind your enemy, you can quickly attack from behind. While Slitterhead’s enemy variety and attack patterns might be pretty standard, creating a favorable situation by possessing the right body makes Slitterhead’s battles feel interesting nonetheless.

Switching bodies puts the player in a more advantageous position, but leaving a body unattended in a dangerous situation often means sacrificing it. This makes switching bodies during battle a high-risk high-return strategy, although it has to be said that continuously swapping bodies almost always felt safer than facing an enemy head-on while trying to evade or deflect its attacks. Possessing bodies during battle does feel a bit chaotic at times, especially in confined spaces. The body you switch to might not be facing the enemy you are fighting, and the camera can get in the way when you switch to a body close to the wall. But even with those inconveniences, the possession mechanic makes Slitterhead’s combat feel more unique.

Each character you can possess has their own health bar. It is nearly impossible to remember the remaining health of every single body laying around, so sometimes it may happen that you accidentally switch to a character that is almost out of health. If a character you’re not currently controlling is killed, there is no penalty except for the fact that there’s one less body to transfer to. However, if the character you are currently controlling gets killed it’s game over, no matter how many possessable bodies were left.

During the early sections of the game I played, there were always plenty of bodies to switch to. It seemed that the game expected me to continuously possess new bodies and sacrifice the old ones instead, rather than taking the life of each individual seriously.

Once you’ve eliminated the enemies in an area, you can regain health by standing on the pool of blood they left behind. But keeping the characters you possess alive isn’t all that important. Slitterhead’s gameplay loop of possessing and mercilessly sacrificing people delivers the message that human lives don’t mean much anyway. When the game design itself tells a creepier story than most horror game narratives, you must be doing something right as a developer. However, from a gameplay standpoint it remains to be seen if the possession mechanic can actually provide enough depth and variety throughout the campaign.

Skills allow you to heal nearby characters or even summon new bodies to possess, but at least during the beginning of the game I never felt the need to do so. I was instructed to play the game on Easy mode (there are four difficulty modes in total to choose from). I played through the beginning of the game and one other stage without ever being at a serious risk. By exploring, I found a shrine that led me to an optional boss challenge. I was killed once during this challenge, but I managed to overcome it during my second try without much trouble. As long as you keep swapping bodies, it seems that Slitterhead won’t challenge you too much in Easy mode. According to the developers, the other difficulty modes aren’t overly challenging either, as they see Slitterhead as an action adventure game that can be casually enjoyed by a wide array of players.

What makes Slitterhead more interesting as a casual action game is the wide variety of skills and hero characters you get to control. Hero characters are a lot stronger than normal characters, and each has unique movesets and skills. During my time with the game, I got to play as a female character equipped with Wolverine-like claws as well as a character with a kickboxer-like moveset.

The second stage I got to play was set inside a condominium building. While not quite as exciting as walking around in the city itself, the dim rooms of the building are always moody and atmospheric, decorated with mahjong tables and cigarette packs. I advanced by taking the stairs and elevators while eliminating enemies along the way to ultimately make it to the top floor, where of course a boss was awaiting me.

At this point I had already mastered the art of switching bodies, so the boss fight itself wasn’t much of a challenge. However, after receiving a certain amount of damage the boss started to flee in a similar vein as prey in Monster Hunter games, over the rooftops of the city. I was now climbing air conditioner outlets and bamboo scaffoldings as I tried to catch the boss hopping from one building to the other. On my way, I transferred to an old man standing on a balcony, and was able to soar above the city by tethering to pools of blood spattered around the scenery and swinging between them like Spider-Man. While not every single moment necessarily felt great to play, it was an enjoyable set piece to take part in.

If you’re looking for the tightest or smoothest action game available, there are better options. However, just like Siren and Gravity Dash, Slitterhead is a game that masterfully sets the mood. A wide array of different stages and situations will undoubtedly create an unforgettable experience with a unique flavor.

Slitterhead is set to release on PS5PS4Xbox Series X|S/PC (Steam/Epic Games) on November 8, 2024.

Esra Krabbe is an editor at IGN Japan. If you want to know what it feels like to work at IGN Japan, try possessing his body.

Developer Camouflaj (Iron Man VR) and publisher Oculus Studios debuted the first cinematic story trailer for the Meta Quest 3-exclusive Batman: Arkham Shadow at Summer Game Fest today (watch it below), and I talked to Camouflaj studio head Ryan Payton to confirm a number of new gameplay details.

Arkham Shadow, due out in Fall of 2024, is an official part of the Arkham-verse, and it’s set between the events of Arkham Origins and Arkham Asylum. Roger Craig Smith will reprise his Arkham Origins role as Batman, and we’re promised a number of villain origin stories, including Scarecrow and Harley Quinn. Jim Gordon and Harvey Dent, among other public officials, have been abducted, and the mastermind behind it all is the Rat King. He’s pledged to execute them all in a week’s time for “crimes committed against the people of Gotham City,” so it’s up to you as Batman to decide how far you’re willing to go in order to stop these deaths.

[NEW TRAILER EMBED GOES HERE]

Payton promises a full Arkham experience in VR, including a combo-driven freeform combat system, the ability to glide down from above onto unsuspecting enemies below using Batman’s cape for sneak attacks, using Detective Mode from perches above to plan stealth attacks, throwing Batarangs to keep combos going, dropping smoke bombs to get out of trouble, and using Batman’s Grapnel gun to quickly get to the rooftops of Gotham City. The Unity-powered Arkham Shadow isn’t an open-world game like Arkham City or Arkham Knight, and instead draws inspiration for its structure from Rocksteady’s first Batman adventure.

“Batman: Arkham Shadow is very much inspired by Arkham Asylum in terms of scope and scale in terms of also the structure of the game,” Payton told me. “It’s exploration, like you have in Asylum – which includes free-flow locomotion, so using the Grapnel gun to zip over onto things, and do the slide, go through vents. All those elements that you’d expect from an Arkham game; it’s gonna be driven in in large part by the moment-to-moment combat.

“[Our pitch to Warner Bros. was,] We’re gonna take all of that and then we’re gonna completely reimagine it for VR and make it work amazing for VR and actually have it feel like an evolution. So you still have that feeling of doing crowd control, but you’re also getting interrupted with counters and you’re making sure you’re flowing into the counter and doing that. All in first-person, all in VR and making it feel that kind of bone-crushing Arkham combat. It’s going to have boss battles just like all the other Arkham games have, [it’ll have] investigations with Detective Mode. And we’re also going to have big Arkham-like cinematics where you’re going face-to-face in first-person as Batman with these kinds of hard-hitting moments. With these classic DC characters. So that was the pitch and that was almost four years ago, and here we are with the biggest game that Camouflaj has ever made, [and] longest game we’ve ever made. And Arkham Asylum is our North Star.”

Batman: Arkham Shadow was announced last month following the Kevin Conroy’s final performance as Batman in the Arkham-verse in Rocksteady’s Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, in which many fans didn’t care for how the developer chose to send off the character.

Ryan McCaffrey is IGN’s executive editor of previews and host of both IGN’s weekly Xbox show, Podcast Unlocked, as well as our monthly(-ish) interview show, IGN Unfiltered. He’s a North Jersey guy, so it’s “Taylor ham,” not “pork roll.” Debate it with him on Twitter at @DMC_Ryan.

Starting today, Amazon has the excellent Super Mario RPG remake for Nintendo Switch for only $38.95. That’s over 30% off the original $60 MSRP and the best price we’ve ever seen. Even better, this game is a physical copy that’s sold and shipped from Amazon direct, not a marketplace vendor.

Super Mario RPG for $38.95

Super Mario RPG is a remake of the 1996 SNES classic. It was one of the best games to grace the console back then amidst a sea of other incredible titles, and Nintendo did a great job of staying faithful to the game’s charm and fun factor. A whole slew of improvements have been implemented to bring this game up to modern day standards, including updated visuals, music, gameplay mechanics, and several small yet welcome quality-of-life UI improvements. Check out our Super Mario RPG review for a detailed rundown of all of the the changes and our official impressions of the game. Still, it’s understandably difficult to pay $60 for a remake no matter how good it is, so a deal like this is certainly welcome.

Looking for more Mario games? Here’s a list of every Mario game for the Nintendo Switch.

A limited edition original Xbox themed after Marvel’s 2003 Hulk film has been donated to a UK charity shop despite being worth thousands.

The British Heart Foundation is selling the console on eBay, where bids have so far risen to more than $2,300 despite the auction not ending until June 15, 2024. The BHF estimated it could bring upwards of $11,000 for the charity, which funds medical research of heart and circulatory diseases and aims to raise public awareness of these issues.

A collaboration between Xbox, the Hulk film, and Pepsi saw 50 of the consoles made to give away to winners of a competition. UK residents tasked with watching Hulk at the cinema, who purchased a Pepsi and popcorn meal deal, received a scratchcard which offered a chance of winning the bright green hardware.