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It’s time to look ahead and get excited about all of the new games, films, and TV shows coming in 2024. Cardy, Matt, and Dale are here to go through an extensive list of the things we’re scheduled to watch and play over the next 12 months. From Star Wars Outlaws and Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth to Dune: Part Two and True Detective: Night Country, there’s plenty to delve into.
What are you most excited about watching or playing in 2024? Get in touch at ign_ukfeedback@ign.com.
Classic Konami collections of games including Felix the Cat and Rocket Knight Adventures will be re-released in 2024, both physically and digitally.
As reported by Polygon, the Felix the Cat collection will include both the NES game and the Game Boy game, while what’s dubbed Rocket Knight Adventures: Re-Sparked will include Rocket Knight Adventures, Sparkster: Rocket Knight Adventures 2, and Sparkster. No release dates for either game were announced, though they’ll come to PlayStation 4 and 5 plus Nintendo Switch.
Physical editions will be released through Limited Run Games. Standard and Classic editions of Felix the Cat will be available (priced at $34.99 and $64.99 respectively), with the latter including a CD soundtrack, reversible poster, and NES-inspired packaging alongside the standard disc.
Rocket Knight Adventures: Re-Sparked will come in Standard, Classic, and Ultimate editions, priced at $34.99, $64.99, and $134.99 respectively. The Classic includes a CD soundtrack, reversible poster, steel book, and retro inspired packaging, while the Ultimate includes all this plus a Sparkster statuette, comic, design document collection, mini cartridge display case, and certificate of authenticity.
Further collections will be announced too, with another being revealed on February 24. Konami is also making various quality of life upgrades and other improvements.
“This release includes both the classic Nintendo Entertainment System title and the Game Boy title that was released a year later,” it said of the Felix the Cat collection. “Through Carbon Engine, and some help from Felix’s Magic Bag of Tricks, new features for the titles, including save states and other quality-of-life fixes, bring them into the modern era of gaming.”
Rocket Knight Adventures: Re-Sparked will also include a new animated intro from Studio Meala, a rewind feature, Boss Rush mode, and Museum mode featuring never before seen content.
Ryan Dinsdale is an IGN freelance reporter. He’ll talk about The Witcher all day.
After a round of Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League previews from media went live this week, developer Rocksteady has lifted its non-disclosure agreement (NDA) on the recently held closed alpha, allowing players to talk freely about their time with the game.
IGN was among a number of publications that published impressions of Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League earlier this week. “Rocksteady’s first large-scale game in almost nine years is not clicking with us yet,” we said.
Warner Bros.-owned Rocksteady has now lifted a portion of the NDA on the closed alpha, letting players talk about the game but not publish assets like videos and screenshots.
“Now that there is more news out on the game and players are asking, we’re no longer enforcing a portion of the NDA,” Rocksteady said in a statement. “And we’re allowing players to talk about their experience from the Closed Alpha Test. We’ve heard the community requests and want to give players an opportunity to discuss what it’s like to explore Metropolis as Harley Quinn, Deadshot, Captain Boomerang, and King Shark.
“To the amazing players who tested the game, please feel free to talk and write about your gameplay experience.”
As mentioned, other terms of the NDA remain in place. “Players may not post imagery or videos from the Closed Alpha Test,” Rocksteady said.
In Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League you play as one of four supervillains who take on members of the Justice League. You can play solo or co-op with friends in the open-world city of Metropolis. Suicide Squad follows Rocksteady’s critically acclaimed Batman Arkham series, which includes a number of single-player and story-focused games.
Suicide Squad, on the other hand, is very much a live service, with a battle pass to work through and gear score to increase as you pick up incrementally more powerful loot. But Rocksteady really does not want to call Suicide Squad a live service, perhaps to avoid the negative connotations the phrase now has.
Indeed, Rocksteady has faced an uphill challenge bringing its fans on-side following the announcement of Suicide Squad and the revelations about its live service elements, with many hoping for a return to the developer’s roots with a Batman Arkham-style game in the future.
Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League comes out February 2, 2024 on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X and S, and PC.
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.
Sand Land launches on PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X and S, and PC on April 26, 2024, publisher Bandai Namco has announced.
Announced in 2023, Bandai Namco’s Sand Land looks to translate a cult Japanese comic into an open-world adventure. Sand Land debuted in 2000 as a short-lived tale of a demon prince exploring a desolate wilderness.
Created by Akira Toriyama, a manga artist of major renown for his Dragonball series as well as his contributions to many games such as Dragon Quest, Sand Land remained a print-only phenomenon until 2023. A feature-length film debuted last summer, with this game serving as the next multimedia tie-in.
“Joining Beelzebub, the Fiend Prince, his chaperone, Thief, and Sheriff Rao, prepare to explore the vast desert and take on the Royal Army in various customisable vehicles,” reads the official synopsis.
“This unlikely team uniting humans and demons sets out on an adventure in search for the Legendary Spring capable of ending the terrible drought that has taken over the world. Together, they will travel beyond Sand Land to uncharted territories.”
IGN played a Sand Land demo at last year’s Tokyo Game Show. “Sand Land has a long way to go before I’d consider giving it another look,” we said at the time. “At present, the driving, combat, and exploration don’t entice me to dig any deeper.”
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.
At last, Nintendo is bringing two of the Game Boy Advance’s best RPGs to Nintendo Switch Online. Stand up, Golden Sun fans, because we’re finally getting Golden Sun and Golden Sun: The Lost Age on the service next week, on January 17.
We knew Golden Sun would make its way to the service eventually – it was teased last year, when Nintendo first unveiled its plans for GBA games coming to Switch Online. But with Golden Sun and its sequel effectively being two critical halves of a full story, it makes a lot more sense to drop them both at the same time.
Two epic adventures dawn…
Golden Sun and Golden Sun: The Lost Age are coming to #NintendoSwitch for #NintendoSwitchOnline + Expansion Pack members on 1/17! pic.twitter.com/d3Y5Lx5RX0
— Nintendo of America (@NintendoAmerica) January 12, 2024
For those unfamiliar, Golden Sun was a 2001 RPG from developer Camelot, better known now for its work on the Mario Golf and Mario Tennis franchises. It follows a group of four heroes wielding elemental magic on a quest to stop a team of villains from lighting four elemental lighthouses and plunging the world of Weyard into chaos. However, Golden Sun only tells half of the story – its sequel, The Lost Age, was released two years later and follows some of the supposed “villains” from the first game as they work to finish the job they started in Golden Sun, while the first game’s heroes are in hot pursuit.
Both games are still beloved for their interesting and nuanced class systems revolving around elemental spirits called Djinn, the hybrid ways the game’s magic, or Psynergy, could be used both in and out of battle, and their incredible soundtracks by renowned composer Motoi Sakuraba. We reviewed both Golden Sun and The Lost Age very highly back in the early 2000s when they came out. Camelot did eventually release a third Golden Sun game, Dark Dawn, for DS in 2010, but it wasn’t as well-received as its predecessors, and we noted that it felt “somewhat dated.”
The debut of both Golden Sun and The Lost Age on Nintendo Switch Online is great news for fans of the series who were struggling to find ways to play these games in 2023 without digging up ancient handheld gaming devices. Now, if only we can convince Camelot to tackle a fourth Golden Sun game…
Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. Got a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.
They say it’s better to rule in Hell than serve in Heaven. Well, “they,” in this case, happens to be a guy who literally calls himself the Prince of Lies, so we may want to take that with a grain of salt. But from the time I’ve spent with Solium Infernum so far, I think he may be right. As a refreshed and reimagined update to a 2009 4X cult classic, it’s sort of like Civilization set in the bowels of Hades – but with a greater emphasis on politics and, of course, betrayal.
Where Civ puts us in the boots of figures like Teddy Roosevelt or Montezuma, Solium Infernum features a devilishly-rendered cast of archfiends, from the straightforwardly malevolent warlord Astaroth to a nightmarish Beelzebub monstrosity. Each of the models shows off a certain wicked imagination, which allows their personalities to really come across when you’re cutting deals or scheming against them. The dialogue lines are even recorded in Enochian, a language created by occultists under the pretense of being the spoken language of angels, which is a neat touch.
Solium Infernum’s version of Hell isn’t the fire and brimstone you may be imagining, though. Heavily inspired by Jonathan Milton’s Paradise Lost, it’s a cold and ashen place run by an intractable bureaucracy that doesn’t so much reflect childhood nightmares, like being attacked by shadow monsters, but more adult ones, like having to deal with the DMV.
Not that it’s lacking at all in dark fantasy imagery, of course. The Places of Power you need to capture to secure victory each represent some kind of creative torment for sinners or equally disturbing point-of-interest. These amazing unit cards for each of the dozens of recruitable legions of Hell provide scintillating tidbits of lore, along with evocative, animated 2D art. The names are just fantastic, too. Sometimes the only solution to a problem is 10,000 Screaming Bastards.
A game of Solium Infernum starts you off with your citadel and a respawning, personal legion that’s a bit different for each Archfiend. Our boy Lucifer stepped out for some cigarettes and never came back, so the throne of Hell is empty and up to six human or AI players are looking to be the next to sit on it. This starts by maneuvering units around to capture hexes – called Cantons – as the first to touch each one adds it to their territory. More importantly, capturing Places of Power grants passive benefits and increases your Prestige score, which is tallied up at the end to see who gets to become Pandaemonium’s Next Top Devil.
Securing cantons early can be crucial because, somewhat unintuitively, this contest isn’t just a bloodsoaked free-for-all. Hell has a lot of rules you have to follow, and part of that means you can’t cross your rivals’ cantons or attack their units and Places of Power without a formal beef being declared. To do so, you have to either demand some tribute from another archfiend or send them an insult, wagering some of your own Prestige in the process. They can back down and give you what you want, or they can rise to the challenge. Feuds can be settled with a limited period of open warfare, in which the initiator must complete an objective like killing a certain number of legions or capturing a Place of Power. Or, both sides can nominate a Praetor – powerful recruitable hero characters – to duel instead.
Combat takes place in three phases: Ranged, Melee, and Infernal, with each unit having a different strength in each. The legion with the highest strength in each phase deals an amount of damage equal to the difference. Astaroth, for instance, excels in melee, but isn’t much good with magic. So I found it’s better to end the battle before the spells even start flying by stacking up melee damage, or else I’d be in for a world of hurt.
Solium Infernum isn’t a game won by bloodshed alone, though. There are also mechanics for spying on your enemies, changing the rules temporarily with rituals and event cards, framing other archfiends for your misdeeds, and even snatching victory at the last second by offering to become a vassal after choosing a “Power Behind the Throne” objective. Your Archfiend levels up in a variety of powers from Wrath, which benefits straightforward conquest, to Charisma, which allows you to manipulate the politics of Hell to favor you and spurn your enemies. Increasing your infernal Rank costs an increasing amount of Prestige, which runs the risk of falling behind, but is also the main permanent way of improving your economy, since cantons don’t actually pay you taxes or produce food. I mean, look. I don’t think anything is growing down there.
The devs assert that the best way to play is an asynchronous multiplayer mode with a turn timer that can be set from one day up to a full week, potentially creating games that last months. It even has Steam notifications for when your turn is up. The number of things you can do on a turn feel overwhelming at first, but as you have a limited number of orders, you’re really forced to think carefully about how to get the most out of your legions and pre-empt what your rivals are trying to do. An auction mechanic for buying new legions, artifacts, and praetors, along with Hell’s deliberately fiddly currency system that requires combining different tokens and never getting any change if you overpay, speak to the layers upon layers of bluffs and careful counterplay that are possible.
If you want to try your hand at sitting upon the Big Spooky Chair of Satan yourself, you’ll be able to fall from Heaven on February 14th.
Quick Play is Overwatch 2‘s most standard, basic mode — where players log in if they just want to hop into a few matches without worrying about their rank or an unwelcome ruleset. But for one weekend, Blizzard’s team-based shooter is shaking Quick Play up.
For a few days, Quick Play will be “hacked” by Sombra, who is turning it into something called Quick Play: Hacked – Quicker Play. As the name suggests, everything will be faster. By changing things like capture times, Blizzard is hoping that players will experience more team fights and potentially new strategies. Here are the patch notes detailing the changes:
Quicker Play will be active until January 14, at which point the game will return to normal. But according to Blizzard, this marks the start of a larger shift for Overwatch 2’s core mode.
“We want to explore new and fun ways to change core Quick Play gameplay,” reads the blog post announcement. “Changes will happen periodically and only for a limited time.”
Special, time-limited modes are added periodically to Overwatch 2, but typically they’re offered as something separate from the basic queue. Since these are changes to Quick Play, it means that more players will experience an alternative version of the game. Players who dally in Ranked or Arcade modes will be unaffected.
“Testing new ideas with you for a limited time allows us to quickly understand what you like and possibly implement changes to improve gameplay,” the blog post says. “This also gives players of all skill levels an opportunity to try out new playstyles and strategies that wouldn’t necessarily work as well in a traditional game of Overwatch.”
The good news is that if you’re truly not feeling these Quick Play changes, you can start a custom game with the traditional rules.
Patricia Hernandez is a freelance writer at IGN
Everyone likes bees. Brightly colored, fuzzy, industrious: what’s not to love? So if you wanted to make bees even more appealing or exciting, there’s only one way to go: make them into space bees! That’s the setup for Apiary, the new strategy game from first time designer Connie Vogelmann. In the far future, bees have evolved intelligence and taken their peaceable lifestyles to the stars. Players are rival factions, who must both cooperate and compete to demonstrate their philosophies are superior.
Like a lot of modern strategy board games, Apiary starts with a lot of cardboard-punching. There are all sorts of building and upgrade hexes to push out of their cardboard sprues, along with waggle dance tracks, planet tiles and various other chits and counters. A deck of seed cards is also included, and there’s a big fold-out board with various tracks and action spaces on it. It’s all serviceable enough stuff, although the art is a little drab.
Fans of wood and plastic won’t be disappointed when they go rummaging in the deeper recesses beneath. There are shaped wooden tokens to track supplies of various resources, with the wax and honey tokens being painted a neat metallic sheen and a chunky bee miniature that serves as the mothership which flies around exploring the galaxy. Each player color also has four plastic worker pieces, which are bee-shaped but with a cubic center that rotates to show values between one and four. These are ink-washed so you can see the numbers and details clearly.
Player piece sets are rounded out with some wooden cubes in their color to record progress on various tracks and a docking mat to organize their pieces. Players also get a hive mat which has spaces for their growing colony and a faction tile which gives them some starting hexes for their hive and a condition for extra victory points. There are five different hives and 20 factions, so there are lots of possible starting combinations.
There’s a lot of stuff in the box and, at first, it looks like it won’t all fit back in. However, there’s a clever plastic organizer included which keeps it all together. How it all packs down isn’t obvious and there’s no guide in the rules, but a quick search online should show you how it works.
At first glance, Apiary looks like a classic worker placement and resource management affair. Most of your turns will be spent placing worker bees from your docking mat into action spaces on the board and gaining the benefits. Explore lets you move the mothership around, revealing planets and gaining resources. Advance lets you spend those resources to gain farm, recruit and development tiles to add to your hive, each of which grants additional bonuses. Grow gives you the chance to add empty cells to your hive for future building, or new workers to place on future turns. Convert does what it says on the tin, allowing you to change up basic resources for more advanced ones.
As ever in games of this style, the overall aim is to gain victory points, and there’s a bewildering array of ways to do so, in the interest of offering multiple ways to win. From this standpoint, it’s still a standout title that features a lot of nicely rounded and well-integrated mechanics. You need buildings on your hive mat to store resources, for example, but you also need the resources to gain the buildings. Not only is this circular dependency interesting to solve mechanically, but it prevents players from stockpiling. It also adds a fun spatial strategy aspect to what otherwise might be something of a spreadsheet game. The same goes for exploring the galaxy, a mini-game where you move the mothership on a grid in which empty spaces reveal a random planet which may, or may not, grant you the resources you want.
But the game has a novel trick up its sleeve to surprise you, and it’s a doozy. Not all workers in Apiary are created equal. Those numbers on the body of each worker indicate its level, and this has a critical impact on play. Most actions work better the higher the level worker is assigned to it. More resource conversions on the convert action, more squares to move on the explore action, and so on. Furthermore, explore and advance can hold two workers each, and when a second worker is assigned you get to use the sum of both levels, regardless of which player owns the other.
This sets up a fascinating dance of interaction. Going first lets you grab the action and results you’re looking for, but waiting may be beneficial, as you might get to tag along with a higher-level worker. Furthermore, workers don’t block each other from spaces in Apiary. If you want to use an occupied spot, you can go right ahead and do so, but the owner gets their bee back, gets to increase its level and can choose either to use it again on a later turn on “land” it. This means it can be used to gain income from farms along with other returning workers if you run out of workers to place, whereupon they all gain a level, too.
Positive interaction of this kind is very novel, and it leaves Apiary in the brilliant position of feeling like a highly interactive game without the zero-sum, “take that” bites that a certain kind of gamer hates. Rather, bumping players off spots is often doing them a favor, and you need to take that into account when deciding your moves. Some spaces will hold two workers, and you get the action at the strength of them both added together, so, again, you must be careful being first to the spot. You get the advantage of an early selection, but you’re handing a hand-up to the following player. It’s a lovely balance of competing priorities.
Worker leveling also feeds into the end game and becomes a major source of points. Level four workers, the highest grade, are very powerful. Not only do they lend the highest level to their action, but they grant an additional bonus. A convert action with such a worker, for instance, lets you “dance,” creating a custom conversion of your choice that other players can later pay you to use. They’re also the only workers that can use the Monument action, which lets you buy tiles offering big end-game points. But once used, these top-level workers have to go into hibernation, earning you a small extra bonus, and once a player has hibernated seven bees, the game ends.
This gives control of the game end to player choice in yet another layer of interlocking systems. Indeed, if anything, there’s almost too much going on at once in Apiary. While the core rules loop isn’t that difficult to learn, the sheer number of options can feel overwhelming to new players. And even for the more experienced, it can make it hard to understand how the mechanical levers you’re pulling are leading to you getting points, or lack thereof. The result is a feeling of disconnect that’s sometimes frustrating, especially if you’re looking to work out how you can improve your play.
Mechanical disconnect like this is often a sign of a game that’s divorced from its theme and, indeed, Apiary is semi-abstract. You can see echoes of the bee’s lifecycle in the way you need to construct cells to expand your hive and, of course, in the busy nature of the workers you place. But at the same time, the game uses its futuristic overtones to good effect. This is particularly clear in the different game factions, each of which has its own starting setup and ways to score bonus points, giving you a huge pot of varied strategies to try out.
Soon you’ll be able to play the latest and greatest hits from Night City’s top radio stations at home with the Cyberpunk 2077 Radio Vol. 1 and Vol. 2 vinyls, which are officially up for preorder. These bright yellow vinyls are set to release on April 26 of this year and will set you back $29.98 each. They’re well worth the investment as well given the artists included on them. Check out the links below to preorder a copy for yourself today.
If you’ve yet to jump into Night City and explore the world of Cyberpunk 2077 for yourself, there’s no better time than now to do so. Cyberpunk 2077’s Ultimate Edition released back in early December and features the game in its fresh 2.0 updated state alongside the excellent Phantom Liberty expansion. It’s well worth picking up if you’ve been looking to play it. We also gave Phantom Liberty a 9/10 upon release in our review, calling it a “more sophisticated level of storytelling with excellent performances, smarter insights on the cyberpunk genre and its dystopian themes,” and that it lands “on top of a much-improved gameplay experience thanks to its fresh 2.0 update,” so you know you’ll be in for a great time.
In the spirit of excellent games, if you’re looking to see what new games are coming out throughout the rest of this year, make sure to check out our roundup of video game release dates to plot out what’s releasing in the next few months. We also have a few preorder guides available for upcoming games, like a Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown preorder guide or a Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth preorder guide.
Hannah Hoolihan is a freelance writer who works with the Guides and Commerce teams here at IGN.
A demo for upcoming role-playing game Granblue Fantasy: Relink launches on PlayStation 4 and 5 at midnight tonight, January 11, publisher Cygames has announced.
Three modes will be available in the demo — Tutorial, Story, and Quest — with players able to earn rewards for the full version of Granblue Fantasy: Relink in each one. Story mode won’t be a prequel or separate part of the game but instead just offer “a small slice” of Granblue Fantasy: Relink’s main story.
Quest mode gives players an additional three quests to work through, playable either solo or with up to three others via online co-op. 11 characters are available in this mode: Gran, Katalina, Rackam, Io, Charlotta, Ghandagoza, Narmaya, Lancelot, Siegfried, Yodarha, and Zeta. Finally, Tutorial mode gives players a chance to get to grips with the basics. Progress made in the demo does not transfer over to the full game.
“Granblue Fantasy is set in Zegagranda Skydom, in the corner of the world where islands are guarded by primal monsters and winds,” its synopsis reads. “Players are tasked with discovering the web of intrigue reaching far beyond the borders of Zegagrande and will fight to determine the future of the Sky Realm.”
It was first announced way back in 2016, but following some development troubles that saw initial studio PlatinumGames step away, Granblue Fantasy: Relink has seemingly taken a while for Cygames to get right.
A release date finally arrived in August 2023, however, when Cygames announced Granblue Fantasy: Relink launches on February 1, 2024.
Ryan Dinsdale is an IGN freelance reporter. He’ll talk about The Witcher all day.
