Category: IGN

Amazon is offering the Patriot Viper VP4300 2TB M.2 2280 PCIe Gen4 x 4 Internal Gaming Solid State Drive, which is compatible with the PS5 console, for only $149.99. This makes it definitely the lowest price we’ve seen for a brand name 2TB PS5 SSD, especially since this one even includes a slim aluminum heatshield.

Patriot Viper VP4300 2TB PS5 SSD for $149.99

The Patriot Viper VP4300 is an M.2 2280 PCIe Gen4 x4 solid state drive with rated transfer speeds of 7,400MB/s read and 6,800MB/s write. That makes it well above the PS5’s recommended 5,600MB/s speed requirement. It also makes the Viper’s performance on par with other high-speed SSDs like the WD SN850 or the Samsung 980 Pro.

The Viper includes two heatsinks: a thicker aluminum one and a thinner graphene one. We recommend using the aluminum heatshield because it offers better cooling, it can be removed if necessary, and most importantly for PS5 gamers, it still fits in the console.

Both the WD SN850X with heatsink and Samsung 980 Pro with heatsink cost $179.99. That’s a great price, nevertheless it’s still $30 more than getting this Patriot Viper right here. Patriot has a good reputation in the enthusiast PC RAM and SSD market, so you won’t go wrong with choosing any of these three brands.

For more SSD deals, check out our best PS5 SSD deals of 2023.

Today’s daily deals include cheap PS5 compatible SSDs, a PS5 Digital Edition console actually in stock on Amazon, a massive 55″ Samsung Odyssey Ark gaming monitor, a handy Elgato Stream Deck controller, a rugged Samsung T7 portable SSD, and more.

PS5 Digital Edition on Amazon Without Invitation

The PS5 Digital Edition is finally available for order on Amazon without having to wait for an invite. The PS5 Digital is exactly the same as the $500 PS5 Disc Edition minus the Blu-ray drive. Unlike the gimped Xbox Series S, it has the same power and performance as its more expensive sibling. We haven’t seen the Digital Edition in stock (without invite) on Amazon for ages, and traditionally this console has been hard to find elsewhere as well.

WD Black SN850X 2TB PS5 SSD From $159.99

Amazon has the newest WD Black Series SN850X M.2 PCIe 4.0 SSD for the best price we’ve seen. In fact, this is lower than the price we saw on Black Friday. The SN850X is the successor to the SN850 SSD. It has newer flash chips (BiCS5 vs BiCS4) and an updated firmware, which combined offer improved sequential and random read/write speeds. For PC gamers, there’s also an updated Game Mode 2.0 utility that’s designed to tune the SSD for better performance during gaming sessions.

Samsung 980 Pro 2TB M.2 SSD From $159.99

Samsung SSDs need no introduction. They’ve made some of the most popular and reliable PS5 SSDs on the market. The 980 Pro has been out for a while now, and it’s still Samsung’s fastest M.2 PCIe SSD. It is fully PS5 compatible in terms of form factor and performance, with blistering speeds of up to 7,100MB/s. It goes toe to toe with other well-known options like the WD Black SN850 and the Seagate Firecuda 530.

Samsung Odyssey Ark 55″ QLED Mini-LED Gaming Monitor for $1999.99

This is the first time we’ve seen Samsung’s flagship 55″ gaming monitor drop in price to under $2K (it was about $2300 on Black Friday). The Odyssey Ark is a 55″ QLED Mini LED gaming monitor with a 4K (3840×2160) resolution and an aggressive 1000R curve for maximum immersion. What’s amazing about this monitor is that despite the garganuan size, the stand actually allows you to rotate this monitor 90 degrees into portrait mode. Samsung calls it “cockpit” mode and allows you to view it as three screens stacked one atop another.

Samsung T7 Shield 4TB Portable SSD for $279.99

The Samsung T7 Shield is a external solid state drive. SSDs are much faster than traditional hard drives, and combined with the USB 3.2 Type-C interface, the T7 is capable of transfer speeds of up to 1,050MB/s read and 1,000MB/s write. As a comparison, a traditional portable hard d rive is only capable of transfer speeds of about 100MB/s over USB 3.0. That’s a veritable order of magnitude in difference. The Samsung T7 Shield in particular is more durable than your typical SSD enclosure. It’s rated for IP65 water and dust resistance, and it’s shockproof to 10 feet. The soft touch enclosure on the T7 Shield is less prone to general wear and tear and it’s also easier to grip.

Elgato Stream Deck MK.2 Studio Controller for $119.99

If you’re looking to add a little something extra to your streams, the Elgato Stream Deck can turn your stream into a professionally-slick presentation. The buttons are customizable to whatever you like, so the possibilities are limited by your imagination. This is the lowest price it’s ever been on Amazon, too, so this is a perfect opportunity to take your streaming game to the next level.

Alienware Aurora R13 Intel Core i7-12700F RTX 3060 Ti Gaming PC for Only $1099.99

As part of its President’s Day Sale, Dell is offering an Alienware Aurora R13 gaming PC equipped with an Intel Core i7-12700F CPU and GeForce RTX 3060 Ti GPU for only $1099.99 after $600 in instant savings. This is the best price right now for an RTX 3060 Ti gaming PC from Alienware or Dell. In fact, it’s even cheaper than any Dell XPS RTX 3060 Ti desktop even though the Alienware R13 has better components.

Alienware m15 RTX 3060 Gaming Laptop $1299.99

As part of its President’s Day Sale, Dell is offering an Alienware m15 R7 gaming laptop with RTX 3060 video card for $1299.99 after $550 off discount. This is currently the least expensive RTX 3060 equipped Alienware gaming laptop at Dell and includes some nice upgrades like a 15″ 2560×1440 QHD display and a beefier 1TB SSD.

HP OMEN 25L RTX 3070 Gaming PC for $1210

Here’s a pretty nice deal on an excellent gaming PC for around $1200. This HP OMEN 25L laptop features a 12th gen Intel Core i7-12700 12-core Alder Lake CPU, GeForce RTX 3070 GPU, 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD, and 1TB HDD. The RTX 3070 is a very solid video card for this price level… in fact I don’t think you’ll find another prebuilt PC with a better card. It will easily get you 60fps+ at up to 1440p gaming.

$700 Off Alienware Aurora R15 Intel Core i9-13900KF Raptor Lake RTX 4090 Gaming PC

Dell (Alienware) is offering $700 off this totally badass Alienware Aurora gaming PC. No that doesn’t make it cheap, but this is pretty much Dell’s top of the line gaming PC with everything you could ever want. Specs include the new 13th gen Intel Core i9-1300KF 24-core Raptor Lake CPU (equal to or better than the AMD Ryzen 9 7950X), GeForce RTX 4090 GPU, 32GB of DDR5-4800MHz RAM, 1TB SSD, and 1TB HDD. The PC has been upgraded with Alienware’s best Cryo-Tech 240mm AIO CPU liquid cooling, a massive 1350W power supply, and a clear side panel to show off all of your contents.

GeForce RTX 4090 Starting at $1659.99

Here are some RTX 4090s at or close to MSRP! Everybody knows by now that the RTX 4090 is the undisputed king of the hill. It’s significantly more powerful than any other NVIDIA card out there. It’s laughably more powerful than any AMD card, thanks to its support for DLSS 3.0 and it’s marvelous domination of ray tracing tech.

The Best Deals of the Week

These deals are definitely worth your attention.

You can relive one of the most iconic moments in Assassin’s Creed history, thanks to our latest listing over at the IGN Store. This Assassin’s Creed Revelations diorama recreats the moment that Ezio Auditore comes face-to-face with the remains of Altair, the protaganist of the original Assassin’s Creed. You can check out the epic statue at the IGN Store now.

The statue costs $499.99, and is set to ship in early 2024. It stands at 12 inches tall, 14.5 inches wide, and 9 inches deep, making it an awesome, huge centerpiece for any gaming collection or display. It also has an LED-lit Memory Seal, along with the iconic Assassin’s Creed logo at the base of the statue. You can see the images of the statue in high detail below:

Assassin’s Creed Revelations originally launched in 2011 on Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and PC. The game brought together the franchise’s two lead characters up to that point, Altair from the original Assassin’s Creed and Ezio from Assassin’s Creed II and Brotherhood. In our review of the game, we said, “If you’ve been following the lives of Altair and Ezio this long, you owe it to yourself to see their last adventure.”

Warning: The below article has spoilers for 2018’s God of War and God of War Ragnarok.

In an early draft of God of War Ragnarok, Kratos was originally going to die at Thor’s hand. According to narrative director Matt Sophos, Thor would kill Kratos during their fight at the beginning of the game.

“It wasn’t a permanent death. He would get pulled out of Hel, essentially, by Atreus. But it’s now been 20 years have passed,” Sophos explained in an interview with MinnMax. However, this outline didn’t stay around for long as it didn’t feel right to the development team. Kratos has come back from death plenty of times in previous games.

Sophos continued, “As we were developing the story, we knew that we wanted the story to be one about letting go and changing…nothing is written that can’t be unwritten. As long as you’re willing to change, then you’re not bound to fate.” In God of War (2018), Kratos was prophesized to die. So if he had indeed perished, then that would’ve undermined the message of the game.

God of War Ragnarok was one of the biggest games of 2022, winning multiple accolades at last year’s The Game Awards, as well as selling 11 million copies so far. The game is also receiving a New Game Plus option sometime this spring.

In IGN’s God of War Ragnarok review, we said, “An enthralling spectacle to behold and an even more exciting one to take the reins of, God of War Ragnarok melds action and adventure together to create a new, unforgettable Norse saga.”

George Yang is a freelance writer for IGN. He’s been writing about the industry since 2019 and has worked with other publications such as Insider, Kotaku, NPR, and Variety.

When not writing about video games, George is playing video games. What a surprise! You can follow him on Twitter @Yinyangfooey

A year ago a game showed up in Nintendo’s February 9 Direct presentation that took me by such surprise I couldn’t quite figure out where and how and to whom to express my elation to. Was there anyone in my circle of friends and coworkers similarly passionate about this forgotten gem of an RPG? You see, I thought Live A Live – brought back to life on Switch this past July – was gone; forgotten. Never to be seen again. Pining for the fjords. A victim of franchise love and loyalty that demands more Final Fantasies and more Dragon Quests from Square Enix. A casualty of that pesky reality at any company that employs creative dreamers: that their creations have to make more than just the money needed to bring their ideas to life. Way more money.

And Live A Live didn’t do that. But the story isn’t as simple as Square (which didn’t merge with competitor Enix until 2003) gambling on a new roleplaying game brand and falling flat. Though it’s impossible to find verified sales information on the game today, Live A Live is commonly cited as having sold 270,000 Super Famicom/SNES carts. But while Square’s games surely weren’t cheap to make, they also commanded a high price. A new copy of Live A Live sold for 9,900 Yen. That’s $100 in 1994 and a whopping $200 in today’s dollars. Final Fantasy VI, which had come out just a few months earlier, was priced at an even steeper 11,400 Yen ($114).

I remember it well because I stood in line to buy both games in Akihabara, Tokyo, on their respective release days. As a student living in an expensive city, these were significant investments. Live A Live was the equivalent of 50 Tonkatsu sando lunches, or more than 100 McDonald’s hamburgers. But it was money well-spent on both of those games. And if the 270k sales figures are true, it was money well-earned too. While the creative talent behind Live A Live is extensive, it likely wasn’t expensive – the game started active development just a year before release and was headlined by first-time director Takashi Tokita. Tokita, lead designer of Final Fantasy IV, would later become the head of Square’s Product Development Division 7, tasked with getting more value out of their ’90s classics by re-releasing Final Fantasy games on GBA and extending the FFIV’s story with The After Years.

Live A Live received plenty of media coverage in Japanese magazines leading up to its release. One of the things that first attracted me to the game – apart from the visual similarities to Final Fantasy and the fact I was a JRPG-devouring machine who considered sleep optional – was the developer’s unique approach to the creative process. I remember reading in Famitsu (Japan’s popular weekly gaming magazine) that Live A Live was constructed more like a collection of short stories from different authors than a classic Square RPG. While composer Yoko Shimomura (Street Fighter II, Breath of Fire, later: Kingdom Hearts) flexed her musical muscle by imbuing each chapter with a matching – and distinct – soundtrack of its own, the seven initial scenarios each had their own art director. Under the supervision of Tokita and lead designer Nobuyuki Inoue, this group of manga artists left their own signatures on the disparate parts of the whole. The artists were largely unknown at the time, though Gosho Aoyama, who oversaw the Edo Japan chapter, started to turn heads with a new manga called Detective Conan a few months into development.

Which brings us back to the fact that Live A Live certainly was profitable. Created in about a year’s time on a smaller budget, it didn’t come close to Final Fantasy’s multi-million unit sales. But it released to positive reviews by the Japanese press, and I can attest to the lines of gamers waiting for their copy on launch day despite the relatively muted advertising. Final Fantasy VI was everywhere in Tokyo in 1994. You couldn’t ride the subway or turn on the TV without seeing or hearing about FFVI. Live A Live, not so much.

As a Square RPG fan, I didn’t care. I played it and loved it, though I do remember my disappointment that Live A Live didn’t quite live up to the visual bar set by the Final Fantasy Super Famicom outings. But the music, the variety of settings and gameplay systems – the many homages to my favorite movies – made it such a memorable experience that I held on to my copy of the game and dragged it with me from Japan to Germany and eventually to the US.

It doesn’t happen often, but it’s always nice when it does. Right now, Nintendo is running a sale that drops prices on a decent selection of games down to $39.99 or less. Anyone who pays attention to such things knows that’s about the best we can hope to see from the Mario company, which refuses to allow the deeper discounts we see on pretty much every other game on the market.

The games on sale this time around include The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, and also its Expansion Pass, which you might want to pick up before Tears of the Kingdom arrives. You can also find deals on some excellent JRPGs, a few mini- and micro-game collections, and quite a bit more. Let’s have a look.

Nintendo Switch Game Deals

There’s a good chance you can find something worth picking up in this sale. I recommend Link’s Awakening and WarioWare: Get It Together for good fun times. Live-a-Live is an excellent RPG that’s divided into relatively bite-sized chapters, so it’s not like you’re embarking on one ridiculously enormous quest. And the combat system in Bravely Default II is almost perfectly tuned.

If you want more digital and physical options, you can take a look at the full sale at Best Buy. Best Buy generally does a better job of keeping everything in stock than Amazon does.

Chris Reed is a deals expert and commerce editor for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @_chrislreed or on Mastodon @chrislreed.

Ninja Gaiden Black is my favorite action game of all time, so if you describe something as “a hybrid slasher/shooter from the makers of Ninja Gaiden” like Wanted: Dead does on the back of its box, you’ve got my both attention and hopes up right out of the gate. But as quick as they rose, they fell even faster, because Wanted: Dead is a bad game even removed from any comparison to Ninja Gaiden. Its story is nonsense, the voice acting is some of the worst I’ve heard in a modern game, its difficulty is all over the place, it frequently crashes, and even though its combat is the best part, it still feels sluggish and poorly balanced between your ranged and melee options. If you look super closely, you can see tiny bits of some of the ideas that went into the Ninja Gaiden games, from quick and satisfying executions to dismemberment that affects the behavior of enemy AI. But those small sparks aren’t enough to save what is otherwise a soulless throwback to the many mediocre action games of the mid to late 2000s.

Wanted: Dead’s story takes place in Hong Kong and follows the Zombie Squad, a Suicide Squad-esque police task force made up of former military that wound up in prison with a life sentence for one reason or another and joined the squad as a form of rehabilitation. Despite the fact that there is a weird abundance of scenes in between missions where Zombie Squad is together just hanging out (usually eating food), there is zero chemistry between these characters. I can’t even tell you much about them outside of the fact that Herzog is a creep, Doc is super awkward, Cortez only communicates with sign language, and the player character, Lieutenant Stone, has confusing anime flashbacks with no context. Finding personnel files illuminates a little more about each character, like the fact that Herzog is “an extreme lover of women” with “The Beast” as his nickname, and Doc got expelled from med school for liking drugs and wild parties, though most of the rest of these files are copied and pasted between each character.

It all has the vibe of a Suda51 game like No More Heroes, Lollipop Chainsaw, or Killer is Dead but without any of the style or charm that goes into them. It doesn’t lean into its silliness hard enough, and as a result, the tone feels confused. It’s a gritty slasher/shooter that will throw you into an off the wall karaoke performance of 99 Luftballons out of nowhere, or pit you against your squadmate in an eating competition after learning about the history of ramen and its Chinese roots. It’s bizarre, but the kind that makes me tilt my head rather than laugh at the absurdity. The voice acting is also poor without ever having the charm to at least be considered endearingly campy. I had a hard time following what characters were actually talking about because it felt like the actors never really had a grasp of what they were talking about themselves.

A Dull Blade

I can forgive an action game of a lot if the action itself makes up for those shortcomings, and while Wanted: Dead’s combat is the best part about it, it’s far too one-note to save the rest of this sinking ship. Its fundamentals are at least pretty sound: The animations look great, there’s some satisfaction to the gory sword play, and for the first hour or so, it feels good to parry enemy attacks, liberate some limbs, and see some stylish executions. The issue is that it never really evolves beyond that base over the roughly eight hour campaign.

I could buy new skills from a very limited skill tree, but none of them ever felt like they affected my approach to combat. Most either felt like skills of convenience that I should’ve had from the start, like a dashing attack or the ability to use an execution on a downed or limbless enemy, or they were necessary power ramps that felt virtually required just to be able to survive the later encounters, like more stimpacks or flat increases of damage and defense. Nothing ever made me better at defeating specific enemy types or gave me a new way to deal with any particular threat, let alone a reason to use anything other than the same combo that I’d been using since the start. There are no air combos, practically no learnable special attacks outside of a nearly useless charge attack and the aforementioned dashing attack, and no new melee weapons beyond the starting katana. Put simply, Wanted: Dead’s combat is pasta with no sauce.

As a result, the combat grew stale after the second level, and became a chore for the remaining three. It doesn’t help that the enemy AI and variety in Wanted: Dead is terrible. They can basically be boiled down into five archetypes: Weak ranged grunts, weak melee grunts, shield dudes, ninjas, and big boy brutes. While there are some slight variations within those archetypes, they all pretty much behave the same. Once I learned the parry timings, combat essentially just became a game of taking turns. I’d attack until the enemy parried, wait to parry their attacks, and then either die or attack until they parry again. Lather, rinse, repeat.

For those looking for a challenge, at the very least Wanted: Dead does provide that, but it does so in all the wrong ways. For starters, the checkpointing is atrocious. I frequently found myself playing for 10-15 minutes without hitting a checkpoint in a single level, and worse still, some of these stretches were capped off with what are essentially miniboss fights – that meant I wouldn’t even get a shot at trying again without retracing my steps through the same 10-15 minutes of enemy encounters if I died. This is especially bad in a game that’s so reliant on learning enemy rhythms and attack patterns.

The most damning thing, however, is that Lieutenant Stone feels super weak to play as throughout the entire campaign despite the fact that she is supposed to be some badass super cop. She can use guns, but most enemies are bullet sponges that take forever to kill; she can throw grenades, but you can’t cook them, so your foes will almost always dive out of the way; she can’t block bullets, she dies in just a few hits, and she needs to purchase upgrades to do basic things, like blocking more than one strike at a time or attacking after a perfectly timed parry.

There are isolated moments where Wanted: Dead does briefly come to life. The third level begins with a cool encounter where it tries to overwhelm you with a bunch of weak enemies that die in just one or two hits, which acts a great showcase for the exciting super move Lieutenant Stone can use to chain executions together, much like Ryu Hayabusa could do in Ninja Gaiden 3. And while it’s super janky to look at, there’s another fun moment where you’re given a chainsaw in a hedge maze, chopping up enemies as you round the corners. Wanted: Dead desperately needed more moments like these to break up the monotony, but sadly they are few and far between. It also doesn’t help that even good moments could be soured by a tendency to crash repeatedly while I played on PlayStation 5.

In case you missed the news, IGN Fan Fest is back and bigger than ever for 2023! If you hadn’t heard of Fan Fest before, IGN Fan Fest is a two-day event, bringing fans exclusive interviews and sneak peeks from some of the biggest movies, shows and games you all love. (You can see everything announced at Fan Fest 2022 for reference).

What better way to celebrate fans than giving out special discounts this week on the coolest merch from your favorite franchises and beyond? Keep reading to see what deals are up for grabs this week only on our very own IGN Store.

TL;DR – What to Expect at Fan Fest 2023

Just before my group of four young astronauts with major, personal conflicts of interest blast off to the red planet, I’m assured by our team leader that, while some corners had to be cut to get our ship spaceworthy, it should do its job just fine. And it does… kind of. Which is a great metaphor for Deliver Us Mars as a whole. This platforming, puzzle-solving, interplanetary adventure is trying to do too much with too little, and it ends up touching down just North of adequate.

The backstory for our plucky, rebellious, sometimes even endearing hero, Kathy, is that she was separated from her father Isaac just before he boarded a colonization mission bound for Mars. Years later, she’s been through astronaut school on a climate-ravaged Earth and a mysterious transmission from Isaac spurs her and her older sister, Claire, to seek seats on the mission to bring the colony ships back. Periodic flashbacks do a respectable job of filling in the complicated and painful story of their family along the way.

The launch sequence from Cape Canaveral is among the strongest. It has you perform various checks and landing procedures that feel authentic and tactile before watching through the front window as your ship, the Zephyr, leaves Earth’s atmosphere with no cuts or loading screens. You’re not briefed on any of these procedures ahead of time, which led to a lot of me swiveling my mouse pointer around frantically trying to find the highlighted switch for the internal power interval or whatever, but it was neat once I got the hang of it.

Outside these scripted sequences, Deliver Us Mars consists of first- and third-person explorations of an orbital facility and the surface of Mars itself, featuring some fairly simple puzzle-solving and occasional, frustrating platforming. There are several sections where you have to bounce wireless power beams around, matching the voltage on doors and terminals to get to the next area. They’re generally not too difficult, but I found some of the trickier ones satisfying to solve.

What wasn’t nearly as satisfying were these obnoxious climbing wall segments. You have to click the left and right mouse button at the same time to grab onto a wall to begin with, and you have to do so with enough room that you don’t slide off of the climbing surface. But this action is so unresponsive that whether you can get a purchase or not feels more random than anything, especially in some cases where you have to jump at an angle. Also, one of the moves you need to progress in some of the later segments is never explained at all, and I discovered it by accident when I was just trying out random buttons in frustration after I’d been stuck for several minutes. Pro tip: You can hold S and press spacebar to jump to a wall that’s behind you.

This lack of direction even extends to some segments of the main story where you have several different ways you can go, but aren’t told at all which is the right one and can end up wandering way off in the wrong direction. There is an option under Accessibility to always display quest markers, and while I don’t necessarily need a big star constantly guiding my every step, it could really use some sort of middle ground. If you tell me to go to Ark Vita without ever giving me a hint about where it is, that seems like you’re really leaving me to twist in the wind.

At least the characters are endearing. What few of them there are, anyway. Neil Newborn (whom you may remember as Resident Evil: Village’s maniacal Heisenberg) gives a great performance as Isaac, a complex character with conflicted motivations. Kathy herself is brought to life by Ellise Chappell, who gives a convincing performance with a wide emotional range. And the story is respectable, with the mystery of what happened to the Martian colonists pulling me forward at each turn.

The character models can’t really keep up with it, though. They have a very doll-like, uncanny valley look to them – when we get to see their faces at all. A lot of backstory is delivered through these pre-recorded holograms where hairless, faceless crash test dummies pose in place while dialogue plays. It really looks like placeholder art you’d see in an unfinished game, and the developers just never had the time or resources to replace it. There is also a whole chapter toward the end that jumps from one scene to something completely unrelated, giving me the sense that they cut a significant amount of plot without doing a very good job of stitching it back together.

Performance, especially during cutscenes, is also a major issue. My RTX 3080-powered system exceeds the recommended specs, but in many cinematics I would see my framerate drop below 10 fps, even with DLSS on. I had to turn off the per-strand hair rendering altogether because it kept glitching out. In regular gameplay, it’s usually fine. But this is clearly not a very well-optimized project.

The mighty Kemono – the creatures inhabiting Wild Hearts, the new monster hunting game by Koei Tecmo and EA – aren’t easy. In fact, they’re hard enough that even one of the game’s directors has trouble defeating his own creations.

“I have quite a lot of difficulties,” Wild Hearts co-director Takuto Edagawa says with a laugh. “When we look at [the toughest Kemono in the game], those ones I die [against]. If I’m not properly prepared, I’ll go in and I’ll be killed.”

But luckily for Edagawa, a helping hand is always close by — literally. His development partner, co-director Kotaro Hirata, smiles and says, “I’m totally awesome at [Wild Hearts], actually.”

The Omega Force division of Koei Tecmo is primarily known for Dynasty Warriors, the wild power fantasy series that sees players effortlessly taking out hundreds of foes at a time. With Wild Hearts, which will seek to capture the appeal of Capcom’s popular Monster Hunter series, Koei Tecmo is well aware it is developing a very difficult game. Edagawa and Hirata want you to fear the Kemono, the nature-infused beasts that inhabit Wild Hearts’ world.

But the development has also been careful to introduce several mechanics to encourage players new to the monster hunting genre to give Wild Hearts a try.

How Omega Force Crafted Wild Hearts’ Karakuri System

What does set Wild Hearts apart is, in fact, crafting. Players will be able to take advantage of the new Karakuri crafting system, which gives players the power to instantly construct objects during the heat of battle. Whether it’s a box to climb on to launch yourself closer to the massive Kemono, or a spring that helps you quickly evade devastating incoming attacks, the Karakuri are designed to give players the edge.

The Karakuri crafting system came about when Edagawa and Hirata realized the beasts were too difficult for players to defeat. Rather than nerfing the Kemono’s abilities, the two decided to give the player the power of the Karakuri to even the score.

“Before [the Karakuri system] came along, the Kemono were way too strong for the players,” Hirata said. “They were just massive creatures with too much power. But then the Karakuri idea came in, and then we realized, ‘the Karakuri system might be too strong now!’… We wanted to make sure the Kemono were really strong and really difficult to beat, because we wanted the players to feel the sense that it was a challenging endeavor. But trying to find that right balance between the actual strength of the Kemono versus the strength of the players was the hardest balance to figure out.”

The directors say the difference between great Wild Hearts players and those who are still figuring it out will be the mastery of the Karakuri system. For players struggling against the nature-infused Kemono, Wild Hearts’ flexible multiplayer support will make calling in help a breeze. Wild Hearts supports online multiplayer for up to three people, and Hirata said watching how more experienced players use the Karakuri can teach rookies very useful strategies.

Unlike Monster Hunter World and Monster Hunter Rise, Wild Hearts also supports crossplay, allowing players on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC to tackle the game together.

“[Crossplay] was actually quite a significant decision for us, and it was one of the toughest things we actually had to work with in development,” Edagawa said. “EA actually said that cross platform play is definitely a plus, and so we thought, ‘Then okay, we’ll do it.’ And ultimately we’re very happy that we decided that… When we think of the fact that we want more people to play, and people from more diverse environments to play, it was definitely worth the additional effort that was required to be able to do this.”

A New Hunting Franchise for Omega Force

While Hirata and Edagawa shied away from drawing comparisons to Capcom’s hunting juggernaut (the two didn’t use the word “Monster” during the entirety of the interview, referring to the beasts in Wild Hearts as “Kemono”, “creatures”, and “prey”, exclusively), it’s impossible to not look at Wild Hearts and see the similarities to Monster Hunter. The two titles are cut from the same cloth, both focusing on the central gameplay loop of hunting creatures to improve your gear, and using that better gear to take down even more powerful foes.

Given Monster Hunter World’s sales success, it’s easy to understand why the Dynasty Warriors studio wanted to take another stab at a hunting action game.

Omega Force previously developed the Toukiden series, which saw three games released between 2013 and 2016. The franchise never caught on in the West, causing a long hiatus for hunting action games from the studio.

Wild Hearts is a fresh start in the genre for Omega Force, and the directors have high hopes for the game beyond this week’s launch. The studio will continue to support the game with free, post-launch updates that will add new Kemono for players to face off against.

There are currently no plans for microtransactions, with Edagawa saying, “when it comes to gameplay and content, players will not be charged anything for any of the actual gameplay.”

If the developers do implement microtransactions down the line, it will strictly apply to cosmetics. Beyond that, Hirata said Koei Tecmo wants Wild Hearts to be a new core franchise for the studio.

“We wanted to build a new pillar for Omega Force. I think in the past we had experiences with the Warriors series and also Toukiden as well, but… When we talk about the reach to a global audience, those titles were not quite there yet in appealing to a wider audience. So one of the things we really wanted to work on and one of the things that started off this project was for Omega Force to have a game that had a global appeal, that was accepted more by a much wider audience.”

Wild Hearts is out this February 17 on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC.

Logan Plant is a freelance writer at IGN