Category: Video Games

There’s something about the wild, deranged look in Crash Bandicoot’s eyes that tells me he’d be perfect for a chaotic, competitive multiplayer game, and clearly I’m not alone. After sitting down with the people at Toys for Bob to howl and hurl trash talk at one another for an hour as we played their upcoming Crash Team Rumble, it’s clear they’re onto something. The over-the-top world of Crash Bandicoot fits very nicely with the surprisingly nuanced competitive slugfest they’ve created, and I was hooked after the first scream-inducing match.

Crash Team Rumble is a 4v4 brawler where teams compete to be the first to score 2,000 points in the form of Crash’s iconic wumpa fruit. To do so you’ll need to smack crates, slap other players, make use of power ups, and of course, master platforming. That’s all with the goal of gobbling up as many wumpa fruits as possible to stash into your team’s bank before some heartless goon stomps on your head and takes you for all you’re worth.

If you’ve ever played Killer Queen, then you’ll feel right at home with a lot of Crash Team Rumble’s formula, which allows for multiple strategies to put you on the path to victory. You can play it slow and steady by depositing wumpa fruits into your team’s bank until you’ve racked up enough points, or you can multiply your wumpa-depositing potential by capturing the level’s Boost Zones. Or, if you’re like me and just want to grief your opponents, you can camp out on the enemy bank and relentlessly kill opposing players to slow down their own harvest. Unlike Killer Queen, a mix of each strategy will likely be required, rather than achieving victory by pulling off just one. Every match then becomes about prioritizing the right strategies and communicating with your teammates to emerge with a winning formula.

To that end, each of the five characters have lots of options to help you crush the competition, whether it’s double jumping, sliding, spinning, or other unique abilities like Crash’s mid-air dash and extra powerful slide attack, or Doctor Cortex’s ability to turn opponents into harmless little critters for a time. Crash and Tawna are well-rounded Scorers, who excel at grabbing wumpas and depositing them at the bank. Meanwhile Coco and Doctor Cortex are Boosters, experts at controlling Boost Zones that earn you multipliers for any wumpas deposited while they are held. Finally there’s Dingodile, who is the sole Blocker, intended to simply stop the enemy from scoring by being a big, scary DPS machine.

As your team scrambles to carry out their strategy, you’ll also have to contend with power ups and modifiers within each level. One level has a giant UFO that rains death upon the opposing team once summoned, while another has beach balls that can be used to increase your team’s mobility and deal extreme damage to anyone in your way. With so much to think about and numerous things that can go very wrong or very right for each team, the result is the sort of glorious mayhem that reminds me of my childhood days yelling at my friends during Mario Kart 64 or Smash Bros. and it’s really hard to put down.

One match I was able to win by simply beating up the enemy team so much they had a hard time depositing anything into their bank, while another I racked up tons of multipliers by capturing Boost Zones so we were able to bank 2,000 wumpas in no time at all. Many matches were extremely close calls, but even when they weren’t the energy in the room was hilarious and infectious.

After a short time with it, I’m confident I’ll be putting some time in with Crash Team Rumble during its beta next month and when it gets its full release in June.

Elden Ring has won Game of the Year at the 23rd annual Game Developer Choice Awards. The awards ceremony took place this evening as part of the 2023 Game Developers Conference (GDC), running throughout this week at San Francisco’s Moscone Convention Center. As a peer-based event, the Game Developer Choice Awards are voted for by developers themselves.

FromSoftware’s hugely-successful fantasy blockbuster also picked up the awards for Best Visual Art and Best Design.

Sony Santa Monica Studio’s God of War Ragnarok also enjoyed a successful evening with its own trifecta of trophies. God of War Ragnarok was awarded Best Audio, Best Technology, and the Audience Award.

This year’s Game Developer Choice Awards also recognised industry legend John Romero with a Lifetime Achievement Award. The id Software co-founder, who helped create Commander Keen, Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Doom II, and Quake, is renowned as a pioneer of the first-person shooter genre and spearheading the concept of the multiplayer deathmatch – a term he is often credited with creating. This year’s Pioneer Award was posthumously given to Mabel Addis, designer and writer of The Sumerian Game in 1964. Addis has been recognised as the first female game designer, and her work on The Sumerian Game’s story has been mooted as the first video game narrative ever.

The full list of awards and winners is below.

• Best Debut: Stray (BlueTwelve Studio/Annapurna Interactive)
• Best Visual Art: Elden Ring (FromSoftware Inc./Bandai Namco Entertainment)
• Best Audio: God of War Ragnarok (Santa Monica Studio/Sony Interactive Entertainment)
• Best Narrative: Pentiment (Obsidian Entertainment/Xbox Game Studios)
• Social Impact Award: Citizen Sleeper (Jump Over The Age/Fellow Traveller)
• Innovation Award: Immortality (Half Mermaid Productions)
• Best Technology: God of War Ragnarok (Santa Monica Studio/Sony Interactive Entertainment)
• Best Design: Elden Ring (FromSoftware Inc./Bandai Namco Entertainment)
• Audience Award: God of War Ragnarok (Santa Monica Studio/Sony Interactive Entertainment)
• Game of the Year: Elden Ring (FromSoftware Inc./Bandai Namco Entertainment)
• Pioneer Award: Mabel Addis
• Lifetime Achievement Award: John Romero

Elden Ring has snared a host of major GOTY awards since its release, including Game of the Year at the 26th annual DICE Awards, the 2023 New York Game Awards, and The Game Awards 2022. We also recognised Elden Ring as IGN’s 2022 Game of the Year. If you’re yet to try this 10 out of 10 hit, now is the perfect time to join the more than 20 million others who already have – especially with the recent news an expansion is now on the horizon.

Luke is Games Editor at IGN’s Sydney office. You can chat to him on Twitter @MrLukeReilly.

We all played a ton of the Diablo 4 beta this past weekend, and we were all also lucky enough to play Redfall recently as well. We’ve got a LOT of thoughts about both. Join us!

Subscribe on any of your favorite podcast feeds, to our YouTube channel, or grab an MP3 of this week’s episode. For more awesome content, check out our interview with Todd Howard, who answered all of our Starfield questions after the big reveal at the Xbox Showcase:

For more next-gen coverage, make sure to check out our Xbox Series X review, our Xbox Series S review, and our PS5 review.

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.

Over three years after its initial release, The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners remains one of my favorite VR games, holding its ground next to the likes of Half-Life: Alyx and Gran Turismo 7 VR. That’s why it was such a major disappointment when its long-awaited sequel, The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners – Chapter 2: Retribution, was released as a Meta Quest 2 exclusive back in December. It came with a slurry of bugs and performance issues that left such a middling taste in my mouth that I genuinely wondered whether it was even intended as a sequel to begin with, especially given the lack of a proper PC VR version at the time. Fast forward three months and we now have a PC re-release, plus a PlayStation VR2 version that visually blows everything about the original Quest 2 release out of the water. It’s still not quite as polished as Chapter 1, and its ideas are safer than I would’ve hoped for a full-blown sequel, but its increased action is far tenser with the horsepower to sustain it.

Assuming you’ve heard absolutely nothing about The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners or its sequel, it’s basically a VR roleplaying game that uses a mishmash of survival horror elements to propel its branching storyline. This formula usually does a good job of adding tension to its action and exploration. In my own playthrough of the 2020 breakout hit, I got involved in complex faction politics between all the looting and surviving, but through my choices, I influenced my own personal stakes in a post-apocalyptic New Orleans. Chapter 2 seems to mostly do away with these kinds of choices across its 12-or-so-hour campaign, disappointingly railroading me into a set path, but featuring way more opportunities for combat to try and make up for it. Moreover, it expected me to know the original’s story pretty well, doing the absolute minimum to bring me up to current events.

Story aside, there’s nothing I love more than darkness in a survival horror VR game, where a swarm of flesh-eating monsters can potentially creep into view and outnumber me at any moment. So it’s great to see that the PlayStation VR2’s HDR OLED panels display dark scenes with such accuracy that playing Chapter 2: Retribution on this headset is – quite literally – a night-and-day difference from playing on a Quest 2. True blacks breathe life into Chapter 2’s biggest new addition over the original: night missions. Crawling around the dilapidated Rampart High School at night was once more annoying than it was spooky, but on the PS VR2, it’s downright terrifying.

It’s such a big difference that I found myself actually enjoying Chapter 2: Retribution’s story, though still not for its lackluster characters like the overly-talkative Pawn King and the single-minded group of ragtag rebels you’re basically expected to team up with. The original worked so well because its sparse interactions with NPC characters blended into a story about a vulnerable lone survivor making their way and defining themselves through their own actions, but there really isn’t the same sort of leeway here for subtlety in Chapter 2. I found myself disappointingly locked into a linear series of events where I absolutely must face retribution for deeds I might not have even chosen to do if I didn’t play the original and that I didn’t even really remember doing when I played it back in 2020. Its momentum can be jarring at times, especially given how little time we’re given to connect with the decently-voiced but boringly one-note characters, but if you prefer action combat over dialogue, there’s plenty here to enjoy.

Chapter 2’s hectic new weapons like the Chainsaw and the Sawed-Off Shotgun come in clutch during the aforementioned night missions, where Retribution’s biggest payoffs await. Loot is wildly better at night when I’m brave enough to seek it out, but walkers are more aggressive and far more numerous, leading to unintentionally climactic showdowns between myself and the ravenous horde. These intense walker battles only showed a promising start on the Quest 2 – but thanks to the thicker guts of the PS5, these skirmishes finally came to life in frightening detail on the PlayStation VR2, where a much larger number of enemies could spawn on the same map. I often needed to sneak through, redirect, or fend off entire swarms of walkers, forcing me to make intelligent use of all the tools in my arsenal. Mixed with the haptic feedback of the Sense controllers and the 3D audio in my Pulse headphones, the whole experience was way more coherent on the PS VR2 than I remember it being when I played it just three months ago on the Meta Quest 2.

There isn’t too much new content here, given that only a handful of the 12 zones are new at all. Most of the time you’ll just be wandering around in the original world to scavenge for loot and complete quests. But thanks to performance improvements, human AI is once again as vicious and tactical as I remember it being in the original, leading to unexpected scenarios between myself, hostile humans, and prowling walkers. And with the added difficulty comes a reason to approach situations with more nuance. For instance, I can focus my fire on a single human, killing them in a way that allows them to turn – creating a distraction behind enemy lines as I close the gap between myself and my opponents. These dynamic situations are way more interesting than the forced setup with axe-wielding secondary antagonist Gerrick, who notably looks a bit creepier with increased details that finally indicate what that weird red stuff hanging around his neck in the Quest 2 version was. Spoiler alert: it’s walker entrails. It was always walker entrails.

It’s even more satisfying to return to my home camp with a fresh load of loot after a day’s adventure, and this time around, I’m not worried about breaking anything if I choose to decorate my abode with loose items. Collecting items and dropping them into your recycling bin allows you to level up your crafting stations, making you more powerful and better equipped to head back out the next day, and despite the addition of two new crafting stations that introduce interesting new items like the Sap Gloves, Laser Sights, and the SMG, this loop is pretty much unchanged from the original. That said, the story itself still isn’t quite as intricate, often sending me on fetch quests where I fight the same type of enemies over and over again. You’ll spin those wheels as things heat up between you and the main antagonist, who’s loomed over your time in New Orleans since the first chapter.

Framerates are at least way more consistent now, allowing the action to run smoothly at what appears to be 90hz with no reprojections. Unfortunately, there are still a frustrating number of glitches that likely stem from this aging corpse of a game engine. To be clear: I ran into several experience-ruining bugs on the PS VR2 which likely had nothing to do with the hardware itself, and the two biggest offenders were significantly worse than many of the problems I ran into when I reviewed the Quest 2 version last year. About five hours into my PS VR2 playthrough, a quest completely stopped updating with new progress, forcing me to scrap my save altogether and start anew. Later on, during my new playthrough, I ended up in a situation where I was hindered from finishing a quest because a group of enemy humans cheap-shotted me and camped out by my corpse, seeing and shooting me through walls and floorboards and rendering me unable to retrieve to my weapons, which I couldn’t survive without.

As we inch closer to the release date of Arkane Studios’ first-person shooter Redfall, it has been confirmed that it will not be using Unreal Engine 5.

Harvey Smith said in a WccfTech interview that the game will be running on Unreal Engine 4. He noted that while they were developing the game, “Halfway through the project, Epic came up with Unreal Engine 5, but the game is based on Unreal Engine 4.26. If we had more time, we would have probably gone with UE5, but it was a lot of work just upgrading to 4.26.”

It is worth mentioning that Arkane has said in the past that they wouldn’t be using Unreal Engine 5. Over on the Redfall FAQ page, you’ll find a question asking, “What game engine is Redfall utilizing?” with the answer being Unreal Engine 4.

Redfall is the most recent title to come out of Arkane Studios. The game is projected to come out on May 2, 2023, for PC and Xbox Series X|S. There was originally going to be a PlayStation 5 version of the game, but Microsoft scrapped it when it acquired Bethesda, Smith revealed in a recent interview with IGN France.

Luis Joshua Gutierrez is a freelance writer who loves games. You can reach him at @ImLuisGutierrez on Twitter.