Category: IGN

LEGO and Minecraft are one of those perfect combinations that just make sense. You take a game all about building with blocks and you transfer it over to a toy brand that is all bout building with bricks and you have a winning combination. While there are a lot of great LEGO Minecraft sets available, some of them are actually about to be retired.

One of these sets that the LEGO website has as “Retiring soon” is the Minecraft Pumpkin Farm that happens to still be on sale at Amazon this October. This set is an excellent option for Halloween, seeing as it’s literally a pumpkin house in a swamp with a witch minifigure. Although we don’t know exactly when this set will be retired, it almost certainly won’t be around at all this time next year.

LEGO Minecraft: The Pumpkin Farm on Amazon

As luck would have it, 2024 turned out to be a rough year to release a co-op multiplayer game featuring a satirical fascistic military force battling hordes and hordes of monstrous, bug-like alien creatures. Ironically, of the three major games that fit this description that hit PCs and consoles this year, Starship Troopers: Extermination is the least effective at pulling off the mighty few versus the endless enemy motif. Of course, even if it doesn’t match the high bar set by Helldivers 2 and Warhammer 40K Space Marine 2, you can have a decent amount of fun with its unique features, like larger teams and clever base-building sections, before the swarm becomes too monotonous.

Before diving into the main multiplayer event, Starship Troopers: Extermination offers up an extremely skippable single-player campaign where you can learn the ropes without letting your team down. You play a nameless soldier in the Special Operations Group, hand picked by General Johnny Rico, portrayed by Casper Van Dien in a less-than-enthusiastic performance. There really is no plot here, as this mode serves more as a tutorial removed from the chaos of the online environment than a fully fledged story with a beginning, middle, and climactic end. I’m not a green recruit, as I put more than 15 hours into the early access version earlier this year, but I can’t imagine that a true beginner would get anything out of this experience that they couldn’t pick up in a far less boring fashion in the field.

These 25 missions consist of all the normal things you would do in multiplayer but with none of the spontaneous fun of playing with other people. Also, a focused campaign should have been a prime opportunity to inject some actual satire into a game dressed up like one of the most iconic spoofs in film history, but Extermination completely misses it. This first chapter, “Answering The Call,” threatens to be the first of several in a broader campaign, but if what follows is anything like this I think I’d rather put my head between the jaws of a fire warrior bug.

Skipping ahead of all that to where it gets good: with up to 16 players on the battlefield at a time Extermination brings far more firepower to the fight against the insectoid menace than its peers. You’re divided into squads of up to four, but there can be a good sense of teamwork as everyone coordinates to complete objectives and hopefully extract from the scene with as many of their lives intact as possible.

Extermination does a great job of making sure 16 players never feels like enough, though, as it sends endless and relentless waves of bugs to crash against your fighting force nonstop. Dozens and dozens of bugs can be actively tearing you and your base apart on screen at a time, and even dead bugs – the only good kind – can become lingering tactical problems as their corpses can stack up to become ramps for their friends to scale walls with. It’s a welcome, but stiff challenge, as any large enemy can turn you or your squadmates into ribbons with just one or two attacks, and even basic warriors can shred you without much more effort. It gets hectic quickly.

To counter the bug threat there are six playable soldier classes to choose from, each with unique ability and equipment options that specialize their roles pretty well. For instance, though they are both heavy armored, the Guardian and Demolisher would never be confused with one another, as the former can build a personal fort on the fly to protect themselves from surrounding bugs and stabilize their unwieldy heavy guns, while the latter deals damage almost exclusively by blowing things up with grenades and rockets and relies on teammates to cover them.

Depending on how you look at it, the decision to make character progression mostly individual to each class is either welcome content or a major drag. Unlocking all six classes’ abilities and equipment takes some significant grinding, which means you’re back to square one when you decide to branch out and try something new – but you’re also not going to run out of rewards to earn for a long, long time. To Extermination’s credit, the starting gear package does a decent job at summarizing what each class can do, like the Engineer’s flamethrower and ability to build a limited amount of structures outside of the designated zones, or the Ranger’s quick-moving, low-cooldown dashes. But if you’d like to know more, it’s a huge commitment.

Every weapon performs as you would assume it would in a futuristic military shooter, but even those that aren’t big machine guns have intense amounts of recoil to take into account. Hit markers seem unreliable as well, sometimes not showing at all when aiming down sights, so you have to be ready to do a fair amount of spraying and praying.

Another design decision with some major pros and cons is that you can’t swap your class mid-mission, even after you get killed and respawn. That makes your choice important, for sure, but bad team compositions occasionally lead to quagmires when, for example, a mission modifier makes bugs start spawning lots of heavily armored creatures and your team doesn’t have nearly enough options to deal with them efficiently. Unless you roll with a group of 15 of your closest friends, relying on randoms to be team players and pick wisely can be frustrating.

Variety can also be an issue. Though Extermination is always quick to throw impressive waves of hundreds of bugs at you and your trooper brethren at a time, there are only nine different types of enemies among them, and half of them are the same type of bitey quadruped soldier from the movie in different sizes and colors. The remaining species are all ranged attackers: Gunners who shoot straight at troopers and bombardiers and grenadiers that arc blue and red death juices like siege weapons. With source material that includes such a variety of interesting critters, it’s baffling that none of the weirder and more interesting ones, like the infamous brain bug or flying fighters, are nowhere to be found.

In general, building a base is a quick and seamless process of pulling out a special gun, pointing it at any place on a specified zone on the map, selecting an object, and placing its foundation. This only claims the spot as taken, though; If you want to erect that wall or activate that ammo supply station, you’ll need to repair it and make it real – as simple as switching modes on the build tool. It’s a little extra hassle at first, but in the likely event of its destruction, the foundation will remain so that a build section can just simply be repaired again – a clever way to let you rebuild good ideas quickly without having to lay everything out again.

There’s nothing that’s truly surprising about how this works, but everything you can build – like tall walls with or without ramps to reach the tops, automated or mountable gun placements, bunkers that serve as relatively safe spaces for troopers to buckle down in against heavy bombardments – serves a clear and effective purpose, and in most rounds I saw a wide variety of pieces being used in base layouts.

For my money, Horde is the mode most worth playing in Extermination. Granted, aside from having so many people in play it’s not much different than any other horde mode in any other game we’ve seen since Gears of War popularized the idea: enemy waves spawn that your team must survive, in which case you’ll get a break to reinforce your base in order to better survive the next, even larger wave. Here, though, the scramble between rounds is real: Resources go fast and the 45 seconds between waves is not much time to fix much of anything, so you have to choose wisely. I got used to tending my own little section of the fortifications – and hoping my teammates would do the same.

The trouble is that, unless a true team leader emerges, it’s very difficult to get a real macro-level plan together on such a large team. This narrowed my overall strategic options some, but I basically always found a wall to mount a heavy gun on and held my own – and that’s a pretty reliably good time. I also had to get used to just stealing from the shared pool of building ore to build my fortifications as soon as possible, and ask for forgiveness later. That gave me some memorable moments of fighting and building alongside others, but all this disorganization made me long for someone in old-school Battlefield or PlanetSide’s commander role, where one player’s full-time job is coordinating others.

If you prefer a more intimate team experience, Hive Hunt is a complete change of pace from the rest of Extermination because you only have to staff one squad of four troopers to trundle through caves in search of bug eggs to blow up. It’s a tougher mode, due in part to the lack of bodies on my side and absolutely no lack of carapaces on theirs, but also with no opportunities to build fortifications at all there’s nothing to put between you and the many dangerous and strong enemies that will bombard you in these tighter spaces. You really start to miss those huge walls when tiger bugs lock you in a death loop because they can easily one-shot you with almost zero repercussions. Without the tactical element of base building, the steady but unremarkable gunplay really comes into the fore.

My least favorite mode is ARC, which asks full teams to build and maintain a base around the eponymous device while also venturing out into the map to refineries to produce and escort resources back to power it. Coordination is key, but of course it’s completely absent most of the time when playing with mostly random people. Base-building with limited resources means that any fortifications are first come, first built, with no quick way to communicate ideas outside of barking into voice chat and hoping everybody hears you over the rest of the chatter. With few exceptions, most of my ARC rounds end in long, losing wars of attrition, where my teammates quit one by one (without so much as a bot replacement or the ability for new players to join mid-match) and those of us sticking around are forced to cower behind walls that we must constantly repair until we either run out of respawns or the ARC gets destroyed.

In comparison to ARC, the Assault and Secure (AAS) missions are similar but a night-and-day difference in how consistently enjoyable they are. The key here is that the order of operations is reversed: first you travel across the map completing smaller objectives, like securing a location or refining ore and gas, and then you hunker down into a base to survive a long series of bug waves. What needs to be done is self explanatory and requires very little coaxing until the very end, so everything flows towards the big standoff organically. Everyone on the team has no choice but to work together on the little objectives on the way, so it’s overall a much better experience than ARC.

However, every mode suffers from being staged on mostly empty maps, with the only real life or personality on them being the troopers and bugs. There’s nothing to see or find that isn’t an objective waypoint marked clearly on the map. Compared to Helldivers II with all of its little points of interest, it feels barren and uninteresting when you’re not actively pulling the trigger.

There’s a general lack of polish all over Extermination as well. Bugs sometimes just stand around, completely oblivious to the fight at hand. Skills occasionally activate too many times or don’t go off at all, often leaving me to shrug my last confused shrug when attempting to drop a mine only to hold on tight to it instead as I get consumed by the mob. Performance is also a bit shaky – I had to lower the video settings to medium so that I could get a smooth and consistent frame rate on my Intel Core i9-9000 and RTX 3070 GPU, and that’s something I don’t recall feeling I had to do when I played in early access a year ago.

It’s very important to have regular, healthy bowel movements in real life. Normally, it’s a little less important for characters in video games, Travis Touchdown exempted. But in Metaphor: ReFantazio, it turns out that using the bathroom regularly will make you more powerful, if you pay attention to when you’re doing it.

Initially shared by @UltimaShadowX on X/Twitter, using the toilet in Metaphor can give you a permanent +1 boost to your character’s luck if you do it on a certain day. That certain day is “Idlesday” on the in-game calendar, which comes around every fifth day. Every Idlesday, you can go to the bathroom on your Gauntlet Runner (effectively your home base throughout the game) and check the Toilet inside to use it. Doing so nets you the stat boost.

In Metaphor, if you take a shit in the Gauntlet Runner on a day divisible by 5, you get a free luck stat increase.
Absolute fucking masterpiece game. pic.twitter.com/AH1RKRkGSD

— ⚠️ Caution ⚠️ Ultima (@UltimaShadowX) October 15, 2024

Unfortunately, you don’t get anything for using the bathroom any other day of the week (though you’re welcome to if you feel moved to do so). You can also get experience from using the shower, and apparently acquiring bath salts a bit later in the game will let you raise stats by taking a bath. Atlus really, really wants its players to embrace cleanliness!

There are a number of other things one can do on the Gauntlet Runner on a regular basis to improve themselves, some of which we’ve highlighted in our guide to unlocking the base.

It’s no surprise that players are finding fun details like this in Metaphor: ReFantazio. It’s an amazing game. We gave it a 9/10, saying that it “doesn’t just send a powerful message across its political drama, it becomes a beautiful expression of the real impact storytelling can have on all of us.”

Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. You can find her posting on BlueSky @duckvalentine.bsky.social. Got a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.

Woot! (owned by Amazon) is offering The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom for Nintendo Switch for only $39.99 after you apply a $10 off promo code “ZELDAWELCOME” during checkout. Amazon Prime members get free shipping, otherwise there is a $6 flat fee. This is the best price we’ve seen for this amazing game, and we doubt it will go lower on Black Friday.

You’ll be getting a physical copy, which also includes a 90-day Woot! warranty. Woot! mentions that copies may or may not be imported, but all Nintendo Switch games are region-free so you’ll be able to play the game regardless. You won’t have to worry about language either since that setting is determined by your Switch console. I picked up a copy of Echoes of Wisdom from Woot’s previous deal, and it was indeed a PEGI copy, but it was brand new and sealed and worked perfectly fine on my US Switch console.

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom for $39.99

Tales of Kenzera: Zau development studio Surgent Studios shared an update today stating it had put its team on notice for redundancy amid efforts to secure funding for its next project.

Help us bring our vision to life. https://t.co/ULAKd6wYxX pic.twitter.com/tZjnSqEP3A

— Surgent Studios | ZAU OUT NOW (@surgentstudios) October 18, 2024

“We’ve decided to put the work of the Surgent games division on hiatus while we secure funding for our next project,” the update reads. “In the meantime, we’ve unfortunately had to put our team on notice for redundancy.

“Our team has created a prototype for a bold new project,” the update later continues. “It’s darker, edgier, and more visceral than our first game, but it retains all ZAU’s high-octane combat and cultural depth. And we’re looking for a partner.”

Tales of Kenzera: Zau is the first release from Surgent Studios, which was founded by actor Abubakar Salim in 2020. The game received generally positive critical reviews, including our own 7/10 review that said while its action wasn’t groundbreaking, “it’s elevated by a truly moving tale about how to go on in this world when your loved ones have passed on to the next.”

Our work on #ZauTheGame is coming to a close (although there’s a little more on the way).

Now we’re looking to the future with our next project…and we need a partner.

We have a few irons in the fire, but YOU can help move the needle by telling us what you thought of ZAU and… https://t.co/AAMyp4YGAL

— Abubakar Salim (@Abzybabzy) October 18, 2024

Despite the game’s positive reception, Surgent Studios has had a rocky year. The studio and its members have been the victim of a growing campaign of ongoing, targeted harassment since Tales of Kenzera: Zau’s release, to the point where Salim addressed the wave of hatred in a public message back in May. And earlier this year, Surgent laid off “just over a dozen” developers, citing “a difficult time in the games industry.” These cuts come as part of a wider trend in layoffs sweeping the industry as project funding dries up, leading to over 13,000 individuals laid off just this year.

Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. You can find her posting on BlueSky @duckvalentine.bsky.social. Got a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.

Silent Hill 2 Remake developer Bloober Team is open to making more remakes in the franchise or even a new Silent Hill game altogether.

Wojciech Piejko, Bloober Team director and designer, alongside Wojciech Piejko, director and producer on the just announced sci-fi survival horror game Cronos: The New Dawn, told IGN the team is open to all opportunities it finds interesting.

“I think we are always open,” Piejko said. “If we like the opportunity, we’ll take it.” Bloober Team released the Silent Hill 2 remake on October 8 to glowing critical reception and strong sales too, leaving many fans of the previously dormant horror franchise eager for more.

“There are opportunities that you have to seize,” Piejko added. “Like Silent Hill 2, you can remake the legend. So yeah, I do believe that everything’s possible.”

The decision will also be in the hands of Silent Hill publisher Konami, though it is presumably happy with how the Silent Hill 2 remake turned out. Nothing has been announced regarding another remake or full sequel yet, however.

Bloober Team has already announced one of its new projects in the aforementioned Cronos: The New Dawn. Coming to PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X and S, and PC via Steam, the game is set in a post apocalyptic 1980s Poland and promises a “twisted time travel story” in Bloober Team’s first foray into an original survival horror franchise.

In our 8/10 review of the Silent Hill 2 remake, IGN said: “Silent Hill 2 is a great way to visit – or revisit – one of the most dread-inducing destinations in the history of survival horror.”

Ryan Dinsdale is an IGN freelance reporter. He’ll talk about The Witcher all day.

It’s been a turbulent week for Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2, its developer, its publisher, and its players. In the same breath as it announced an incredible 4.5 million sales in just over a month, publisher Focus Entertainment and developer Saber Interactive sparked an angry backlash with the release of the hotly anticipated Update 4.0.

IGN has reported on the details of this update and why it’s caused so much upset, but in short, it makes a number of significant nerfs to the Space Marines’ ability to fight back against the Tyranid horde and Thousand Sons Chaos Marines. The popular PvE co-op mode Operations was made harder, deliberately so, Focus said in the patch notes, after it deemed the missions too easy. The new Lethal difficulty, via a new mechanic that forces players to stick close together in an almost impossible fashion, was slammed by frustrated players who are now saying that Space Marine 2 is doing a Helldivers 2 and going so far with nerfs that it’s killing the fun.

These nerfs have gone down so badly with Space Marine 2 players that the game has suffered a now familiar review bomb campaign on Steam, with over 1,200 negative reviews in just two days. Space Marine 2’s official Discord and subreddit are packed with complaints, too.

Now, two days after the patch came out, publisher Focus Entertainment has signaled its intent to release a follow-up patch next week with “balancing fixes.”

“We closely read your feedback regarding the latest patch for Space Marine 2 and we’re actively working on another one including balancing fixes,” Focus said. “It should release next week.”

The hope, of course, is this patch rights the ship. Perhaps it will revert some of this week’s changes completely, tweak them slightly, or maybe even include a few buffs. We’ll have to wait and see. Meanwhile, this weekend’s going to be a tough one for Space Marine 2 players.

We’ve got plenty more on Space Marine 2, including a big feature on the game’s modding scene, where plenty of interesting things are going on behind the scenes. Last month, Saber Chief Creative Officer Tim Willits told IGN how the breakout success of Space Marine 2 had “changed everything” for the company. Eagle-eyed fans have spotted the Space Marine chapter now all-but confirmed to get a cosmetic pack after the Dark Angels, and even an unannounced new Thousand Sons enemy type.

Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.

The Call of Duty series looks set to take players back to the future in 2025 with a Black Ops 2 sequel set in the early 2030s.

Fans were alerted to leaked information about next year’s unannounced Call of Duty game after details allegedly revealed in a focus group meeting hit social media. Some of these details were then corroborated by Insider Gaming. Activision declined to comment when contacted by IGN.

While 2024’s Black Ops 6 is set in the 90s to the backdrop of the Gulf War, 2025’s Black Ops game reportedly shoots forward to the 2030s, picking up where 2012’s Black Ops 2, set in 2025, left off.

It reportedly continues the Black Ops storyline from that point, with David Mason from Black Ops 2 as the protagonist. Mechanics from Black Ops 6 said to return include the new body shield and Omnimovement, with some tweaks such as human shields with grenades stuck to them that can be thrown at enemies, and wall jumping. Zombies mode, meanwhile, is said to introduce an eight-player mode.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Infinity Ward is reportedly hard at work on the next Modern Warfare game, presumably Modern Warfare 4. Perhaps that’s due out in 2026.

Developer Treyarch has had four years to work on Black Ops 6, the longest development period of a mainline Call of Duty game yet. Expectations are high then after 2023’s Modern Warfare 3, which is perhaps the most poorly received campaign in Call of Duty history.

Modern Warfare 3, originally conceived as an expansion pack for 2022’s Modern Warfare 2, reportedly imposed crunch on its developers as they battled to create a fully-fledged sequel in just 16 months. Sledgehammer studio head Aaron Halon has insisted Modern Warfare 3 was “years in the making.”

Assuming the reports of next year’s Call of Duty being another Black Ops game hot on the heels of this year’s Black Ops 6 are true, Activision will once again face tough questions around its value as a fully-fledged sequel.

In the shorter term, Black Ops 6 launches on October 25 and straight into Game Pass. It’s the first Call of Duty game to do so since Microsoft bought Activision Blizzard for $69 billion. For more, we’ve got confirmation of Call of Duty: Black Ops 6’s launch Multiplayer maps, modes, and Operators, and Call of Duty: Black Ops 6’s preload and global launch times.

Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.

2023’s Modern Warfare 3 includes perhaps the most poorly received campaign in Call of Duty history. It has a metascore of 56 on Metacritic and a ‘mostly negative’ user review rating on Steam. IGN’s own Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 single-player campaign review returned a 4/10. We said: “Underbaked, rehashed, and cobbled together from multiplayer parts, Modern Warfare 3’s single-player campaign is everything a Call of Duty story mode shouldn’t be.” Eurogamer added: “Clearly rushed to market, Modern Warfare 3’s campaign tapes together ill-conceived open areas, underwhelming linear missions, and a meaningless story.” In short, it was all a bit of a disaster.

A year later and Call of Duty fans are yet again faced with another campaign from the first-person shooter behemoth, this time the Raven Software-developed Black Ops 6 campaign. IGN has just reported on how Black Ops 6 is set to offer the most varied Call of Duty campaign ever, but did Raven tweak anything in response to the reaction to Modern Warfare 3, or perhaps learn any lessons from Modern Warfare 3’s campaign?

Not so, Jon Zuk, associate creative director at Raven Software, told IGN in an interview.

“The campaign… all game development is very fluid and we react to a lot of different things, but in the case of the previous game’s reception, we were already pretty locked in on the story we were telling and the missions we were creating,” Zuk said. “So we didn’t react to how that was received.”

One key point of difference between the developments of Modern Warfare 3, led by Sledgehammer Games, and Black Ops 6, led by Treyarch, is time. Modern Warfare 3, originally conceived as an expansion pack for 2022’s Modern Warfare 2, reportedly imposed crunch on its developers as they battled to create a fully-fledged sequel in just 16 months. Sledgehammer studio head Aaron Halon has insisted Modern Warfare 3 was “years in the making.”

Black Ops 6, however, has enjoyed a longer development time than any other mainline Call of Duty game. Treyarch has worked on it for four years, ever since Black Ops Cold War came out in 2020. And for the campaign, Raven too has benefited from this extra time.

“The extra development time certainly gives us time to do a little bit more prototyping and a little bit more trying something out, finding out if it’s fun and if it works and throwing some things away,” Zuk explained.

“When you have the shorter development cycle, sometimes you’re stuck with things just for the time crunch that maybe you aren’t as happy with as you could be. So I do feel like we had good opportunities to keep crafting and recrafting the missions until we were happy with them.”

Players can also expect Black Ops 6’s campaign to be longer than Cold War’s, Zuk confirmed, although your mileage may vary depending on how much time you spend back at your safehouse hub.

“You can go back, you can talk to your team, you can upgrade your weapon and your equipment and things like that,” Zuk said. “And you can do a little bit of searching around the safehouse , but there’s players who are going to do all of that, and there’s players who are going to do none of that and are just, I want to get to the next mission as quickly as possible.

“So I think that the game length is going to be variable from player to player, but even if you do try to do the speed run version of it, it is going to be longer than Cold War.”

Black Ops 6 is of course the first Call of Duty game to launch straight into Game Pass, Microsoft’s subscription service. It comes after Microsoft bought Activision Blizzard for an eye-watering $69 billion, and has sparked a debate about whether the move will cannibalize sales of the game.

But will launching straight into Game Pass have a meaningful impact on the number of people who play Black Ops 6’s campaign? Unlike with previous Call of Duty games, Activision is not releasing an early access campaign for Black Ops 6, which means everyone jumps in at the same time from October 25.

Zuk said that from Raven’s perspective, it’s trusting owner and publisher Activision to do what’s best for the game. “I have no input in the business side of that at all,” Zuk replied. “The decision was made to not do early access this year, and I trust that Activision has thought out every bit of this and is very confident in the success of the title.”

We’ve also got confirmation of Call of Duty: Black Ops 6’s launch Multiplayer maps, modes, and Operators, and Call of Duty: Black Ops 6’s preload and global launch times.

Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.