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Warhammer Skulls is the ultimate showcase of Warhammer video games, and it’s back this week for its 10th anniversary. There are a bunch of Warhammer games from several different developers that are either on the horizon or are getting post-launch support, so there’s a lot to get updates on. As has become tradition, the show will be full of world premieres, exclusive reveals, and update announcements, and you can watch it all live.

Warhammer Skulls will start on Thursday, May 21 at 5 p.m. BST, which means 12 p.m. Eastern / 11 a.m. Central / 9 a.m. Pacific, and you can see the times for other cities around the world in the graphic at the bottom of this page. The show will run for about 50 minutes, and IGN will livestream it across all our channels. You can watch the full event in any of these places:

IGN.com (our homepage)

IGN’s Facebook

IGN’s Twitter

IGN’s Twitch

IGN’s YouTube

If you can’t watch the show live, don’t worry. We’ll post the full video to our YouTube page, just like we did for last year’s show.

The announcement of this year’s Warhammer Skulls also teased updates for a handful of games: Space Marine 2, Darktide, Total War: Warhammer III, Boltgun 2, Warhammer Survivors, Dark Heresy, and Rogue Trader.

These games run the gamut of genres, developers, and release dates. Space Marine 2, Darktide, Total War: Warhammer III, and Rogue Trader have all gotten extensive post-release support. Their involvement in the show likely means significant updates are on the way for each of them, so we’ll just have to stay tuned to see what those updates are.

Boltgun 2, Warhammer Survivors, and Dark Heresy are each scheduled to be released this year, so there’s bound to be new trailers and details revealed. And maybe we’ll get announcements of a demo or two. These are just the games that were specifically teased as being involved in the show, but there are bound to be some surprise reveals and announcements we can’t see coming. Tune in Thursday to see it all for yourself.

Subnautica 2 developer Unknown Worlds is still talking internally about what to do in response to the game’s big killing fish debate, but players have taken the matter into their own hands, diving deeper to uncover ways of actually defending themselves.

To briefly recap, killing fish isn’t properly supported in Subnautica 2, which launched to huge success in early access form last week. You can deter fish by using a flare, but there are no tools designed specifically for causing fish damage, which means that you’re faced with having to put up with them nibbling at your heels as you go about your underwater business.

But, it turns out that there are ways to defend yourself in Subnautica 2, but you’ll have to put in a bit of work to make use of them. Across subreddits, discords, and social media, players have identified mid-game upgrades that offer some defense, and even let you kill fish in a round about way.

Warning! Potential spoilers for Subnautica 2 follow:

The Feedback Resonator, an upgrade for the Sonic Resonator that lets it fire a projectile, lets you shoot fish from a distance. You’ll need to work your way deep into the game to obtain it, but some reports indicate the Sonic Resonator can actually kill fish, so it’s certainly worthwhile.

Redditor Jeidoz suggests the Shockwave biomod upgrade, which gives you an electric discharge that can push fish away from you. And then there are the aforementioned flares when you’re in a pickle.

Jeidoz said they were able to complete the early access Subnautica 2 as it is now without taking damage, which sounds like a herculean effort. They used flares and dashed to run away from predators, then the Sonic Resonator to encourage fish to push off. Then, getting further into the mid-game, the Electric Discharge was used “for any dangerous situations,” and the Feedback Resonator was used for single-target enemies.

“In the current version of Early Access, I believe we only have mid-game (or even pre-mid-game?) options,” Jeidoz said. “With future updates, we can expect new vehicles, new bio-mods, fixed fish reactions to light, and other tools/actions. Currently, the PDA mentions some of them, but most fish only react to flares, ‘sounds’ from vehicles, the Sonic Resonator, the player, and stationary vehicles.”

So, the upshot is, the more you play Subnautica 2, the more you’ll be able to defend yourself. But this is not the outright ability to kill fish, as some want. Yes, you do kill fish “off screen” by eating them raw, cooking them, or turning them into other resources. But some players want to effectively clear the game out of fish, giving them the breathing room to bend the depths to their will.

This, though, does not sound like something the developers at Unknown Worlds will ever make possible in Subnautica 2. The developers have spoken in the past about not wanting players to conquer or dominate the environment, and that it wouldn’t feature tools that would let them slay anything that gets in their way. "We aren't a killing game," level designer Artyom "Artie" O'Rielly recently said in the Subnautica Discord. "Go play Sons of the Forest or something if you want to kill."

Still, Unknown Worlds is certainly thinking about tweaking the game in response to the debate. Also speaking in the Discord, lead game designer Anthony Gallegos said the developer can tune creature aggression to make fish less annoying to deal with.

“One thing that should help with this soon is the array of creature flinches we're doing,” Gallegos explained. “Right now they aren't communicating that you've impacted them, and that will change.

“We can do a lot without a stasis rifle for now, though," he added. "Some of it is just going to be rounds of tuning around creature aggression, downtime between when you run them off, etc. We clearly have work to do there, and we're doing it!”

If you're just getting started, we’ve got a Things to Do First in Subnautica 2 guide to check out, plus resource location guides to help you find Titanium, Silver, and more. Discover blackbox and supply crate locations on our interactive Subnautica 2 map, and make sure you don’t miss any Angel Comb Adaptations or Blueprints.

Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.

For the better part of a century, the Caped Crusader has maintained a level of aura rarely seen in characters kissing the public domain. He’s been a purple-gloved pulp avenger and a swashbuckling ‘70s love god, a camp icon and a goth baddie. Frank Miller’s iconoclastic boomer, Grant Morrison’s avatar of determination, and Scott Snyder’s Absolute unit are all wildly different iterations of a timeless concept existing under the same cowl. The games have only been a little more consistent.

We’ve previously explored the rocky origins of Batman in the world of video games, and today we look at arguably the Dark Knight’s most challenging chapter: navigating the extreme highs and lows of an era dominated by The Animated Series and Joel Schumacher’s nippled Batsuits, right as video game hardware changed how we played forever.

Batman: The Animated Series is a high-water mark among all Bat-media. Premiering in 1992, it is the platonic ideal of the Dark Knight, anchored by iconic voice performances, unheard of depth and undeniable style.

The series inspired four video games during its initial run, although one of them barely counts. Only Konami’s 1993 Game Boy title actually released under the “Animated Series” moniker, which features excellent platforming and an impressive dedication to showcase the show’s lavish production into a 2.5 inch cartridge. There’s a lot of game in that little grey box. It’s the first time Batman’s rogue’s gallery was really showcased, featuring seven A-list villains unrestrained by the smaller scope of a film adaptation. It’s also the first time we get to play as Robin, a keystone of the comic franchise whose relationship with Bruce remains criminally underexplored in movies and games to this day.

Konami followed up with an SNES title in 1994. Originally developed as a BTAS tie-in but published as The Adventures of Batman and Robin, the boy wonder is barely involved in the proceedings. Instead, a solo Batman battles through stages styled as episodes from the TV series, complete with unique art deco title cards for each. This format offers more than most Batman sidescrollers, with impressive Mode 7 boss battles, overhead Batmobile sections, and levels that mechanically complement the signature gimmicks of their respective rogues.

Not to be outdone, Sega published its own BTAS adaptation the same year. Batman and Robin for Genesis was developed by Clockwork Tortoise and is a technical tour-de-force of pseudo 3D scaling and rotation effects, utilizing brilliant tricks and scanline-level hacks to create visuals that simply shouldn’t exist on hardware primarily designed to play Altered Beast.

The gameplay doesn’t even pay lip service towards Batman’s skill as a detective, or his finely-honed physical combat skills. Instead, it’s a pure run-and-gun in the explosive tradition of Contra and Gunstar heroes, in which the Dark Knight and his ward run to the right, flinging an infinite supply of Batarangs at full auto while their tireless arms never flag. The dynamic duo can finally be played in co-op action here, though the presence of your trusty sidekick does little to alleviate the game’s notorious difficulty.

There are only four stages, but they are merciless and enormous– one autoscrolling Batwing section clocks in at over 16 minutes. Buildings explode, zeppelins are hijacked, and the entire world dissolves into a virtual reality hellscape as you make your way to Mr. Freeze’s sci-fi fortress. Anyone who can conquer the hyperactive gauntlet and throw the down-bad doctor back in his icy cell with a mere three lives and two continues deserves to be adopted by Bruce Wayne.

There’s one last game to round out this brief, beautiful era before the Bat-nipple arrived to change everything: Batman and Robin for the Sega CD. This one is particularly strange. For one thing, it’s a fully-priced release made out of what’s essentially a minigame, consisting of naught but a series of vehicle stages using the old Batman Returns engine in which the Dark Knight never gets out of his car.

What sets the Sega CD version apart, however, has nothing to do with the gameplay. Between the boring Batmobile levels we’re treated to full-motion video cutscenes that, at first glance, appear to be ripped directly from the Animated Series. That’s not technically correct, since the disc actually includes completely original footage, voiced by the same cast, directed by Bruce Timm, written by Paul Dini, and animated by Tokyo Movie Shinsha, the studio behind the standout episodes like Feat of Clay and Robin’s Reckoning. The 16 minutes of footage essentially comprise a lost episode, and if you can stomach the extremely compressed and dithered, 64-color video at 160p, the Sega CD cutscenes are worth tracking down.

The 16-bit era was very good to Batman, but a new age lurked ominously on the horizon. Casting aside Tim Burton’s vision and the Animated Series it inspired, a very different version of the Dark Knight would rise, bathed in a neon glow, and heralded by the haunting sounds of Seal and the Smashing Pumpkins. The games wouldn’t be much better.

On the big screen, new Batman director Joel Schumacher crafted a more toyetic vision for the Dark Knight. His first film, Batman Forever, spawned just two games. And for the first time, the movie tie-ins would be largely the same game ported to every platform, and who better to do that than the devs who brought Mortal Kombat into your living room?

Acclaim and Probe Entertainment’s Batman Forever is essentially a 2D fighter bolted to a beat ‘em up, a star-crossed pairing if there ever was one, and much like the later Mortal Kombat Mythologies: Sub Zero, it commits the cardinal sin of mapping jump to the up button, turning exploration into aggravation. The Dark Knight is no stranger to fighting games, but the execution in Batman Forever is, frankly, embarrassing, with so many esoteric button combinations that the instruction manual looks like sheet music.

Like Mortal Kombat, the game uses digitized sprites of stuntmen in bogus imitations of the film’s sensuously molded rubber, shuffling across bland and illegible scenery with zero Schumacher swagger onscreen. It’s astonishing anyone managed to make a movie that’s so extra into a game this dull.

If you just read a description of Batman Forever: The Arcade Game, you’d think it was largely the same as the console version. But look closer at its digitized sprites and you’ll notice that the schlubby stand-ins have been replaced with juiced-up CGI renders ala Killer Instinct, ready to melt your brain with nonstop button-smashing action. A psychedelic braindance of Game UI bombards the screen with combo counters, massive health bars, and bouncing powerups. Batman and Robin can annihilate waves of enemies with godlike ultra moves while an announcer barks phrases like “FRENZY MODE!” to a backdrop of speed metal guitars.

For all its extravagance, The Arcade Game received little fanfare. Notably, it’s the first Bat-Title IGN ever reviewed – we gave it a 5/10. Beat ‘em ups might have been Batman’s specialty, but by the late ‘90s they were considered stale and old-fashioned. The same could be said about 2D graphics, which is why the Dynamic Duo sprinted into the third dimension for their next game: Batman & Robin.

Based on the much-maligned film of the same name and originally set to release alongside it, Probe needed extra time to finish the game which forced Acclaim to delay it by a year, meaning that not only did Batman & Robin for Playstation miss the movie launch, by the time it came out the movie it was based on was already a global laughingstock. It’s a shame, because if you strip away the Schumacherian specifics there’s something genuinely ambitious underneath: a 3D, open-world Batman simulator bashing its head against the limitations of the Playstation hardware.

You control one of the three Bat-characters, including Batgirl in a series first, each patrolling the city with their own mean machine. You take discovered clues back to the Batcave, where you’ll decipher them to find out where, and more importantly when, mischief is afoot. The game runs on a relentless real-time clock, forcing you to be on time for Mr. Freeze’s latest caper or face an automatic game over. There are no checkpoints or quick restarts, so you’d better factor in the five-minute travel time to find an extremely rare save point. No one said it would be easy being Batman.

Batman and Robin has a reputation as one of the worst Batman games of all time, and it probably deserves it. Between the busted tank controls, tedious difficulty, obnoxious sound effects, and utter confusion about what you’re supposed to be doing, it’s not a pleasant experience. Look deeper, however, and you’ll see some pretty fascinating stuff buried within. Gotham is littered with locations to explore, from Arkham Asylum to the Ace Chemical Plant to Crime Alley itself, all accessible by Bat-foot or vehicle. The game looks great for its age, and if you’re enough of a sicko to somehow beat it, you’re rewarded with a credits scene featuring dorky caricatures of the development team. They might not have delivered the best Batman game, but these doe-eyed goofballs clearly gave it all they had.

The next Batman game wasn’t really a Batman game, in the sense that the man under the cowl isn’t Bruce Wayne. Instead, it was based on Batman Beyond, the cult classic animated series set in 2039 in which scrappy teenager Terry McGinnis inherited the mantle from the retired billionaire.

2000’s Return of the Joker for Nintendo 64, PlayStation, and Game Boy Color is an adaptation of the direct-to-video movie of the same name, a controversial film that was heavily censored for its disturbing portrayal of child brainwashing and violence, which is a bit rich considering Batman has spent decades recruiting traumatized orphans to break people’s bones on his behalf.

The game is less interesting than the movie’s reputation suggests, a barebones, entirely unremarkable polygonal beat-’em-up that barely takes advantage of Terry’s futuristic tech and only superficially scratches the surface of the extremely schway TV show it adapted. Released at the end of a console generation with exciting new hardware already on the market, Return of the Joker’s existence registered as a mere twip on the radar that still remains the only dedicated Batman Beyond game we’ve ever gotten.

Return of the Joker was the first Batman game published by Ubisoft, which started its stewardship of the IP rights on a bad foot and promptly made it worse with a follow-up, Gotham City Racer. One persistent tension throughout the history of Batman games is the balance between superhero action and driving segments, two very different gaming rhythms welded uneasily together. A game built entirely on the driving half of that equation had been tried before and hadn’t worked then either, and whatever refinements 3D vehicular combat had undergone in the intervening years weren’t enough to make Gotham City Racer an enjoyable experience. The Sega CD at least had Paul Dini, Bruce Timm, and the anime studio that made Akira behind it.

Gotham City Racer and Ubisoft’s subsequent titles would all work within the stylings of The New Batman Adventures, the revamped animated series. First came Batman: Vengeance, a third-person action-adventure game for PS2, Gamecube, and Xbox in 2001. Batman’s brand of high-tech sneak-aroundery plays like a chubby guy in hockey pads compared to Solid Snake and Sam Fisher, but Ubisoft Montreal created an ambitious game that tries to encompass every aspect of Batman’s extremely weird job, but without anything to really pull you through it.

What it did offer was a faithful translation of the animated series into 3D, complete with an original story and great performances from the all-star voice cast that helped give it a premium, classic BTAS feel. Even the side-scrolling Game Boy Advance version punches above its weight in visuals and variety, from platforming and shmup sections to solving overhead sokoban dungeons.

Instead of refining the raw potential of the Vengeance approach, Ubisoft swerved back into familiar territory with the bog-standard beat-’em-up Batman: The Rise of Sin Tzu. The gameplay is rather retrograde for 2003, a bland button-mashing brawler. The most notable aspect of the gameplay is that it’s our first opportunity to kick some butts as Nightwing, though the relatively low polygon count did a disservice to the former Robin’s notorious physique.

The real draw of Rise of Sin Tzu is the titular villain, a new character heavily hyped as the second coming of Harley Quinn. Voiced by the late Cary-Hiryoki Togawa, Sin Tzu was a master planner and military strategist who engineered an Arkham outbreak to weaken Gotham’s fabled Dark Knight before beating him in single combat. He’s essentially Bane mixed with Big Boss, but despite his cool golden skin and the yin-yang plastered to his forehead like a Pog, the Gary Stu known as Sin Tzu has retreated into obscurity after the poor reception to his debut game. Outside of rare cameos he’s been trapped on sixth-generation consoles for the last twenty years.

Sin Tzu would be Ubisoft’s final Batman title, but the promised Batman renaissance was still a few years away. In the meantime, there was one more game to close out this extremely disappointing era: Kemco’s cautionary tale Batman: Dark Tomorrow.

On paper, Dark Tomorrow seemed promising: a 3D Batman game based on the comic book ideal of the character, unburdened by movies or TV and relying on the excellent comics of the era for flavor, showcasing lesser-known characters like Cassandra Cain’s Batgirl for the first and basically only time.

Scott Peterson, a longtime writer and editor of DC’s Batman books, was tapped to write the story, a serviceably cinematic tale involving Ra’s Al Ghul threatening to flood the world’s coastlines while Batman is busy rescuing Jim Gordon from the bedlam of Arkham Asylum. Squint and the concept kind of resembles Rocksteady’s revolutionary game that was still six years away, though the execution was anything but.

Dark Tomorrow’s problems started at the top. The project was led by a would-be film producer who had never shipped a game before, and he prioritized the CGI cutscenes and overall presentation above all else. The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra recorded a full symphonic score, while the worthless enemy AI was programmed through a Game Boy Advance emulator by a team with mostly handheld experience.

What began as a sprawling, urban open world ala Spider-Man 2 instead became a linear, laborious trek through colorless warehouses, docks, factories, and sewers before schlepping through Arkham. Fixed camera angles give a nauseating effect, mocking the very notion of a 180-degree rule and making combat borderline impossible. On the rare occasion the Dark Knight knocks someone down, he has to handcuff every single enemy with a vibe-shattering mandatory cutscene you’ll watch a thousand times.

The game has multiple endings, all but one of which results in the death of Batman or an apocalyptic global flood. Even if you defeat Ra’s al Ghul, millions will be unalived unless you’ve solved a puzzle the game never hints at, using an ability you’ve had no reason to touch the entire time.

If you want a summary of Batman games in 2003, “Dark Tomorrow” just about covers it. The character was a punchline post-Schumacher, the DCAU was winding down, and the games’ performance over the last decade ranged from aggressively mid to utterly atrocious. The comic books were cooking, but things looked bleak on the Bat-front as far as pop culture and gaming were concerned. Something had to give and something would. In the immortal words of Aaron Eckhart: the night is darkest before dawn. And after a very dark night, the gates of Arkham Asylum were getting ready to open…

Our exploration of the history of Batman video games has already dived into the era of Tim Burton's gothic movies, and tomorrow's chapter will examine how the Arkham series changed superhero games forever.

We made it to the Magic Door with less than 10 seconds left. A couple of last-second run-ins with the guards that populate the Constable Guildhall took time we didn’t have, but we managed to escape – our contract completed, our mission objective fulfilled, and our pockets loaded down with the ill-gotten gains we’d liberated from the cops. Not a bad day’s work. Moments like this are when Thick as Thieves sings: sneaking out of a tough situation, figuring out a new way to get where you need to be, a last second escape with zeroes on the clock. Combine co-op play, a couple of thieves with unique toolkits, excellent level design that constantly forces you to make interesting decisions, and a surprisingly compelling story, and Thick as Thieves has enough to keep you coming back for one last job. I just wish there was more of it. (And that I could kill Hauntstables. If the Hauntstables have no enemies, I have departed this Earth.)

Thick as Thieves is set in 1910s Kilcairn, a fictional Scottish city that meets at the collision of magic and technology. You break into (get it? Do you get it?) the Thieves’ Guild by stealing the Vistara Diamond. But the diamond ain’t just a big shiny rock on a stick; it reveals nearby guards, hidden traps, and even treasures – and wilder stuff like hidden magic doors where the really good loot is kept. Uncovering the nature of the Diamond means uncovering the history of the city itself, and a prominent family who lived there, and pretty soon what started as a simple heist becomes a small part of a much bigger story that took me around 12 hours to tie the knot on.

Thick as Thieves’ setup – get in, get what you came for, get out – means there isn’t a lot of what you’d consider a traditional story. Most of it is told though text-based communiques that hand out your mission objectives or congratulate you on a job well done, and scattered notes that provide clues about the location of (or security surrounding) the things you’re there to snatch mid-mission. What’s here is compelling, but you kind of have to look for it, and a good chunk of it is especially easy to miss if you’re playing co-op – which you absolutely should be if you have a friend who wants to get grabby with other peoples’ things.

Thieving effectively means being aware of your surroundings and not getting caught, so if you’ve ever played a stealth game, you’ll be at home here. Crouching under trip wires, avoiding pressure plates, turning off rotating turrets, and avoiding magic eyes are the name of the game. Most of the time you’ll be crouched, moving slowly as you snuff out candles, turn off lamps, and try to make as little noise as possible. The actual thieving comes in the form of a cute little minigame to pick locks in order to open doors or snag treasures secured in display cases. You’ll also collect clues that lead you to each mission’s big score or its story-based contract, both of which are active at once. The former could be anything from stealing enough stuff to hit a certain monetary threshold or finding specific items, while the latter requires you to “acquire” an object that only appears if you’re on that contract. It’s best to do both, but you’re not out of luck if you only do one (preferably the contract).

Avoiding traps is simple enough if you pay attention (or use the Diamond, which makes things much easier), but the guards themselves are another thing entirely. Their patterns are predictable, but they’re alert to most sounds and even catching a glimpse of you will cause them to investigate. You’re a thief, not a fighter, and if they catch you, they’ll tell you to stop resisting (even when you’re not) before zapping you with lightning until you’re dead. If you want them gone (and you do), your best bet is to sneak up behind them and knock them out.

If they see you first, you’re not entirely defenseless. A smoke grenade will stun them long enough for you to put them to sleep, and you can always run. Plus, completing contracts and absconding with loot will level you up, giving you access to consumable items like the Insult Fairy, which distracts guards by doing exactly what you’d think, or the Pickpocket Fairy, which does… exactly what you’d think, and is super handy when you want a guard’s key without getting near him. So yeah, guards can be annoying, but the best part is you always have an out (unless you’ve already spent it), and unless you trigger a trap that locks you in a room with one, you can always run.

And if you’re smart, you can just avoid them entirely. Each thief has four slots of usable items: one is reserved for the Diamond, two are for any combination of smoke grenades, fairies, and other useful tools, and the final is unique to that thief. Thick as Thieves has two: the Spider, which is what you start with, and the Chameleon, which you unlock. The former has a grappling hook that can allow you to pull yourself up, down, and all around, and the latter can copy the form of a guard and use it to walk around in disguise.

The Chameleon is cool and suave and has some great voice lines (“and a penny for the vicar!”), but the Spider has all of that and a grappling hook, so she wins. Why walk past an annoying guard when you can just go over him, you know? What I like most, no matter who you choose, is that Thick as Thieves is always encouraging you to play smart and make good decisions. You’ll start off very cautious, but playing smart also means realizing that guard is in your path and the fastest way to where you need to be is to bomb his ass with a smoke grenade and choke him out. Yeah, being stealthy is great, but I like that you’re rewarded for playing offense and taking smart risks, too – like sprinting to get past a magic eye before it spots you.

But all the tricks in the world will only get you so far. Eventually, you’ll run into Hauntstables (incredible name, by the way), who are Constables cursed to be cops for all eternity. Some of the lore frames this as punishment, which feels valid for choosing to be a very intentionally corrupt cop, but nobody should be forced to be a cop forever. I feel for the Hauntstables when they complain about waiting forever for a cup of coffee or say it feels like they’ve been on this shift forever because, well, they have. But man they’re a pain.

The big deal with Hauntstables is that they’re ghosts, so they can go through walls, ascend through floors, descend through roofs, and can’t be knocked out. They also hurt you if they get too close, so if you are spotted, you need to move. Getting away from them is tricky, and you mostly either need a smoke grenade to stun them or clear path to book it down to have a chance. Sometimes you’ll die not because one spotted you, but because you were low on health and he just happened to walk by. Slither Sap, one of your equipable items, allegedly has a “strange interaction” with them, but I have thrown a lot of Slither Sap at these cats and nothing seemed to happen. What does work, though, is turning on gramophones. Hauntstables do not like bagpipes. Their loss is your gain, but these guys are going to send you to an early grave more than once. Luckily, you do respawn, just without whatever loot you snagged (though you can bank your spoils at certain single-use stashes scattered across the map), which is dangerous when you’re up against a timer.

The most annoying thing about Hauntstables, though, is that they get stuck. Normal guards will see their buddies unconscious on the ground and pick them up before searching for you and then eventually going about their business if you stay hidden, but Hauntstables can’t pick people up, so they can get stuck in an infinite loop of “see guy on the ground, be shocked, be unable to do anything about it, see guy on the ground” and so on. This is funny, but it also means that Hauntstable won’t go back to his patrol path, which is a pain if you’re trying to get past the area he happens to be stuck in. Usually, this eventually resolves (especially if you die), but it’s annoying, though never gamebreaking.

What carries Thick as Thieves, aside from the charming art, roguish… rogues, and general Cool Vibes are the levels. There are unfortunately only two: the aforementioned Constable Guildhall and Elway Manor, but they’re both so good that I can almost forgive it. Each is a multi-story behemoth ripe with hidden paths and tons of ways to get where you need to be, and they do change from time to time as some paths open and others close. Combine that with your thief’s skills and the ever-changing objectives you’ll have when you enter each level (as well as difficulty options that add more traps and guards), and I never got bored.

There’s a joy to mastering these levels and knowing exactly how to get where you need to be, but there are a couple downsides. Certain notes – like the ones that explain that Hauntstables don’t like gramophones – appear on the map every time, which can be irritating when you’re looking for mission or contract-specific clues and you find one you’ve seen before. It’s also just kind of a bummer to finish a contract and know that the next one will either send you to the other level or back to where you just were. Variety is the spice of theft, after all.

My favorite thing about Thick as Thieves, though, is the online co-op. It’s fun to split up and explore separate areas, coordinate to take out a guard, or have your buddy save you at the last moment, and vice-versa. And getting picked up next to the stuff you dropped is way better than respawning in a safe area. It does make levels easier, but it’s so much more fun to play with a friend that I kind of don’t care. Besides, you can always crank up the difficulty setting if you’re into that.

Microsoft has confirmed the lineup of games coming to Xbox Game Pass during the second half of May as well as the early part of June.

It’s a quieter second half of the month after big hitters including Forza Horizon 6 hit Game Pass already, but there are still some eye-catching additions and a few day one releases. As revealed in a post on Xbox Wire, Frontier’s Jurassic World Evolution 3 is set for Game Pass following its October 2025 launch, and Obsidian’s The Outer Worlds: Spacer’s Choice Edition joins the subscription service.

Day one titles include Kwalee Labs' bullet hell action adventure game Luna Abyss, Cococucumber's sci-fi deckbuilding RPG sequel Echo Generation 2, Aggro Crab's physics-based party game Crashout Crew, and Doot's tiny bug collection game Kabuto Park.

• Dead Static Drive (Cloud, Console, and PC) – May 20
  Now with Game Pass Premium; joining Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass
• My Friend Peppa Pig (Cloud, Console, and PC) – May 20
  Game Pass Ultimate, Game Pass Premium, PC Game Pass
• Pigeon Simulator (Cloud, XBOX Series X|S, Handheld, and PC) – May 20
  Now with Game Pass Premium; joining Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass
• Remnant II (Cloud, Console, and PC) – May 20
  Game Pass Ultimate, Game Pass Premium, PC Game Pass
• Winter Burrow (Cloud, Console, and PC) – May 20
  Now with Game Pass Premium; joining Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass
• Luna Abyss (Cloud, XBOX Series X|S, and PC) – May 21
  Game Pass Ultimate, PC Game Pass
• Escape Simulator (Cloud, XBOX Series X|S, and PC) – May 26
  Game Pass Ultimate, Game Pass Premium, PC Game Pass
• Echo Generation 2 (Cloud, XBOX Series X|S, and PC) – May 27
  Game Pass Ultimate, PC Game Pass
• The Outer Worlds: Spacer’s Choice Edition (Cloud, XBOX Series X|S, and PC) – May 27
  Game Pass Ultimate, Game Pass Premium, PC Game Pass
• Crashout Crew (Cloud, XBOX Series X|S, Handheld, and PC) – May 28
  Game Pass Ultimate, PC Game Pass
• Kabuto Park (Cloud, XBOX Series X|S, and PC) – May 28
  Game Pass Ultimate, Game Pass Premium, PC Game Pass
• Final Fantasy VI (Cloud, XBOX Series X|S, and PC) – June 2
  Game Pass Ultimate, Game Pass Premium, PC Game Pass
• Jurassic World Evolution 3 (Cloud, XBOX Series X|S, and PC) – June 2
  Game Pass Ultimate, Game Pass Premium, PC Game Pass

Microsoft will no doubt have a number of big Game Pass announcements at its Xbox showcase event, which is set for June 7. As usual, a number of games leave Game Pass this month. You can grab a discount if you buy the games to keep playing.

• Against the Storm (Cloud, Console, and PC)
• Crypt Custodian (Cloud, Console, and PC)
• Metaphor: ReFantazio (Cloud, Console, and PC)
• Persona 4 Golden (Cloud, Console, and PC)
• Spray Paint Simulator (Cloud, Console, and PC)

Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.

Fortnite is back on the App Store, with Epic boss Tim Sweeney declaring "the beginning of the end of the Apple Tax worldwide."

Sweeney’s ongoing battle to get Fortnite back on iPhones and Android phones without paying store fees is well-documented. Epic doesn’t want to pay the now standard 30% store fee on revenue made from mobile games, instead preferring to direct players to its own mobile store, the Epic Games Store, without Apple and Google getting in the way. Sweeney has been fighting this battle since 2020, spending a great deal of cash in the process, even as Fortnite was blocked on iOS. It felt as though Epic had won this time last year following a significant court ruling, but Apple ultimately blocked Fortnite's return.

Now, Epic has pushed Fortnite back onto iOS, with Sweeney saying the decision was made after Apple told the U.S. Supreme Court that "regulators around the world are watching this case to determine what commission rate Apple may charge on covered purchases in huge markets outside the United States." Epic said it was "confident that once Apple is forced to show its costs, governments around the world will not allow Apple junk fees to stand."

"We will continue to challenge Apple’s anticompetitive App Store practices of banning alternative app stores and competition in payments," Epic Games added in a statement.

"We’ve seen momentum around the world to address these practices, with regulators passing laws in Japan, the European Union and the United Kingdom - but time and time again, Apple has evaded the laws with scare screens, fees and onerous requirements. It’s time for regulators to truly enforce the laws so developers and consumers around the world can benefit from an open and fair mobile app ecosystem."

Epic boss Tim Sweeney said on X/Twitter earlier today: "Fortnite is back on the Apple App Store as we head into the final battle of Epic v Apple in court. For years, Apple has fragmented iOS features and fees by territory, taking regulatory negotiating positions in secret, and intentionally delaying the pursuit of justice."

"Apple has now told the Supreme Court, 'Regulators around the world are watching this case to determine what commission rate Apple may charge on covered purchases in huge markets outside the United States.' So we see this as the beginning of the end of the Apple Tax worldwide," Sweeney continued.

"This is a critical moment in the battle against the App Store empire to win freedom for all developers and consumers, and we'll continue the fight in every jurisdiction worldwide until competition is restored to digital stores and payment markets everywhere."

Interestingly, Fortnite has yet to return to the Australian App Store. Epic said it was waiting for a court order to "bring Apple's unlawful conduct to an end and to make orders that will benefit all app developers and iOS users."

"Epic can't return under an illegal payment arrangement with Apple, so unless Apple agrees to adopt lawful payment terms in the interim, we must wait for a Court decision," the company added.

Fortnite returns to iOS amid a particularly difficult time for the once all-conquering battle royale. Epic suffered major layoffs back in March following a downturn in interest in Fortnite itself. Analysts told IGN that fewer people playing the game's veteran battle royale was only one of its problems, however, following the time and money spent over the past few years fighting costly legal battles with Apple and Google, while bankrolling the Epic Games Store as it attempts to rival Steam. And then there's the explosive growth of Roblox, which dwarfs the engagement seen by Fortnite's own creator-made modes.

Image credit: Mike Coppola/Getty Images for Samsung.

Vikki Blake is a reporter for IGN, as well as a critic, columnist, and consultant with 15+ years experience working with some of the world's biggest gaming sites and publications. She's also a Guardian, Spartan, Silent Hillian, Legend, and perpetually High Chaos. Find her at BlueSky.

The soundtrack of the original 1993 Doom has been inducted into the National Recording Registry.

The Library of Congress is the largest library in the world, "with millions of books, films and video, audio recordings, photographs, newspapers, maps and manuscripts in its collections." Founded over two hundred years ago, it sits as the main research arm of the U.S. Congress and the home of the U.S. Copyright Office.

The latest inductees, of which there are 25, have been dubbed as "audio treasures worthy of preservation for all time based on their cultural, historical or aesthetic importance in the nation’s recorded sound heritage." Bobby Prince's "adrenaline-fueled" score is the third piece of video game history to be immortalized this way.

"Key to Doom's popularity was the adrenaline-fueled soundtrack created by Prince," a Registry spokesperson said (thanks, GI.biz). "Prince, a lifelong musician and practising lawyer, was fascinated by the MIDI technology that rose to prominence in the mid-1980s as a means for instrument control and composition, an interest that led to his earliest work composing video games.

"Taking advantage of his knowledge of MIDI, Prince worked to ensure that the sound effects he created could cut through the music by assigning them to different MIDI frequencies. The Doom soundtrack would go on to inspire countless remixes and lay the foundation for future generations of game composers."

"The sweep and diversity of the National Recording Registry class of 2026 beautifully captures the scope of the American experience as we celebrate our nation’s 250th anniversary,” said Robbin Ahrold, chair of the National Recording Preservation Board. "From icons of R&B to a holiday favorite en Español, from a legendary sports broadcast to this generation’s superstars, it is a thrilling reflection of America at its best."

Doom is the third such video game score to make it into the register. The first was the Super Mario Bros. theme, which joined the archive in 2023. Daniel Rosengeld's soundtrack for Minecraft was added in 2025.

Other inductees this year include Taylor Swift's 1989, Beyoncé’s Single Ladies (Put a Ring On It), The Go-Go’s debut album Beauty and the Beat, Vince Gill’s Go Rest High On That Mountain, Weezer’s self-titled debut Weezer (The Blue Album), Chaka Khan’s hit I Feel for You, and Broadway’s original cast album of Chicago.

Vikki Blake is a reporter for IGN, as well as a critic, columnist, and consultant with 15+ years experience working with some of the world's biggest gaming sites and publications. She's also a Guardian, Spartan, Silent Hillian, Legend, and perpetually High Chaos. Find her at BlueSky.

Microsoft is continuing its drive to revamp brand Xbox with the launch of a feedback platform that gives fans the chance to vote on community requests. Predictably, the request with the most votes is a return to exclusives.

Microsoft’s multiplatform push may have increased sales (Forza Horizon 5, for example, has found significant success on PlayStation 5), but it has come at the expense of alienating hardcore Xbox fans, some of whom want Microsoft to return to Xbox exclusivity.

Earlier this month, it was reported that new Xbox boss Asha Sharma was “treading carefully” as she worked out what to do with exclusive games. Sharma, who replaced Phil Spencer as boss of Xbox earlier this year, has spent her first few months in the job making a number of significant changes as Microsoft works to win back the hearts and minds of its core gaming fans. Among them was the end of the controversial ‘This is an Xbox’ marketing campaign, quickfire new Xbox console features, and a Game Pass price cut.

Perhaps most significant of all, Microsoft has said it will “reevaluate our approach to exclusivity,” a tantalizing tease particularly for core fans who feel Xbox consoles have been devalued amid the company’s multiplatform push in recent years.

Fans, though, have made their feelings loud and clear already, using the new ‘XBOX Player Voice’ platform to push for exclusives.

“XBOX was built off of great game exclusives, you cannot sell any consoles without a reason to buy the console compared to your competition or even sending your tentpole games over to your competitor. BRING THEM BACK PLEASE!!!” reads the thread with the most votes so far (6,319). The comments within it are similarly vociferous. “If you really care about Xbox, you have to bring back exclusives,” one person said. “Xbox needs to have its exclusive games to differentiate itself from the competition. Exclusives work for Sony and Nintendo, so why would it be different for Xbox?” Another added: “Exclusive content and features (hardware or otherwise) make a platform stand out in comparison to the competition. Without those, why would anyone get into the XBOX platform and not other, more popular ones? Right now XBOX simply doesn't stand out from the competition.”

The big question is, can Microsoft follow Sony’s lead and retreat from multiplatform? Microsoft has a number of first-party titles due out this year already earmarked for PS5. For example, it's promised that Forza Horizon 6 will come to PS5 later this year (and if Forza Horizon 5 is any indication, not releasing the sequel on Sony’s console would mean leaving hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue on the table). Meanwhile, Microsoft has said all future Halo games will be released on Sony’s console, starting with this year’s Halo: Campaign Evolved. Playground’s Fable reboot is due out day one on PS5 this fall.

The Verge’s Tom Warren has reported that Sharma “has been evaluating a range of options for Xbox exclusive games, but is treading carefully here and isn’t yet ready to commit to any major changes.” So while hardcore Xbox fans clearly want their exclusives back, there is a question mark over whether Microsoft will agree.

Other top requests on the feedback platform reflect community concern going back years at this point. Backwards compatibility is right up there, as is making online multiplayer free to access. Another high-ranking request is for an achievement list to have a separate category for its DLC, so if you’ve got all the achievements for a game and it gets more via DLC, your 100% will remain. And then there’s the request for an Xbox Game Pass family plan, for Project Helix — the next-gen Xbox — to play discs, and the return of Xbox avatars.

Plenty, then, for Sharma to think about, although in truth none of these requests should come as much of a surprise. By opening the door to fan feedback in this way, Microsoft is creating a growing sense of hope within the community, so it will be interesting to see if Microsoft follows up by addressing the top requests and their chance of success. "We want to be clear: this doesn’t mean every piece of feedback will turn into a feature or result in a change," Microsoft clarified in its announcement on Xbox Wire. "Building across a large, global platform means weighing a lot of inputs. But better visibility helps close the gap between what you tell us and what you see happen next on XBOX."

All this talk of Xbox exclusives comes at a time when Sony has ditched PC for its narrative single-player games, which means the likes of Housemarque’s Saros, Sucker Punch’s Ghost of Yotei, Insomniac’s Marvel’s Wolverine and, presumably, Naughty Dog’s Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet will all remain PS5 exclusives. But it still leaves the door open for Sony’s multiplatform games to continue to release on PC.

Perhaps Microsoft will follow Sony’s lead here?

Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.

EA has confirmed the first details for F1 25’s 2026 Season Pack update will be made available this Wednesday, May 20. The reveal trailer for the upcoming DLC will be released at 4pm UK time, May 20 (11am EDT/8am PDT, and 1am AEST on May 21).

For the time being, EA has revealed the “cover” athletes for the update: seven-time F1 champion Lewis Hamilton, former F3 and F2 champion Gabriel Bortoleto, and veteran driver Valtteri Bottas, winner of 10 F1 Grands Prix and current owner of the greatest F1 moustache this side of Nigel Mansell.

The presence of Bortoleto and Bottas would be no accident, since they represent the two new teams on the 2026 grid: Audi and Cadillac.

EA confirmed in late 2025 that there would be no standalone F1 game released alongside the real-life 2026 season, revealing that the 2026 Formula One World Championship would be coming as a paid expansion for the existing F1 25 instead.

The content update is set to reflect all the sport’s 2026 changes, with new cars, new drivers, and the new regulations. How the new cars are handled within the 2026 season DLC will be interesting considering how critical many current F1 drivers have been of their new characteristics. Two-time F1 champ Fernando Alonso has dubbed modern F1 a “battery world championship”, 2025 champ Lando Norris has lamented F1 has gone from “the best cars ever made in Formula 1 and the nicest to drive to probably the worst”, and four-time champ Max Verstappen has quipped that he’s swapped the simulator for his Nintendo Switch, joking that he’s now practicing with Mario Kart instead.

The next full game in the series is planned for 2027, and will be “reimagined into a more expansive experience with new ways to play for fans around the world.”

IGN’s F1 25 review noted there remain “several areas where it hovers frustratingly short of its full potential,” including its fascination with clothing and emotes over classic F1 cars and content – but that it’s “comfortably the strongest the series has been since the fan favourite F1 2020.”

Luke is a Senior Editor on the IGN reviews team. You can track him down on Bluesky @mrlukereilly to ask him things about stuff.

Forza Horizon 6 managed to slip in a sly reference to Pokémon.

Xbox and Playground Games' beloved racing franchise has returned, and it's arguably better than ever. Forza Horizon 6 takes the series to Japan, a long-requested setting amongst fans. Not only is Japan a beautiful location for any game, but it has a very strong and thriving car culture. After years of fleshing out the franchise, Playground finally felt comfortable in taking on the setting and making the biggest Forza game yet.

As a result, Forza embraces Japan in all kinds of different ways. Of course, there's an emphasis on drifting in the game, there are cherry blossom trees that are so culturally significant they can't be destroyed, and there are all kinds of references to Japanese culture. One of the game's most notable events even sees the player racing a giant mech through the streets of Japan. It's outrageous, but right in line with the tone of Forza. Perhaps one of the most notable Japanese references is a nod to Pokémon, Nintendo's beloved video game franchise.

While listening to the in-game radio, you may hear the radio hosts suggest that players take some pictures while exploring Japan. They then use the term, "Snap 'em all," a play on Pokémon's legendary tagline, "Gotta catch 'em all."

The radio hosts then note that it's, "like that Japanese collecting game we're not allowed to name for legal reasons." It's a fun reference that has been amusing fans, especially since Nintendo is a very litigious company that will act against anyone who infringes on Pokémon's rights.

Pokemon mentioned in Forza Horizon 6 💀 pic.twitter.com/Pbg6IYfRBh

— ຸ (@wxrry) May 16, 2026

In related news, Pokémon turns 30 this year, and there's been no shortage of ways to celebrate. Target recently teamed up with Kellanova to produce a limited-edition line of Pokémon Pop-Tarts. As you might imagine, they have been the target of scalpers, who have been snatching up stock and reselling them for four or five times their normal retail price.

Cade Onder is a freelancer for IGN's news team. He covers all things entertainment, including gaming, film, and more. You can find him on Twitter @Cade_Onder.

Out on 3 June, the Nintendo Switch 2 port of Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth has had preorders for its physical copies (though Game-Key Cards) drop at retailers like Amazon and Argos. Although the epic follow-up to the Final Fantasy 7 Remake has been out on PS5 and PC since early 2024 and 2025 respectively, but is finally coming to the Switch 2 and Xbox Series X|S next month.

Among various preorder bonuses for the Switch 2 preorder, however, (including a reversible alternate box art inlay) is a very unique and limited in-box pre-order bonus: a Zack Fair Magic: The Gathering card.

This borderless version of the card, with variant art done by Tetsuya Nomura himself, has specifically been spotted among FF7 Rebirth’s Switch 2 pre-orders on Amazon UK and Argos — both for £43.99, after Amazon cut its initial £49.99 price.

On the other hand, Argos’ listing also comes with added in-game pre-order bonuses along with the Zack Fair card: a Posh Chocobo Summon Materia, a Shinra Bangle Mk. II item, and Midgar Bangle Mk. II item. However, Amazon doesn’t seem to have those listed in its promo art — only the Zack Fair card and reversible inlay.

If you can’t wait to start playing on Switch 2, Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth’s demo is available on the Nintendo eShop, where your save data will carry over to the full game. Plus, if you have save data from the FF7 Remake Intergrade’s main story, you’ll also unlock free Leviathan Summoning Materia.

If you also have save data for Final Fantasy 7 Remake Intergrade’s INTERmission DLC, you’ll additionally earn the Summoning Materia for Ramuh.

Will you be checking out Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth on Switch 2 or Xbox? Or are you waiting for news on Part 3? Let us know!

Ben Williams – IGN freelance contributor with over 10 years of experience covering gaming, tech, film, TV, and anime. Follow him on Twitter/X @BenLevelTen.

Sony has announced price increases for its subscription service, PlayStation Plus.

PlayStation Plus is Sony’s monthly subscription service for PS4 and PS5 consoles that grants access to online multiplayer, monthly downloadable games, and exclusive PlayStation Store discounts.

Starting May 20, PlayStation Plus prices for new customers will increase in select regions, Sony said in its announcement, blaming "ongoing market conditions." Prices will start at $10.99 USD / €9.99 EUR / £7.99 GBP for 1-month subscriptions and $27.99 USD / €27.99 EUR / £21.99 GBP for three-month subscriptions.

The monthly subscription goes up by $1, and the three-month subscription increases by $3. This price change does not apply to current subscribers (except in Turkey and India) unless the existing subscription changes or lapses, Sony added.

The news comes amid price rises across the video game industry, particularly for hardware. Sony itself raised the price of PS5 consoles back in March, blaming “continued pressures in the global economic landscape.” Earlier this month, Sony said it had yet to decide when to launch the PlayStation 6, nor how much it would cost, as memory shortages fueled by the AI boom continue to hit hard.

As you'd expect, PlayStation fans have reacted negatively to the news, with some saying PlayStation Plus shouldn't be required for online gaming in the first place, and that these new price rises make gaming on PlayStation even costlier. Others have hit out at Sony blaming the price rises on "ongoing market conditions," pointing out Microsoft just cut the price of Xbox Game Pass.

Blaming market conditions is insane. It should be free to play online games without paywalls in 2026

— ben (@videotech) May 18, 2026

First you guys increased PS5 prices and now you increase online subscription prices

what the hell?

— NikTek (@NikTek) May 18, 2026

It's worth noting that this PlayStation Plus price hike comes six months before the planned release of GTA 6, which is expected to draw a huge number of newcomers into the current generation of consoles. An active PlayStation Plus subscription is required to play GTA Online, and there's no suggestion that will change when GTA 6 comes out. Perhaps Sony is getting its price hike in now, mindful that it will gain a flood of new PlayStation Plus subscribers who are only interested in playing GTA 6 online when it comes out.

Sony has forecast annual ‌sales at its gaming business down 6% to 4.42 trillion yen (approx. $28 billion) for the current financial year due to lower hardware sales, with the PS5 now more expensive than ever and approaching its sixth birthday. However, Sony expects gaming profit to rise 30% due to higher first-party software sales, and the absence of a huge impairment loss it recorded against struggling Marathon developer Bungie. Insomniac’s Wolverine game is due out this financial year, and will surely make a significant contribution to Sony’s performance.

Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.

Batman was created more than 80 years ago and has starred in video games for 40 of them – nearly half of his existence. But despite a long and varied existence in the comics, ranging from the world’s greatest detective to a hero willing to fight gods and aliens, the dozens of Dark Knight games across the console generations have rarely strayed far from the basics. No matter what decade it is, no matter what hardware you’re playing on, odds are that in any given Batman title you’ll be gliding off gargoyles, firing grappling hooks, and flinging Batarangs at guys in straightjackets.

This year sees one of gaming’s more unusual approaches to Batman – the version made of plastic bricks – return in Lego Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight, and its exploration of Bruce Wayne’s cinematic legacy has had us thinking of Batman’s long video game journey. So, we’re going on a tour of every Batman game ever made. The good, the bad, and the weird ones. Today, we explore the very start of the rocky, winding road that would one day lead us to the gates of Arkham Asylum…

1986 was a turning point in Batman’s long history. It was the moment he would finally shake off the long shadow of the kitschy ‘60s TV series and become the brooding icon he was always meant to be. It was the year that Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns detonated our conception of the character in an operatic flash of lightning and violence and psychiatrist jokes.

In a considerably less seismic development, 1986 was also the year British developer Ocean Software published Batman’s first ever video game: a dinky isometric puzzler on the venerable ZX Spectrum.

In the days before a truly global gaming market, developers in the UK had honed their own unique approach to action: stiff, heavy movements, plodding controls, and a curious fondness for anthropomorphic eggs. You might think this an ill-fit for the Batman, the ninja master who strikes quickly with surgical precision and leaps across rooftops to vanish into the night. You would be correct.

The Joker and the Riddler have kidnapped Robin! Batman, trapped in his own cave and stripped of gadgets, must find the seven missing pieces of his trusty Bat-hovercraft to escape and pursue the dastardly duo. To do so, he’ll have to slowly navigate 150 isometric screens populated by traps, puzzles, and monsters, without any offensive capabilities whatsoever. Rather than the ultra-adept master of everything, here Batman is bereft of even basic video game functionality. Elementary video game verbs like “jumping” and “carrying items” require you to find hidden upgrades around the brutally difficult maze, rendered in a neon Zur-En-Arrh nightmare of teals and yellows and purples. A superhero power fantasy it is not.

Such an odd start was only the beginning, as 1988 saw Ocean publish the second of its three Dark Knight games, Batman: The Caped Crusader. The first of many, many sidescrolling action games to come, Caped Crusader consists of two separate scenarios pitting the Dark Knight against the Penguin and Joker. Batman can now kick rats, throw Batarangs, and flail listlessly at the hordes of identical henchmen clogging your path through agonizing, samey-looking mazes.

There’s certainly more sauce on display than Ocean’s previous effort. The game’s main selling point is its unique interface inspired by comic panels, where the screen is divided into narrow boxes through which the characters traverse. It’s an admirable, if not always pleasant, innovation that made a genuine attempt to convey the comic experience, and you can understand why Ocean tried it. Comics were pretty much all Batman was known for at the time, save for Superfriends cartoons and old memories of Adam West. That was about to change.

Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman movie was a watershed moment for the character. For the first time in decades there was a definitive Batman in the popular imagination. Game designers finally had something they could work with. Batman: The Movie the game was Ocean’s swan song, and easily the best title of this primordial bunch. The studio slapped Burton’s iconography on a sequence of five minigames, each inspired by a set-piece from the film. The sidescrolling action is vastly improved– Batman can now fight and jump simultaneously as the grappling hook makes its video game debut. More significant is the first appearance of a fast-paced Batmobile shooting gallery, soon to be a franchise staple. There’s even a charming breather on the Bat-computer where Bruce mixes chemicals around, the first real glimpse of the master detective in digital form.

Batman was big business in 1989, and the game was a smash hit across seven different PC platforms, particularly as a pack-in for a best-selling Amiga 500 bundle. The first good Batman game had arrived, but it would be Ocean’s last patrol of Gotham. The British developers would take the back seat, for now, as the license passed to another island nation with its own very distinct approach to game design.

Batman is at his best when he is in control, and it’s hard to embody the world’s second-greatest martial artist on the ZX Spectrum’s squishy rubber keyboard. Thankfully, by 1989, Japanese developer Sunsoft had become fully fluent in Famicom, and Batman would be its masterpiece.

The finished NES game bears little resemblance to the Burton movie’s plot, pitting Batman against a bizarre bullpen of deep cut DC criminals like Killer Moth and Electrocutioner. The second-to-last boss is a z-lister named Firebug, and when you finally face the Joker he summons lightning bolts from the sky, a feat, to our knowledge, Jack Nicholson is not capable of in the film. The game has a ton of personality, but it’s not really Tim Burton’s baroque gothic pulp. There’s an almost “Final Fight” vibe to Gotham’s criminal chaos, over-the-top urban combat energy where the final boss taunts you from a video screen in the penultimate level.

Most of these departures are welcome, especially when it comes to feel and mechanics. Batman marches across the screen in a flurry of punches and kicks and three distinct subweapons, including a highly dubious “spear” gun. The Dark Knight leaps from wall to wall like he’s Ryu Hyabusa. Sunsoft’s Batman earns its comparison to Ninja Gaiden not just in feel but in the cinematic cutscenes that punctuate each stage, if you can survive long enough to reach them.

Sunsoft pounced on the huge success of its first Batman game and spread the love to several other platforms over the next year. A perfectly adequate adaptation of Batman for the Sega Genesis skewed more towards the slow and deliberate Shinobi style vs. the twitch mastery of Ninja Gaiden, while a fairly obscure arcade version looked great, but suffered from early beat-em-up awkwardness with hundreds of goons pouring from doors to suck down your life and quarters. Both were notable for their inter-level Bat-vehicle sequences: sidescrolling shmups on Sega’s console and flashy first-person extravaganzas to turn heads at the arcade.

Batman for Game Boy was another totally new game, with miniature sprites of a gun-wielding Dark Knight riddling his tiny foes with bullets. Video games don’t have the best track records when it comes to Batman’s strict aversion to firearms, but Batman on Game Boy is among the more comical dismissals of the trope.

There’s one more Batman game in Sunsoft’s pocket for the first Batman movie rollout, and it’s a darn cute one. In Batman for the PC Engine, the Dark Knight is embodied as an adorably chubby avatar who putters around top down mazes dressed to look like city streets and art museums. Batman scoots around collecting powerups and cleaning paint, twirling bad guys with his Batarangs and booping them away.

We’ve seen a silly-looking Caped Crusader before, but this is very specifically supposed to be Michael Keaton’s intense and raw avenger. This weird little guy, more Bomberman than Batman, is embodying the same person who screams and smashes vases and hooks up with Kim Basinger. The game is harmless fun, with another excellent soundtrack, but the real joy comes from seeing digital stills from the film fade into the cheerful little goblin we control, or watching a chibi sprite coldly send the Joker plummeting to a grisly death.

Batman Returns was still a year away in 1991, but Sunsoft skipped the line and issued its own sequel. Without a movie to adapt, the team ditched the Burtonian gothic atmosphere in favor of full throttle run-and-gun spectacle. In the West, it was called Return of the Joker, but the Japanese title tells the real story: Dynamite Batman.

Return of the Joker looks and plays like Mega Man, Castlevania, and Contra fell into a vat and emerged as an awesome, amalgam creature with parallax scrolling and enormous sprites. There’s a sequence beneath a blimp that seems like it belongs in Sonic 3, with levels set in snowfields and speeding trains and blazing fast shooter sequences that are giving 16-bit blast processing on the 8-bit NES. Batman’s primary weapon is an arm-mounted cannon, and while it technically isn’t a gun in the traditional sense, slamming powerups into the deadly machine gun on his wrist seems outside the spirit of Batman’s solemn vow. It feels right at home within the context of a Dynamite Batman, however, one who enters boss battles following a fighting-game style versus screen and begins each fight by charging up with red lightning.

The final confrontation with the titular prodigal clown sees the Joker ensconced inside a Dr. Wily spaceship with a ludicrous 250,000 hit points, sending off Sunsoft’s Batman saga in style, even if the publisher wasn’t finished quite yet. Two more bites at the Bat-apple remained.

First came the Game Boy edition of Return of the Joker, which is completely different from its NES namesake. It feels like a hastily repurposed unrelated ninja action title slathered with a bat coat of paint, judging from the Shogun Warriors and samurai the Dark Knight disposes of within.

The Genesis version is perhaps even worse. Farmed out to an American studio under an extremely tight deadline, the 16-bit port, inexplicably rechristened Revenge of the Joker, suffers from clunky controls, muddled graphics, and difficulty that has been increased to the point of aggravation. Even Tommy Tallarico’s soundtrack is a rare miss, with Sega’s gormless Yamaha soundfont unable to compete with the crunching pulsewaves of Sunsoft’s 8-bit output.

Revenge of the Joker sounds and feels like an exhausted sigh from a publisher who had wrung everything it could out of the Burton IP. It was time to move on, and the timing couldn’t be better.

If 1989 was the year of the Bat, 1992 was the year of the cat, the bird, and the silver-haired industrialist. Burton’s indulgent, uninhibited sequel wasn’t quite as massive as the first, but the marketing machine established in ‘89 managed to churn out an entire starting lineup’s worth of video games.

Nine different Batman Returns games were made by six different developers and released by five different publishers. Nine unique, bespoke games tailored to each system, wildly differing in quality. Today’s IP tie-ins are developed over years at enormous cost and ported to increasingly indistinguishable hardware, but in 1992, it meant whatever six studios could ship before the movie left theaters.

First came Batman Returns on the Sega Genesis, developed by Malibu Interactive. Some of its talent was recruited from former Bat-devs Ocean, but the Batman Returns game they made bore a greater resemblance to Sunsoft’s Genesis offering. It’s a somewhat slow, sidescrolling, punch-kickey platformer with gadgets and grappling and a limited glide. Batman progresses through streets, sewers, and circuses, settings mind-numbingly shared across the entire spectrum of Returns games, though there are some cool setpieces like sliding through the slanted halls of a ruined building.

Sega’s Batman Returns is plenty cinematic, with cool touches like fighting the giant art deco statues from the film as firebreathing bosses and a final battle against Catwoman as the credits roll. But the sound lacks impact, and enemies die not with a gurgle or a thud but a synthesized bleat. It’s a solid if uninspiring package, and if you feel like it lacks automotive action you can pop in the Sega CD version, which adds 3D Batmobile sections and better sound to the original game.

Batman Returns on SNES is a Final Fight clone in cape and cowl, with big sprites, juicy hit stops, and beefy sound effects as you beat the crap out of a legion of identical clowns. You can bash their heads together, hurl them through plate glass windows, or cleverly recreate moments from the movie with your trusty grappling hook. Between the screen-clearing powerups, multiple elevator stages, and enemies with their own named lifebars, it’s a Konami belt-scroller through and through, but it’s far from the best. Boss battles are a bit of a bore as you face the Penguin and the Catwoman multiple times throughout the relatively short runtime.

It’s hard to say which platform had the better Batman. Like the other dueling licensed games of the era, your decision will likely lean towards the console you grew up with. If you bore allegiance to neither SNES nor Genesis, however, there were plenty of other Batman Returns games available. They just weren’t going to be as good.

Konami’s own NES effort is commendable, a shrunken-down beat-em-up in the mold of Double Dragon. The similarly obsolete Sega Master System and Game Gear each received their own fairly-decent 8-bit platformers, while Atari’s handheld Lynx featured an extremely simple side-scroller that’s barely more complex than a flip-phone game. On personal computers, an infamous Amiga version ranks among the lowest dregs of Bat-games, a buggy, nonresponsive mess that’s entirely unfun and unmemorable beyond giving you permission to punt poodles.

Rather than another 2D platformer, the MS-DOS version from developer Spirit of Discovery was a point-and-click adventure. Batman walks around the screen like he’s in a Lucasfilm game, though the Dark Knight isn’t one for witty banter, preferring shambling fisticuffs to insult swordfighting. It’s an odd, interesting precursor to the kinds of narrative adventures future technology would make possible. It boasts some pretty clever detective action: solving puzzles, staking out crime scenes, and interrogating crooks interrupted by agonizing combat sections. The Batcomputer is your best friend here, poring through archives and “video” footage to unravel the Penguin’s bid for mayor and expose the evils of Max Schreck. It’s a rare excursion into the side of Batman’s job that doesn’t involve giving people concussions, and one that would be explored heavily in the years to come, when Batman would finally become a video game trailblazer, rather than the victim of countless tie-ins.

Our exploration of the history of Batman games continues tomorrow, when we'll take a look at how the Dark Knight coped with his greatest nemesis: suits with nipples.

GTA 6 pre-orders were rumored to go live today, May 18, but it looks like those reports were inaccurate.

Last week, GTA 6 fans lost their collective mind after reports emerged that Best Buy had potentially leaked the game’s pre-order date. During a livestream, YouTuber Frogboyx1gaming appeared to receive an email from Best Buy to his affiliate account signalling a pre-order campaign for GTA 6 that would run from May 18-21. The suggestion was that GTA 6 pre-orders would go live on May 18, potentially alongside GTA 6 Trailer 3.

IGN had asked Best Buy for comment but received no response. Still, there was plenty of doubt cast on the rumor, and, as we pointed out last week, we’d been here before, many times. Some GTA 6 fans actually believed in a Trailer 3 release date prediction that came from someone who charted the planetary positions for every single Rockstar Games trailer released since 2007. That turned out to be inaccurate, too.

Now, the main administrator of GTA Forums has posted to say a verified source at a European distribution company “confirmed there's no pre-orders,” insisting Best Buy had made a mistake.

As you’d expect, the GTA 6 fan community, already close to breaking point waiting for some sort of announcement or reveal for the game, has gone into meltdown — and yes, there are a number of angry posts from people who had come to expect pre-orders would go live today, despite the fact there was no official announcement that Rockstar.

Nothing. Ever. Happens.
by u/AnimalDesatado in GTA6

The upshot of all this is that the wait goes on not just for GTA 6 pre-orders to go live, but a fresh look at the game, either in trailer or screenshot form. We still don’t know how much the game will cost. All we have to go on are rather vague comments from Strauss Zelnick, boss of Rockstar parent company Take-Two, who’s talked about GTA 6 marketing kicking off this summer, and the game itself offering incredible value whenever anyone asks him how much GTA 6 will cost.

Certainly, the wait for a new GTA 6 reveal has gone on longer than anyone expected. It’s been over a year since Trailer 2 came out. Trailer 1 came out three years ago, in 2023. Meanwhile, GTA 6 itself has suffered two official delays, first to May 2026 after it was penciled in for fall 2025, then to November 2026. In a new interview, Zelnick suggested GTA 6 was internally targeting an even earlier release window — around spring 2025 — before it was announced for fall 2025.

GTA 6 is significantly behind schedule, then, but Zelnick has gone on the record to say he’s keen to give developer Rockstar everything it needs to achieve “perfection.” And there is of course pressure on the game to deliver just that and break every sales record going.

Earlier this month, Business Insider reported that Take-Two is estimated to have spent $1-1.5 billion so far on GTA 6. In an interview with the publication, Zelnick wouldn’t say how much exactly, but did admit “it was expensive.” To put GTA 6 into context, most of the triple-A video game budgets that make headlines do so for being in the hundreds of millions of dollars range. Bungie's recently released extraction shooter reportedly had a budget of over $250 million, for example. Last year, the astronomical development budgets of the Call of Duty games were revealed for the first time after a court document confirmed Activision pumped $700 million into Black Ops Cold War alone, although that was over the shooter's life cycle. GTA 6, clearly, surpasses them all.

At least Zelnick sounds really, really confident that GTA 6 won't be delayed yet again and will actually come out on November 19. When he was asked how he deals with not knowing when the game will come out, given his commitment to giving the developers all the time they need, he replied, firmly: "November 19th, I do know. It’s been announced."

We're now just six months from that date.

Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.

LEGO Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight sees you rise as the Dark Knight and experience the essential Batman story in a bold, action-packed adventure with hard-hitting combat, an open-world Gotham City, and the signature LEGO charm that fans know and love.

It draws on everything in the world of Batman: the movies, the 1960's TV show, and of course the comics, including the LEGO Batman version of the Batsuit from Gotham by Gaslight, the beloved steampunk-themed Elsewords comic from 1989.

LEGO Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight is coming to Nintendo Switch 2, PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S. PC players will be able to log in from 10am PT on May 22, and console players can expect a rolling midnight launch. Those who've paid for the deluxe early access version, however, can jump in three days early.

IGN's Lego Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight review returned an 8/10. We said: "A strong open-world Gotham and trademark Lego slapstick humour powers a fantastic plastic parody of Batman’s greatest hits."

Depending on where you are in the world, LEGO Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight is set to go live at the following times for early access players:

PDT (San Francisco):

• 9pm

CST (Mexico City):

• 10pm

CDT (Chicago):

• 11pm

EDT (New York):

• 12am midnight

BST (London):

• 12am midnight

CEST (Paris):

• 12am midnight

CST (Beijing):

• 12am midnight

JST (Tokyo):

• 12am midnight

AEST (Sydney):

• 12am midnight

NZST (Wellington):

• 12am midnight

Depending on where you are in the world, LEGO Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight is set to go live at the following times for early access players on PC:

PDT (San Francisco):

• 10am

CST (Mexico City):

• 11am

CDT (Chicago):

• 12pm noon

EDT (New York):

• 1pm

BST (London):

• 6pm

CEST (Paris):

• 7pm

CST (Beijing):

• 1am

JST (Tokyo):

• 2am

AEST (Sydney):

• 3am

NZST (Wellington):

• 5am

Depending on where you are in the world, LEGO Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight is set to go live at the following times for all players on console:

PDT (San Francisco):

• 9pm

CST (Mexico City):

• 10pm

CDT (Chicago):

• 11pm

EDT (New York):

• 12am midnight

BST (London):

• 12am midnight

CEST (Paris):

• 12am midnight

CST (Beijing):

• 12am midnight

JST (Tokyo):

• 12am midnight

AEST (Sydney):

• 12am midnight

NZST (Wellington):

• 12am midnight

Depending on where you are in the world, LEGO Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight is set to go live at the following times for all players on PC:

PDT (San Francisco):

• 10am

CST (Mexico City):

• 11am

CDT (Chicago):

• 12pm noon

EDT (New York):

• 1pm

BST (London):

• 6pm

CEST (Paris):

• 7pm

CST (Beijing):

• 12am midnight

JST (Tokyo):

• 2am

AEST (Sydney):

• 3am

NZST (Wellington):

• 5am

Vikki Blake is a reporter for IGN, as well as a critic, columnist, and consultant with 15+ years experience working with some of the world's biggest gaming sites and publications. She's also a Guardian, Spartan, Silent Hillian, Legend, and perpetually High Chaos. Find her at BlueSky.

Forza Horizon 6 developer Playground has confirmed the global release times for the hotly anticipated racing game.

Confirmation comes after Forza Horizon 6 suffered a significant leak on PC that led to the game being made available to pirates well before launch. Playground and parent company Microsoft have been working to plug the leak, and even issued pirates with lifetime hardware ID bans. Some had wondered if the leak would alter Forza Horizon 6’s release plans, perhaps with it being brought forward, but that is not the case.

As confirmed in a post on social media, Forza Horizon 6’s early access launch went ahead as planned on May 15, with the full launch to follow from May 18.

As a first-party Microsoft game, Forza Horizon 6 launches day one on Game Pass (PC and Ultimate) on May 19. Preload went live on May 12 across all platforms (Steam, Xbox Series X and S, and the Xbox app for PC - a PS5 version is on the way, although it's due out later this year). Meanwhile, Forza Horizon 6 is 'Verified' on Steam Deck and other devices, including the Xbox ROG Ally and Ally X.

Steam access for everyone begins at 12:01 am on May 19 with the U.S. Eastern time zone. This is a global release pattern, Playground said, so the Steam launch will be aligned to Eastern time. Full timezone details are below.

PT (Seattle):

• 09:01 pm

CST (Mexico City):

• 11:01 pm

ET (New York):

• 00:01 am

BST (London):

• 00:01 am

CEST (Paris):

• 00:01 am

JST (Tokyo):

• 00:01 am

KST (Seoul):

• 00:01 am

AEST (Sydney):

• 00:01 am

NZST (Auckland):

• 00:01 am

PT (Seattle):

• 09:01 pm

CST (Mexico City):

• 11:01 pm

ET (New York):

• 00:01 am

BST (London):

• 05:01 am

CEST (Paris):

• 06:01 am

JST (Tokyo):

• 01:01 pm

KST (Seoul):

• 01:01 pm

AEST (Sydney):

• 02:01 pm

NZST (Auckland):

• 04:01 pm

Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.

Parody, when done correctly, can be one of the sharpest, funniest ways to show your love for something. That task comes a little bit easier, and all the more richer, when the target in your sights is a man who dresses up as a bat and demands to be taken seriously all too often. Lego series developer TT Games is no stranger to this world, having jumped into Gotham on more than one occasion in the past and delivered consistently fun pastiches of some of pop culture's most beloved characters for two decades now. In Lego Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight, it's back at the top of its game, built lovingly brick-by-brick with fun always foremost in mind, especially in an open world that eclipses its linear levels. A top-tier Lego game with playful twists on Rocksteady’s Arkham series that hit the mark more often than not, it's a strong send-up of the Caped Crusader, delivered with a kiss from a rose.

Legacy of the Dark Knight embraces its Lego building blocks more than any other game in the series to date. By that, I mean its overall structure is somewhat like if several Batman kits were thrown onto the floor and jumbled up, only to be reshaped into original creations of their own. TT Games has taken storylines from each of Bruce Wayne’s big-screen outings and crafted its own tale from those beloved scenes, just performed in plastic. For example, its first chapter slams together moments from Jack Nicholson’s Joker rebirth in Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman movie with the Falcone-centered Iceberg Lounge infiltration of Matt Reeves’ The Batman, and does so effortlessly with comedic charm.

It’s at its best when being reverential to those movies while also exercising its license to mess around with them at will, consistently throwing unexpected mash-ups onto the screen. The overarching story may not come together quite as well as I’d hope, due to it leaving it quite late to tie earlier events and characters together, but in terms of delivering an enjoyable remix of the movies, it hits the nail on the head. Instead of one epic tale, it’s better to think of each of its six chapters as its own mini comic book run, as new allies fight by Batman's side to thwart the plans of an iconic villain. For example, one string of missions may end in a much less leather-obsessed version of Batman Returns’ Penguin story, but you’ll take on the likes of Condiment King along the way. It’s these deviations from the familiar film stories that often delight the most, and I enjoyed each time I thought I knew exactly what the twist on a certain scene was going to be, only to have a curveball thrown at me laced with delightful nonsense.

Through a series of roughly 20 linear missions, you’ll fight, puzzle, and platform your way around Gotham locations in a way that will feel familiar if you’ve played any Lego games in the past. Where things are different, though, is in its combat, which takes a leaf out of Rocksteady’s Batman Arkham series by introducing its counter and dodge-based melee system, albeit soundtracked with a comic-book-esque Chudd!, Thudd!, and Krakk!. It feels slick to wield as you take on hordes of criminals and rack up combos reaching into the 100s, pressing the parry button whenever a flashing prompt appears over one of their heads. It’s a step up from the traditional Lego formula of just pressing the attack button until foes explode into their component parts, with a reasonable amount of enemy variety keeping fights relatively fresh, even if I was left desiring a little more in terms of interesting encounter design.

I played on the Caped Crusader difficulty, which is a step up from the “Classic” Lego experience, but in truth, never came close to losing a fight. I also realise that a tough challenge isn’t necessarily what TT Games are trying to pose here — though there is Dark Knight difficulty if you’re looking for something approaching it. I would have liked to have been made to figure out how to approach combat encounters a little more, though, with stealth takedowns coming all too easily and brawls not evolving much beyond the early hours. Most fights consist of dealing with multiple waves of basic grunts and the odd brute or ranged sharpshooter thrown into the mix as you roll and jump around a walled arena. Each member of the seven-character-strong roster feels identical to control in basic combat, too, with everyone from Nightwing to Jim Gordon packing the same punch. I would have welcomed a little more variety in their movesets here and in how they move around Gotham, as each is equipped with their own version of wings or gliders that all feel exactly the same. That grapple and launch into a long swoop does feel really good, though, so it’s hard to feel too aggrieved.

Where they do differ, though, is in their gadgetry, with each member of the extended bat-family housing two distinct tools on their belt. I particularly enjoyed sending one of Catwoman’s feline friends to scratch the face off enemies with a quick flash of a laser pointer, as I did summoning in Batgirl’s drone to electrify and stun grouped-up goons. Each playable character also has their own skill tree to explore, including some very fun unlockable ultimate abilities that can be unleashed once you’ve filled up your focus meter by landing successive hits. A particular favourite of mine is Batman’s batarang-powered move, which can unleash a swarm of bats onto a horde, stunning and dealing damage to each of them as they get lost in the flurry of plastic wings and teeth. I’ll admit to being initially worried that the relatively thin number of playable heroes could work against Legacy of the Dark Knight, especially when we’ve become accustomed to Lego games containing rosters stretching into the hundreds, but each character does have a substantial amount of depth to sink skill points into here to make them distinct from one another.

Puzzles, and not combat, are where they show off those unique skills more than anywhere, though. Each level is a great mix of problem-solving and fighting, and although it never becomes truly brain-teasing, it does make you pause for thought every now and then. Knowing when to switch between the two characters you’re locked into playing as during a mission is half of the battle, as you work out if a pipe gushing chemicals can be stuffed up with sealant from Gordon’s handy foam cannon or a small vent can be crawled through by one of Selina Kyle’s cat companions. Of course, like pretty much every Lego game, it’s all playable in two-player local co-op (the lack of online is a frustration), with some puzzles requiring coordination and timing to complete. Many bits of tech also come packed with their own enjoyable minigames, such as Batgirl’s hacking batarangs, which trigger a short puzzle section where you need to avoid enemies in a maze made up of concentric circles. These minigames don’t really develop in complexity over time, but there’s a decent amount of different types, so you’re never doing too many of the same in a row.

I’ve been playing Lego games ever since the first, Lego Star Wars, arrived when I was 13 back in 2005, and have always harboured a fondness for them. I instantly fell in love with the slapstick humour that each of my favourite films and characters would be lampooned with, combined with the collectathon aspects I’ve always enjoyed in games. For me, they peaked in 2013, which saw the releases of both Lego Marvel Super Heroes and Lego City Undercover (you can read all about my love for Chase McCain’s adventure here). The freedom presented in the open worlds of both of those really set them apart for me, and, now alongside Legacy of the Dark Knight, they sit at the top of the pile.

Similarly, Rocksteady’s Arkham series remains one of my favourites in all of video games. That blend of revolutionary melee combat, combined with novel approaches to emergent events and how chains of side missions can be employed in open worlds, is what makes them so special to me. Perhaps somewhat controversially, Arkham Knight is actually my favourite of the bunch. I love the Batman story it tells, and still would consider it one of the most interesting cities I’ve explored in a game, in no small part thanks to its emergent nature (hello, Man-Bat.) Not even a handful of tedious tank missions can detract from that. Like a lot of us, I’ve been waiting for another like it, and I did review Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League for IGN, which, sadly, didn’t live up to the quality of its predecessors at all. Let’s hope we get to return to Rocksteady’s Gotham again one day.

After a stop-start prologue tutorial riffs on Batman Begins’ League of Shadows training in a way that takes far too long to get through the basics, it settles into a good rhythm and then really hits the heights late on. A highlight is a late riff on The Dark Knight’s high-speed truck chase, which dynamically switches up the action between vehicle and foot. It carries a sense of momentum that many of the missions prior to it lack, and I would have liked to see more like this when it came to mission design, because when it really sings, like in this sequence, it all comes together wonderfully.

But the critical path has never been what I've enjoyed most when it comes to Lego games. Instead, finding those offshoots and exploring the open world on the hunt for collectibles is really where Legacy of the Dark Knight comes alive. There’s no shortage of things to find in Gotham either – while this version of the crime-ravaged city isn’t the largest, it’s packed full of opportunity. From hundreds of skill token-containing chests and villain-themed trophies to smash in each region to more involved Riddler and Cluemaster conundrums to solve, it feels like there’s something to do on every lofty rooftop and dingy alleyway.

Then there are more involved chains of side-missions to complete, too, which often lead to encounters with Batman villains not involved in the main story. For example, I had a great time following The Case of Waylon Jones, which tasked me with role-playing as The World’s Greatest Detective and analysing compounds by matching up shapes to their corresponding atoms or following trails using a UV light. Catwoman’s hunt for the Falcone fortune is also a great set of side missions, which involve several mini-heists and safecracking antics. It’s never overly complex stuff, but it always offers that welcome bit of variety and helps build out the fantasy further. Legacy of the Dark Knight loves keeping you busy without it ever feeling like busywork. After finishing its main story missions after 12 hours on the dot, I was still left with 53% of its collectibles checklist to complete, but have since achieved 100% at the 34-hour mark.

Rewards for completing these tasks are varied, too, with certain outfits, vehicles, and appearance-modifying red bricks granted depending on the mission. Those rueing the smaller roster size will find comfort in knowing there are still 100 different uniforms to unlock, ranging from comic book classics for the purists to the more maverick lime green, toxic waste-themed Batman Ninja look, if that’s what your heart desires. As well as gaining these from completing levels, you can spend your hard-earned studs at one of Bat-Mite’s many stores dotted around the city. Like a Tom Nook who’s shunned island life for the infinite cold and darkness of Gotham, he’ll offer funny, meta-tinged quips while you browse his wares. Alongside costumes, he also sells decorations to place around your Batcave, granting a level of fantasy that Bat-fans have never had before. The lair itself is a joy to take in, too, with each of your collected goodies proudly displayed in towering wardrobes or exhibition spaces customised to your own desire.

There's charm overload at every turn, with cutscenes that are often hilarious as silliness is always prioritised through slapstick physical humour and goofy dialogue. “We may not have health insurance, but boy does this make up for it”, could be heard from one enemy as I pummelled him and his friends a fresh shade of purple to add a new colour to the funhouse ball pit we were brawling in. There’s a clear love for all things Batman here, with the DC hero and the culture around him always the target of affectionate mockery. That could be riffs on popular memes, such as Michael Caine’s infamous “Batman Begin” Twitter post, or the fact that you may just be wandering around the Batcave minding your own business when the Batphone rings. Who’s on the other end of the line? Well, that would be Bane, gloriously voiced by What We Do in the Shadows’ Matt Berry, who loves nothing more than to crank call you with some wonderfully childish messages.

There’s always something to grab your ears or eyes, from the colourful wonder of the Joker’s parade from Batman ‘89 to the fiery, deathtrap obstacle course of The Flying Grayson’s circus show. But outside of grand spectacle, there are also the small details that I couldn’t stop myself from taking a closer look at, such as the fibrous texture of the heroes’ capes, the way raindrops trace down the scuffs of plastic minifig heads, or the way Batman flails his arms around like an inflatable tube man when on the back of a motorcycle. Zooming around this open-world Gotham is fantastic, too, with each of the 30 vehicles feeling distinct from one another. I particularly enjoy the heft and weight of the tank-like Tumbler from The Dark Knight — the perfect tool for smashing through the city’s destructible decorations and scooping up the stud currency that erupts from them.

Fresh from its huge early access launch, underwater survival and crafting adventure game Subnautica 2 has sparked a significant debate among fans: to kill or not to kill the fish.

Currently, you can’t kill any fish in Subnautica 2, and there is no weaponry to do so, and some players don’t like that at all. While you can sort of deter fish to go away by using a flare, you can’t actively kill fish while out in the deep — despite the fact they can not only pursue you, but damage you.

It’s worth noting that you can kill small fish in a roundabout way, but gathering them up as a resource and turning them into all sorts of useful things back at your base. But there’s no direct killing of any fish while out and about, making everything you encounter on the alien planet effectively immortal. Because of this, you’ll just bounce off fish if you crash into them. Indeed, this is not how it works in Subnautica 1, which does let players kill fish.

Unknown Worlds’ philosophy for the sequel is different. The developers have spoken in the past about not wanting players to conquer or dominate the environment, and that it wouldn’t feature tools that would let them slay anything that gets in their way. "We aren't a killing game," level designer Artyom "Artie" O'Rielly said in the Subnautica Discord. "Go play Sons of the Forest or something if you want to kill."

Still, with Subnautica 2 now out in the wild, the discourse around killing fish has resurfaced, and so the developers are once again chiming in. Environmental artist “uly” has had plenty to say on the topic, insisting that “the conversation around the ways fish die isn’t over.” The developers are talking about it a lot internally, uly said, and hope to provide an update soon.

“Trust me it is a HOT topic,” uly said. “There are so many opinions. Personally, I am hoping we can eventually let the little fish die. I’m team no-kill-shark-sized-stuff tho.”

“When you bump into a predator you shouldn't be going ‘uuuuuugh what a pain,’ you should be going, ‘Ah man... what tools do I have up my sleeve to deal with this guy?’”

“You do get a tool that will deter them, but it doesn’t deter them enough right now,” uly continued. “You prob wont be able to kill the shark sized stuff and larger, but you’ll get tools to deter them. Killing little fish? I’m not in charge of that stuff, but it’s an active discussion in the team.”

As mentioned, flares are an option for deterring fish, but they’re far from ideal. “I think that they take up valuable inventory space,” uly suggested, which “means most players aren't lugging them around. Inventory space is at too much of a premium.”

Clearly, Unknown Worlds is working out how to handle this issue, but don’t expect meaningful change any time soon. Uly said any change to allow players to kill fish would require “a good bit of investment” on the development side, citing game balance, mechanics, animation, sound, and AI considerations.

“We've had this conversation a TON internally,” uly said. “Regardless of where we land, we know that players don't have enough ways to deal with hostile wildlife.”

I’ve been keeping on top of the Subnautica 2 community while playing the game, and every now and then you see players ask for help on how to kill fish, unaware it’s simply not possible. For example, one person posted on the Subnautica reddit to complain about getting bit by fish, pointing out the Survival Multitool doesn’t hurt them back and asking if there is a weapon available further down the line.

“You can't kill fish, it's not in their vision,” one person replied. “I think it’s a good thing,” another added. “It’ll open up the devs to add more progression elements to deter or distract or pacify fish. Knifing them is probably the least interesting solution from a gameplay perspective.”

A change for killing fish is not on the Subnautica 2 early access roadmap, which was revealed last week. Unknown Worlds said it’s working towards a “big drop” that will expand the world with biomes, creatures, resources, tools, vehicles, and the next chapter of the story. But in the meantime, improvements will be added to the game. The first update will include quality-of-life fixes that Unknown Worlds said “should help adjust and address some areas that need a little tweaking to make your Subnautica 2 experience even better.” The second update, meanwhile, will focus on improving the co-op experience.

Unknown Worlds stressed that the roadmap is subject to change, but there’s plenty here that should excite fans — and there are a lot of them. Subnautica 2 sold an incredible 2 million copies in just 12 hours, and obliterated the first game’s Steam concurrent player peak. IGN’s Subnautica 2 early access review returned a 7/10. We said: “It’s pretty impressive that wading in the shallow tides of Subnautica 2's early access debut is as fun as it is already, and that should be a great sign of things to come, but I also wouldn’t blame anyone for waiting for these waters to rise a bit before getting their feet wet.”

We’ve got a Things to Do First in Subnautica 2 guide to check out before you dive in, plus resource location guides to help you find Titanium, Silver, and more. Discover blackbox and supply crate locations on our interactive Subnautica 2 map, and make sure you don’t miss any Angel Comb Adaptations or Blueprints.

Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.

Borderlands’ well-documented 11th hour art style change cost Take-Two an extra $50 million in development costs and delayed the game by a year, but without it the now successful franchise would have flopped straight out the gate.

That’s according to Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick, who in a sweeping interview with David Senra about his career said his approval of the last minute switch and associated extra cost was “a non-obvious decision” that no-one else would have made, but his trust in the developers was rewarded with a new hit franchise.

“We had not turned around the company yet, and we had very limited capital,” Zelnick began, speaking of Take-Two as it was after he had taken over the company in 2007. At the time, Borderlands was due out in 2008 with a realistic art style, but then Zelnick was asked to approve a significant change with the game basically done that would see it rebuilt with a cel-shaded, cartooney art style.

“We were developing a game and it was about to be released two months later, which is to say it's done. And we'd spent a lot of money,” Zelnick continued. “And the head of the division came into my office and said, ‘Look, we just don't think this is good enough and we think we screwed up and the art style is not appropriate and it's not differentiated. So, we want to remake the game.’ I was like, ‘What does that mean?’ He said, ‘It means $50 million of incremental dev costs [which was a lot of money to us], and another year.’ It was on a release schedule, which we’d announced. And I dug in. I mean, I don't give knee-jerk answers. I dug in and did my homework. In the end of it, I supported the decision. And that title became Borderlands. Had we not done that, Borderlands wouldn't have been a hit. And that was a non-obvious decision. And I can pretty much assure you no one else in the business would have done it.”

Why wouldn’t anyone else have made the same call? “Because it was insane,” Zelnick explained. “They would have said the game is done. Put out the game. Move on to the next thing. I'm not spending 50 million bucks to remake the goddamn thing in another art style. And I have no evidence that one will work either.”

Zelnick said he had to trust the intuition of the developers at Gearbox. “That's the story,” he added. “Be the most creative, be the most innovative, be the most efficient. I hired the most creative people. I said, ‘You have to pursue your passions. We will support you.’ They came and said, ‘This is our assessment. This is our passion. Are you going to support us?’ And I said, ‘Yes.’”

The rest, as they say, is history. The looter shooter franchise has now sold over 100 million units, with Borderlands 3 publishing label 2K’s fastest selling title, and Borderlands 2K’s top selling title with over 30 million sold.

While it worked out in the end, the art style switch caused a great deal of stress to a number of people. In an interview with Game Informer, Borderlands 4 creative director Graeme Timmins, who was the lead level designer on the original Borderlands, thought the idea was “f***ing insane."

"We had already been working on the game for several years at that point, and not only did we change the art style, we basically threw out all of the levels — I think only Trash Coast and, like, one other level made it through — everything else, we remade basically from scratch," he said. "From January to, like, August or September of that year, all of the level designers — at the time, level design, mission design, and level art were all just under 'level design' under me — we rebuilt the whole game to match the new art style from that time. It was an incredibly intense time, and we were like, 'What the hell are we doing?'"

In 2019, Gearbox boss Randy Pitchford told IGN that while he believed it was the right move, the switch to a non-realistic aesthetic put a cap on the Borderlands franchise’s success. "I knew it was putting a ceiling on us because there's — especially back then — there's just a huge percentage of the gaming audience that does not want a cartoon," he said.

With Borderlands 4 out the door and continuing to get updates, it’s unclear what’s next for the franchise. Borderlands 5 seems like an obvious next step, but Zelnick has admitted sales haven’t met expectations.

Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.

Terraria developer Re-Logic has confirmed that updates will continue "beyond" the 1.4.6 update and the upcoming crossplay patch, and will share "other plans and ideas [...] when the time is right."

Addressing fans on its 15th anniversary in an update on Steam, the studio reflected on the staggering milestone of 70 million sales, 39.6 million of which were sold on PC, 10.7 million on console, and 19.7 million on mobile. Unsurprisingly, this has led to an average daily player count of around half a million players, and a peak of 1.4 million.

As part of the celebrations, Terraria is getting a 15th anniversary collector's edition — what, exactly, it includes remains a mystery — and Terraria Design Works, a book that takes a retrospective look at the life of Terraria, developed in collaboration with Lost in Cult.

"From the hardcore players with thousands of hours to those just discovering our 'metroidvania in a sandbox' today... from the builders to the speedrunners... from those that we interact with regularly in our community to those that just enjoy the game in silence... from those that are regular Terraria enjoyers to those that like to shake things up with all sorts of mods on tModloader... each and every one of you are precious to us," developer Re-Logic said.

"We hope that our game has brought you some joy over the years. Terraria is a unique experience one that we like to think that we have shaped together alongside the fans into the awesomeness that it is today. This is as much your journey as it is ours!"

Terraria has announced its "final" update a number of times, so many in fact that it's become something of a running joke within the community. 1.4.5 was once thought of as being the final update, but then came confirmation of 1.4.6, and now we know even more updates are planned for that.

"They just can't let the game end, and I'm grateful for that," joked one fan. "There's always more fun stuff they can add to this game." Another wrote: "Best $2.50 I ever spent was on Terraria when Steam sales still had deep discounts, I have hundreds of hours on it as well as many fond memories playing it with loved ones. Congrats to them."

Terraria 1.4.5 — dubbed the Bigger and Boulder Update — finally dropped in January, welcoming in thousands of new and returning players alike. Up until the new update, Terraria averaged around 20-30,000 players at any one time, with the occasional spike in interest when new content dropped over the years. 1.4.5, however, prompted one of the biggest spikes in over a decade, hitting a release day peak of almost 165,000 players on Valve's platform.

IGN reviewed Terraria 15 years ago (!), when it was released way back in 2011. Even then, though, we thought it was amazing, scoring it 9/10 and writing: "Though on the surface it looks like just another 'me too' indie game seeking to ride the coattails of Minecraft's success, Terraria expands on the familiar sandbox gameplay with a greater emphasis on combat and adventure that proves very satisfying. That's rare indeed."

Vikki Blake is a reporter for IGN, as well as a critic, columnist, and consultant with 15+ years experience working with some of the world's biggest gaming sites and publications. She's also a Guardian, Spartan, Silent Hillian, Legend, and perpetually High Chaos. Find her at BlueSky.

GTA 6 is due out November 19, 2026, but as we all know it’s suffered a number of delays. It was officially announced for a fall 2025 release, but was then delayed to May 2026, and then, again officially, to this November. But in a new interview, Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick suggested GTA 6 was internally targeting an even earlier release window — around spring 2025 — before it was announced for fall 2025.

Speaking to David Senra in a new video interview about his career, Zelnick said GTA 6 was “about 18 months behind the original date… not much more than that.” That suggests the original plan, even if it wasn’t announced publicly, was to have GTA 6 out spring 2025.

Assuming that’s correct, GTA 6 is significantly behind schedule, but Zelnick has gone on the record to say he’s keen to give developer Rockstar Games everything it needs to achieve “perfection.” And there is of course pressure on the game to deliver just that and break every sales record going.

Earlier this month, Business Insider reported that Take-Two is estimated to have spent $1-1.5 billion so far on GTA 6. In an interview with the publication, Zelnick wouldn’t say how much exactly, but did admit “it was expensive.” To put GTA 6 into context, most of the triple-A video game budgets that make headlines do so for being in the hundreds of millions of dollars range. Bungie's recently released extraction shooter reportedly had a budget of over $250 million, for example. Last year, the astronomical development budgets of the Call of Duty games were revealed for the first time after a court document confirmed Activision pumped $700 million into Black Ops Cold War alone, although that was over the shooter's life cycle. GTA 6, clearly, surpasses them all.

Given the expectation that GTA 6 will be the biggest entertainment launch of all time, it comes as no surprise to hear of astronomical development costs for Rockstar’s game. And it has been in the works for some time; according to Business Insider, some of the thousands of staff at Rockstar have been working on GTA 6 for over a decade now. In a recent interview with Bloomberg, Zelnick said development costs have risen over the years, but Take-Two tries to give its teams “unlimited financial, creative human resources and then they aim to deliver perfection.”

Zelnick has said GTA 6 marketing will kick into gear in the summer, ahead of the planned November release date. Fans are anxiously awaiting the release of Trailer 3, as well as the launch of preorders, and there are all sorts of theories doing the rounds that will no doubt turn out to be nonsense. Such is the intense scrutiny GTA 6 is under, that even the innocuous becomes the big online talking point.

Zelnick, though, sounds pretty confident. In the interview with Senra, he said that “most people believe” GTA is the most valuable entertainment IP ever created, and while he wouldn’t say how much money the series has made over time, he did say, with a smile, “it’s a lot.” GTA 6 will surely be no different.

And Zelnick sounds really, really confident that GTA 6 won't be delayed yet again and will actually come out on November 19. When asked how he deals with not knowing when the game will come out, given his commitment to giving the developers all the time they need, Zelnick replied, firmly: "November 19th, I do know. It’s been announced."

Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.

Coming-of-age video game Mixtape is packed with licensed music from artists like Devo and The Smashing Pumpkins, but publisher Annapurna Interactive and developer Beethoven and Dinosaur have told fans not to worry about the game potentially being delisted down the road.

Creative director Johnny Galvatron kept concerns about the game's future from spinning out of control during a recent interview with Kotaku. Despite featuring a full playlist of tracks from recognizable groups throughout its foot-tapping story, he said that the team paid extra to maintain licenses for each track in perpetuity.

Annapurna followed up the interview with its own statement in an X/Twitter post. It said, "We heard some people say MIXTAPE would be delisted due to music licenses expiring. That was a lie."

We heard some people say MIXTAPE would be delisted due to music licenses expiring.

That was a lie.

Have a great weekend, everyone. https://t.co/C3VesfWPpz

— Annapurna Interactive (@A_i) May 16, 2026

Fears that Mixtape could, at some point, be pulled from digital shelves aren't exactly unfounded. Plenty of games have suffered similar fates due to expired licenses in the past, including Rock Band 4 late last year and the original Alan Wake in 2017. Even Grand Theft Auto 4 replaced a few tunes after some licenses expired in 2018.

It's clear Beethoven and Dinosaur wanted to put in the effort to make sure its story and the music woven throughout it remained intact for years to come. One example of a "boundary test" idea that was floated but didn't pan out involved asking Pink Floyd for a song, but the team's supervisor cautioned that the classic rock band wasn't likely to give them the track they were after. That said, when it came to getting the other tunes they wanted, Galvatron told Kotaku the team never ran into any real horror stories and got "pretty much everything [they] asked for."

"There's just so many points in the game where Stacy turns the screen and says 'This is the Smashing Pumpkins, and it's fucking sick,'" he added. "You send that to [Smashing Pumpkins frontman] Billy Corgan and he goes, 'This is the Smashing Pumpkins and it's fucking sick, yeah, they can do that. That’s fine.'"

Mixtape launched for PC, Nintendo Switch 2, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X | S May 7, 2026. IGN called it a "Masterpiece" in our 10/10 review.

"A musical delight from start to finish," we said at launch last month, "Mixtape sets a new standard for coming-of-age stories in video games and does so with a masterful sense of style."

Michael Cripe is a freelance writer with IGN. He's best known for his work at sites like The Pitch, The Escapist, and OnlySP. Be sure to give him a follow on Bluesky (@mikecripe.bsky.social) and Twitter (@MikeCripe).

Xbox seems to have rebranded…to "XBOX."

You'd be forgiven for not noticing the difference, but yes, newly appointed CEO Asha Sharma took to X/Twitter to confirm Microsoft's gaming branch has been given an all-caps makeover. The lack of an update on platforms like Instagram, Facebook, Bluesky, and YouTube makes it a bit unclear how serious this supposed rebrand is, but the big change to XBOX can at least already be seen on its X account and even Sharma's LinkedIn profile.

The CEO shared the update following a social media poll, where she asked fans to choose between the standard Xbox and its larger version. After returning results that put XBOX in the lead with an almost shocking 64.8% of the votes, the change has officially been acted upon.

👀 pic.twitter.com/4MHzmLsXNm

— Asha (@asha_shar) May 15, 2026

Xbox has undergone a laundry list of changes, big and small, since Sharma replaced Phil Spencer as CEO in February of this year. Highlights include leadership switch-ups earlier this month, the end of the "This is an Xbox" marketing campaign in March, and a drop in price for Game Pass subscribers in April.

It's unclear how successful some of these changes have been for Microsoft as Sharma works to get Xbox into a better place. The all-caps makeover for the Xbox name, though, definitely seem to fall more in line with smaller adjustments we've recently seen, such as the new boot up sequence revealed a few weeks ago or the classic logo facelift from April.

For now, fans aren't sure exactly how to feel about an all-caps XBOX. As some have pointed out, the change is at least a fun nod to the early days of the console's logo and name. Considering the update seems to be inspired directly by fan input, some have even begun to call on Sharma to make more changes, such as reverting the name back to its classic, rough-edged font. Others aren't so willing to entertain the XBOX idea until they see if it will actually stick.

what’s the purpose of this rename bruh https://t.co/DUyRmevBlJ pic.twitter.com/nYUqFqOIp4

— nicki ☘️ (@s1nicki) May 16, 2026

"I was expecting something pointless and stupid, but gosh they have still managed to surprise me," one Reddit user said.

"HUGE IF TRUE," another joked.

We'll hopefully have a better idea about how committed Microsoft is to XBOX in the near future. Until then, you can see what Sharma had to say about her past gaming history. You can also see read about the recently leaked Xbox Cloud Gaming controller.

Michael Cripe is a freelance writer with IGN. He's best known for his work at sites like The Pitch, The Escapist, and OnlySP. Be sure to give him a follow on Bluesky (@mikecripe.bsky.social) and Twitter (@MikeCripe).

Forza Horizon 6 for PC and Xbox comes out next week (the PS5 edition comes later). This is the perfect excuse for you to finally upgrade from a controller to a bona fide racing wheel. For a limited time, Amazon Resale is offering a used "Like New" Logitech G923 Trueforce Racing Wheel and Pedal Set for PC and Xbox for just $184.79 with free shipping after an extra 20% discount that's automatically applied. It normally retails for $350 new, although it's currently on sale for $280.

Amazon Resale (formerly Warehouse) is Amazon's official account for used goods. The products are sorted by condition, with "Like New" being the best. All Resale items get the same 30-day return policy as buying new.

The G923 is Logitech's mainstream racing wheel that replaces the venerable G920/G29 racing wheels. New to the G923 is TrueForce technology, which offers more precise haptic feedback than the previous Driving Force tech. The force feedback really adds to the immersion, especially compared to a gampad controller; if you want something remarkably better, you'd have to shell out a lot more money for a direct-drive or belt-driven wheel, like Logitech's own $1,000 G Pro.

Other than TrueForce, the G923 is nearly identical to the G29 (PlayStation) racing wheel. It features a hand-stitched leather racing wheel with 900 degrees of rotation, sturdy metal base, durable steel ball bearings in the shaft, gear-driven dual-force motor feedback, stainless shifter and pressure sensitive pedals. The Driving Force Shifter is a compatible add-on that features a solid steel gear shaft and 6-speed short-throw gearbox.

Forza Horizon 6 is out on Tuesday, May 19, but Luke Reilly already gave it a well-deserved 10/10 "Masterpiece" review. The latest iteration of the open-world arcade racing franchise will allow you to traverse the varied vistas of Japan, from the snowswept mountainous paths of the Japanese Alps to the concrete jungle of the Tokyo Expressway. The game will launch with 550 cars for you to customize and tweak, and dozens of single-player and online challenges for you to flex your skill, including the return of the Eliminator battle royale mode.

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Eric Song is the IGN commerce manager in charge of finding the best gaming and tech deals every day. When Eric isn't hunting for deals for other people at work, he's hunting for deals for himself during his free time.

NFL teams have been coming up with creative ways to announce their season schedules in recent years, from using memes to parodies to celebrities. For 2026, the Los Angeles Chargers have turned to Halo in order to tell everyone who they'll be playing in the upcoming season.

The team posted a six-minute video, whose introduction notes that the Chargers got permission from Microsoft and that they didn't use any actual gameplay footage. It's modeled after a multiplayer setup screen, with each week's opponent listed as if it was a multiplayer map. They appear to have even hired Halo multiplayer announcer Jeff Steitzer (or a fantastic soundalike) to do callouts for each week, such as "Beast Mode" for the Seahawks matchup in Week 4, complete with a faux Pike Place Market level. Plenty of NFL and pop-culture references are baked in as well, including a subtle nod to the scandal that Week 12 opponent New England Patriots head coach Mike Vrabel is currently mired in.

should we REALLY make our schedule release video in halo?

yes yes yesyes
yesyes yes yes yes
yes yes yes yes yes
yes yesyes yes yes
yes yesye yes yes
yes yes yesyes pic.twitter.com/eusK9QmNGd

— Los Angeles Chargers (@chargers) May 14, 2026

Halo, meanwhile, will be "on the field" this season, as Halo: Campaign Evolved, the Unreal Engine 5 remake of the original Halo: Combat Evolved's campaign, is due for release sometime this year. We'll likely get a release date for it at the upcoming Xbox Showcase. Check out our hands-on preview impressions in the meantime.

Ryan McCaffrey is IGN's executive editor of previews and host of both IGN's weekly Xbox show, Podcast Unlocked, as well as our semi-retired 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.

Best Buy has dropped some great deals on select games for Nintendo Switch and Nintendo Switch 2 recently. Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment for Switch 2, Metroid Prime 4: Beyond for Switch, and Metal Gear Solid: Master Collection Vol.1 for Switch are just a few that caught our eye, but you can see even more of our favorites on sale at the retailer right now below.

There's quite a range of discounts here as well. Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment for Switch 2, Metroid Prime 4: Beyond for Switch, and Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds for Switch 2 are all between 29% to 33% off at the moment, but the other three from the list above are actually all 50% off. What better time to grab them?

It's also worth noting that the deal prices for both Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment and Metroid Prime 4: Beyond are only visible after you've added them to your cart.

We have quite a lot of love for these games, too. Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds and Persona 3: Reload earned 9s in their respective reviews, while Yakuza 0 landed just under with an 8.5. Metroid Prime 4: Beyond and Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment came in just below that with an 8 each, which is still well worth celebrating.

If you're looking for even more video game deals, it's also worth checking out Amazon. At the moment, the retailer has some excellent deals for PS5 users to look into. And if you're curious about big sales that are still to come this year, have a look at our rundown of upcoming sales events. Here, you can see a breakdown of what's to come over the next few months, so you can be prepared for more game deals as they drop.

Hannah Hoolihan is a freelancer who writes with the guides and commerce teams here at IGN.

Forza Horizon 6 has already reached an impressive player count on Steam despite its official launch still being days away.

Although publisher Xbox Game Studios and developer Playground Games won't officially pull their latest open-world racing game out of the garage until next week, those who own the pricier Premium Edition have already started taking advantage of early access, which launched for PC (Xbox App, Steam) and Xbox Series X and S today, May 15. Despite the bundle's $119.99 cost, the Steam version has already reached an impressive peak of 172,093 users (via SteamDB) and is hovering around 160,000 players as of this article's publication.

That puts Forza Horizon 6 head-and-shoulders above the Steam launch for Forza Horizon 5, which managed to pull in a little more than 80,000 players for its all-time peak in November 2021. It's unclear if the Xbox racer is on a path to attract even higher player counts today or through the weekend, but there's a pretty good chance we'll at least see that number go up when its official release date rolls in next week.

Steam, which represents just one slice of the platform pie that makes up the Forza Horizon 6 player base, currently ranks the open-world racing game at number two on its list of top-selling games globally. Subnautica 2, which launched yesterday to even more impressive stats, is the only game above it.

Five years after Xbox and Playground took players to their version of Mexico with the last installment, Forza Horizon 6 finally lets drivers loose in streets inspired by locations in Japan. It's a setting that seems to be at least partially responsible for its roaring success out of the gate following the strong reviews published yesterday. We here at IGN also found a lot to love about Playground's latest, as we called it a "Masterpiece" in our 10/10 review. "The new standard in open-world racing is here, and it’s a gundamn masterpiece," we said.

If you're playing, you might have noticed that shrines, temples, and cherry blossom trees are indestructible. Well, there's a very good reason for that.

The base Forza Horizon 6 experience launches across PC and Xbox Series X and S on May 19, 2026, and costs $69.99. You can catch up on everything you need to know about the Xbox game's launch plans here. You can also check out the first Festival Playlist rewards ahead of their launch May 21.

Michael Cripe is a freelance writer with IGN. He's best known for his work at sites like The Pitch, The Escapist, and OnlySP. Be sure to give him a follow on Bluesky (@mikecripe.bsky.social) and Twitter (@MikeCripe).

Forza Horizon 6 finally brings the racing series to Japan. Players can cruise around a highly detailed, stylized and condensed version of the country, taking in everything from downtown Tokyo, famous landmarks, and scenic country roads in all seasons as they test their mettle against other racers.

The game also rewards you with experience points for letting out that road rage by smashing your car into other vehicles or your surroundings. However, The Japan Times’ recent interview with design director Torben Ellert revealed that while you can destroy most things in Forza 6 by crashing into them (whether on purpose or because you understeered on a hairpin bend), culturally important things like shrines, temples, and cherry trees are indestructible.

“Almost all trees in the game are smashable to ensure that traversing the world map is both fun and rewarding,” Ellert explains. “However, several tree types are not — for example, the cherry blossom trees — because they’re an iconic element of Japanese culture. Certain temples or other cultural elements are also excluded so that players aren’t tempted to drive through shrines or locations of cultural importance.”

Cherry blossoms are historically and culturally important in Japan, often appearing as a key symbol in Japanese literature, art, and poetry. Their pink blossoms are a sign of rebirth and the coming of spring, but also a reminder of how fleeting life is. In ancient times, farmers made offerings and held feasts underneath the cherry trees in the hope that the spirits of the fields would bring a good harvest. In the 800s, the emperor and nobles also kicked off a tradition of holding parties to admire the cherry blossoms. These traditions have evolved into modern day hanami — cherry blossom viewing parties where people have picnics under the trees and enjoy the blossoms.

Cherry blossom trees in real life can be easily damaged. Tampering with or shaking the branches of cherry blossom trees in public parks is punishable by fines in Japan. Furthermore, some of the countries’ oldest trees are over 1,000 years old and protected as natural treasures by the government (like Uozumi Zakura in Gifu). Consideration for their cultural importance explains why UK studio Playground Games decided to make cherry trees invincible in Forza Horizon 6.

As for shrines and temples, last year, Assassins Creed Shadows received heavy pre-release backlash in Japan due to a preview that showed that players could smash up shrines. Ubisoft addressed this in a day-one patch that made shrine objects indestructible and prevented unarmed NPCs from bleeding when attacked (thus preventing bloodshed on sacred grounds). Forza Horizon 6’s devs have opted to be culturally sensitive regarding what the player can do to religious and cultural sites.

“Japan has been on our shortlist for several games now,” Ellert told The Guardian. “But we just didn’t feel like we were ready to take on the challenge of building it.” The team conducted in-depth research for the game, right down to the smallest details, hiring experts including cultural consultant and former Porsche ambassador Kyoko Yamashita to advise on their depiction of Japan and its racing scene. “Because it’s a culture we see a lot, there’s a temptation to think you know it better than you do, which is why we tried really hard to get people to course correct us if we were drifting,” added Ellert.

While those who pre-ordered the premium edition of Forza Horizon 6 are already burning rubber, the game officially releases on PS5, Xbox Series X/S and PC on May 19. While you wait, check out IGN's Forza Horizon 6 review.

Verity Townsend is a Japan-based freelance writer who previously served as editor, contributor and translator for the game news site Automaton West. She has also written about Japanese culture and movies for various publications.

Publisher 2K has announced its brick racing game Lego 2K Drive will be delisted from digital storefronts on PC and console starting May 19, 2026.

A message alerting players to the delisting was published on the game's Steam page and shared online today. The same text can be found on the Xbox and PlayStation Store pages.

Players will be able to purchase Lego 2K Drive digitally until it is removed from online shops, this Tuesday. Although it will remain available to play and redownload after this date, 2K added that multiplayer servers will also go offline starting May 31, 2027. All online services tied to the game will be unavailable from then on.

Developer Visual Concepts launched Lego 2K Drive May 19, 2023, for PC, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X | S. Its gameplay aims to click players into the open-world land of Bricklandia to race, build vehicles, and compete to earn the big prize in story mode.

"In LEGO 2K Drive, your awesome transforming vehicle gives you the freedom to speed seamlessly across riveting racetracks, off-road terrain, and open waters," an official description reads. "Explore the vast world of Bricklandia, show off your driving skills, and build vehicles brick-by-brick!"

Although multiplayer features will be shut down in a little more than one year, offline features will remain available to players who own the game. Those interested in picking up Lego 2K Drive before the delisting can purchase it for $19.99.

We gave the Lego racing game an 8/10 review upon its release in 2023. At the time, we called it a "wild and whimsical all-ages kart racer with an incredible custom vehicle creation tool that’s just about worth the price of admission alone." As Lego 2K Drive leaves digital stores, the gamers supporting the Stop Killing Games initiative are still fighting to keep the games they love (and even the ones they don't) around for years to come after reaching 1 million signatures last year.

Michael Cripe is a freelance writer with IGN. He's best known for his work at sites like The Pitch, The Escapist, and OnlySP. Be sure to give him a follow on Bluesky (@mikecripe.bsky.social) and Twitter (@MikeCripe).

James Bond: the ultimate spy. The secret agent that other secret agents check under the bed for at night, although that’s probably less to do with their concerns about his martial arts prowess and more about his penchant for sexual congress. Hey, honey, whose Aston Martin is that in the driveway? And why is it beeping?

At any rate, conceived by WWII British Naval Intelligence officer Ian Fleming as a cocktail of the many killer elite commandos and secret agents he met during his time in the service, the iconic James Bond has clearly come a long way from his literary beginnings in 1953. Bond quickly migrated from the pages of Fleming’s novels to radio plays, comic books, and – of course – a film series that’s lasted over 60 years. There aren’t many movie franchises that have been around longer. Not this side of Godzilla, at least.

Now, James Bond’s video game history obviously isn’t quite as storied as his silver screen exploits, but it still stretches back well over 40 years. So, whether you’re unfamiliar with Bond games, or you’re just after a quick refresher, we’ve assembled a full history of James Bond games right here, so all you need to do is pour yourself a dry martini and slip into something more comfortable.

To uncover the very first James Bond game we need to go back to 1982, but there is a slight twist to it. 1982’s Shaken but Not Stirred! was developed and published by Richard Shepherd Software for the ZX Spectrum computer, an underrated icon of 8-bit gaming that played an instrumental role in the home computer revolution – and helped inspire an entire generation of UK game designers in the process. Richard Shepherd, a certified accountant, was one such man. Urged on by his wife, Elaine – who suggested he look into adventure games after she’d been shown one while visiting a work client – Shaken but Not Stirred! came together as a classic text adventure.

In 1982, text adventure games were at the peak of their popularity – and the genre was the only real way to have complex adventures in interactive form at the time. ‘Complex’ may be a slight overstatement when it comes to Shaken but Not Stirred!, though it is bizarrely impenetrable at times. That is, I began the game by being instantly abducted and shot dead, before being reincarnated by the game designer, and I left sometime after getting lost in a randomised ocean and shooting my second octopus.

However, what’s particularly interesting about Shaken but Not Stirred! is that it was never actually an official Bond game at all. Richard Shepherd Software never had the rights to make an official Bond game, something that seems obvious when you note Moneypenny’s transparent name change – but admittedly less so when ‘Miss Cashcoin’ is introduced directly beneath the sentence “A James Bond Adventure.”

Yes, perhaps – especially since, by 1982, the Bond license had already been secured by Parker Brothers. Unfortunately for Richard Shepherd Software, the American toy and board game giant was ramping up its video game efforts at the time after snatching up the lucrative rights to publish Star Wars games, and Bond was another hot property it jumped on. Resultingly, Shaken but Not Stirred! was rapidly re-issued as Super Spy and, in 1983, Parker Brothers released what’s technically the first official Bond video game: James Bond 007, for Atari, ColecoVision, and Commodore 64. A version called 007 James Bond was also released in Japan for the SG-1000, Sega’s first-ever home console.

James Bond 007 is a side-scrolling vehicle shooter with three or four levels, depending on the version you played. Each is extremely loosely based on a moment from four Bond films released between 1971 and 1981: The Spy Who Loved Me, Diamonds are Forever, Moonraker, and For Your Eyes Only. You don’t control Bond himself so much as you control a transforming Bond car, although it realistically spends most of its time as a kind of jumping submarine.

James Bond 007 otherwise plays like a short and safe clone of existing side-scrolling vehicle shooters from the dawn of the ’80s, and you can certainly argue the bulk of the Bond flavour comes from the 007 logo slapped on the front. The official license did, however, bring along with it the opportunity to use the Bond theme for the first time – which is an admittedly crucial component of the Bond experience.

1985 arrived with two separate Bond games, both based on A View to a Kill. It was the new Bond film for that year, and the final featuring Roger Moore.

The first is an action game for a variety of home computer platforms, including ZX Spectrum, Amstrad, and Commodore 64.

Published by Domark Software – a short-lived company that spent the late ’80s and early ’90s publishing only Bond games before merging with Eidos in 1996 – its version is broken up into three chunks. It opens with a driving level, which is followed by two rudimentary action sections. The three-games-in-one approach was novel enough, but ultimately the game was not especially well-received.

A View to a Kill’s other game tie-in was a text adventure for MS-DOS, Apple II, and Macintosh, and one of the first games published by Mindscape. Interestingly, A View to a Kill’s text adventure was written by Texas author Raymond Benson. 12 years later Benson would be tapped to take over writing duties for the continuation of the James Bond novel series, stepping in for the retiring John Gardner who had stewarded the Bond books throughout the ’80s and ’90s.

Benson would go on to contribute to the next Mindscape Bond game in 1986, which was another text adventure for the same platforms – this time based on 1964’s Goldfinger.

However, while Mindscape returned to a past Bond adventure, Domark decided to remain in the present with its 1987 tie-in for Timothy Dalton’s Bond debut: The Living Daylights.

For The Living Daylights, Domark opted for a traditional, side-scrolling shoot’em up approach, developed for what appears to be just about every major home computer system of the era. The result wasn’t revolutionary, but it was a considerable step-up from A View to a Kill.

Beginning with Bond’s training exercise against the SAS in Gibraltar and ending in the villainous Whitaker’s mansion, The Living Daylights might be a bit basic, but it at least effectively mirrors the plot of the movie upon which it's based. The ability to choose a different weapon before each level also adds some additional replayability.

With no new movie in cinemas in 1988, Domark’s next Bond game for home computers was loosely inspired by 1973’s Live and Let Die – which had been the first to feature Roger Moore. The key word here is loose, as Live and Let Die is exclusively a… speedboat shooter.

While it’s true the iconic speedboat chase is one of the most memorable moments of Live and Let Die, basing a whole game around it stretches the concept to breaking point. It has just four levels, only the last of which is ostensibly focused on disrupting Dr. Kanaga’s drug operation. The remainder are extra training levels set about as far away from the setting of Live and Let Die as you can get. How far? The Sahara Desert, and the North Pole.

However, there is a reason that Live and Let Die barely feels like a Bond game, and that’s because it was never meant to be one. In truth, Domark simply got wind of a speedboat shooter at UK software house Elite Systems called Aquablast. Domark subsequently pulled the plug on a boat blaster project it already had on the boil with a different developer, slapped a 007 logo on Aquablast, and published that instead. It seems Live and Let Die was always going to be stuck in a boat, but going with Elite got it done faster.

In 1989, Timothy Dalton’s second and unfortunately final Bond film hit the big screen, and Domark unsurprisingly had a game to coincide with it. Licence to Kill, again developed for all major home computers of the era, was yet another new approach for a Bond adaptation – this time it was a top-down, vertically-scrolling shooter. It was rather tricky, but arguably serviceable enough compared to similar games of the era. 1989 also saw a light-gun enabled version of 1987’s The Living Daylights bundled into Amstrad’s Christmas relaunch of the Spectrum +2.

The James Bond 007 Action Pack included two generic shooting gallery games to justify the inclusion of the Magnum Light Phaser, though neither are worth remarking on.

In 1990, Domark again resurrected a slice of the Roger Moore era with The Spy Who Loved Me for home computers, which is perhaps notable for having the funkiest remix of the Bond theme ever partially stolen from Run-D.M.C., Rob Base, and DJ E-Z Rock.

The Spy Who Loved Me was a Spy Hunter clone: a top-down, vertically-scrolling vehicle shooter that has a few flourishes to call its own, but overall is pretty similar to Midway’s 1983 classic. The comparison is potentially a little unfair considering how heavily inspired Spy Hunter was by James Bond in the first place – down to the Interceptor’s suspiciously close resemblance to Bond’s iconic white Lotus Espirit – but either way The Spy Who Loved Me was certainly a little derivative.

1990 also saw the arrival of Interplay’s 007 James Bond: The Stealth Affair, a point-and-click adventure for Amiga, Atari-ST, and MS-DOS – which was officially licensed but wasn’t actually a bona fide Bond game at its core. The Stealth Affair had previously been released in Europe as a Bond-adjacent adventure called Operation Stealth, starring CIA agent John Glames. For the North American release, Interplay simply changed Glames to Bond, but left him taking orders from the CIA rather than MI6.

On the topic of Bond games that aren’t quite Bond games, in 1991 THQ’s James Bond Jr. – developed by Eurocom – was released on the Nintendo Entertainment System. A distinct (and worse) Super Nintendo version, developed by Gray Matter, arrived in 1992. If you’re unfamiliar with James Bond Jr, it was a cartoon series that ran for around six months back in the early ’90s focusing on the nephew of James Bond; a man who is canonically and famously an only child, and not an uncle to… anyone.

1992 also saw the release of a completely unofficial adaptation of the Roger Moore film Octopussy, developed by a Bratislava-based studio and released only in Slovakia. Octopussy was the final Bond game for the then-ancient ZX Spectrum and, while the game was totally unlicensed, it’s certainly possible it helped shift a few more systems down in central Europe before it was discontinued that same year.

1992 additionally marked the arrival of the final Bond game from Domark: James Bond: The Duel. It was released on Sega consoles – first for Mega Drive in Europe in late 1992. A North American release on Genesis followed in early 1993, as did a version for the Master System, and a Game Gear version emerged in 1994. It was made by the same internal development team at Domark that made The Spy Who Loved Me, which I didn’t mention before, but was rather ironically known as The Kremlin.

James Bond: The Duel is notable for being an original Bond story – that is, not based on a film or book – that nonetheless features the official Bond of the era. In this instance, it’s the likeness of Timothy Dalton, several years after his final big screen appearance. Dalton was intended to make a third film, but legal issues between MGM and the film’s producers dragged on for too long and the actor hung up his Walther PPK. There’s no denying that James Bond: The Duel remains an indefensibly boring title that captures none of the intrigue or charm of an actual Bond novel or movie name, but the game itself is a passable action platformer – even if it is hilariously seedy that Bond’s means of replenishing his health is rescuing blondes.

In 1995 we got a new Bond in Pierce Brosnan, and a new film with GoldenEye. What we didn’t get, however, was a game. Not initially, anyway; not after the commercial failure of the Virtual Boy saw Nintendo cancel a Bond driving game based around GoldenEye. No, the actual GoldenEye 007 as we all know it wouldn’t come until two years later, but it would change everything.

Developed by legendary UK software house Rare and published by Nintendo itself for the Nintendo 64, 1997’s GoldenEye 007 was lightning in a bottle. With a rookie director Martin Hollis at the helm, GoldenEye was eventually assembled by a small team of around a dozen developers with no meaningful experience building a shooter. In fact, eight members of the team had never even worked on a commercial game before.

To say that there were a variety of factors conspiring against the success of GoldenEye 007 would be an understatement. It wasn’t just a movie tie-in; it was a late movie tie-in. Hell, Brosnan’s second Bond film – Tomorrow Never Dies – was already complete and set to hit cinemas later in 1997. Furthermore, GoldenEye 007 was a first-person shooter, which was a genre that mainstream console gamers had yet to prove they had a real appetite for. FPS games simply had no firm footprint on consoles at that stage.

On top of this, the team was missing deadlines, and began working 100-hour weeks in the lead-up to launch. The multiplayer mode was squeezed in just six months out from release. Expectations for GoldenEye 007 were low. Even esteemed Nintendo designer Shigeru Miyamoto was unconvinced, with a fax to Rare late in development warning of his unease with the amount of close-up killing and suggesting that the team consider having Bond visit his vanquished enemies in hospital at the end of the game to shake hands with them.

Thankfully, the team at Rare opted against this advice, and the result was more than just the greatest Bond game to date; GoldenEye 007 is frequently regarded as amongst the greatest games ever made. It was a smart and layered story-based shooter with an absolutely essential splitscreen component that literally revolutionised the genre.

GoldenEye 007’s multiplayer, which was brimming with characters, weapons, and clever modes, may have come about as almost an afterthought, but it became the template for four-player FPS fun – years before the internet would swoop in and try to crush same-screen shenanigans. Slappers only, anyone?

GoldenEye 007 wasn’t the first FPS to hit consoles, but its immense success gave the genre a whole new trajectory. It even helped pioneer the idea of dual analogue controls, since one control scheme allowed gamers to play using a separate N64 controller in each hand. Following this, using two analogue sticks to control an FPS on console quietly made its way into the original Medal of Honor as an alternate preset, and it was still very contentious by the time it appeared as the default control solution in 2000’s Alien Resurrection. The controversy is quaint in retrospect, considering how surprising an FPS without dual analogue controls would be today.

Ultimately, GoldenEye 007 sold more than eight million units, grossing $250 million dollars on a budget of just $2 million. Globally, it is the third highest-selling N64 game on the console. In the US, it’s the bestselling N64 game ever. It is far and away the single most important game in this list, and we could talk about it for a good deal longer if we didn’t have so many more games still to get to. After a gutbusting development period, Hollis and a few of his team declined an offer to make a sequel to GoldenEye 007 and, regardless of Rare’s plans, EA swooped in and reportedly “dramatically outbid” all comers for the Bond license, anyway. As such, the Bond games moved on without Rare, and so must we.

Following Nintendo’s James Bond 007 in 1998 – a top-down, RPG-style adventure for Game Boy – Bond began a lengthy tenure at EA.

The first game was 1999’s Tomorrow Never Dies. Developed by long-defunct Black Ops Entertainment and published exclusively on the original PlayStation, Tomorrow Never Dies was initially intended to be called Tomorrow Never Dies: The Mission Continues and pick up where the movie left off.

While the final product was extensively reworked to follow the plot of the film instead, it was a very different sort of game to GoldenEye 007. For one, it was an entirely conventional third-person shooter, as opposed to a trendsetting first-person shooter. Two: it had no multiplayer whatsoever.

And three? It wasn’t very good.

EA was able to effect somewhat of a course correction with its next attempt, which was based on The World Is Not Enough. Three separate versions of the game were produced – one for PlayStation and one for N64 in 2000, and a clunky and forgettable Game Boy Color version in 2001.

The World Is Not Enough on PlayStation was again developed by Black Ops Entertainment, which immediately pivoted from its Tomorrow Never Dies approach and built The World Is Not Enough as a first-person shooter. The result was undoubtedly an improvement, but the solid but scrappy PlayStation version again had no multiplayer. The original PlayStation only had two controller ports compared to the N64’s four, and perhaps asking PlayStation owners to wear the additional expense of purchasing a Multitap was too optimistic to ask for.

At any rate, The World Is Not Enough on PS1 paled in comparison to the N64 version which, funnily enough, was built by James Bond Jr. developer Eurocom. The World Is Not Enough on N64 doesn’t carry the same esteem as its predecessor, but it still packed four-player splitscreen multiplayer – this time with optional bots – and was nonetheless an excellent shooter for its time.

2000 also saw the release of 007 Racing, a PlayStation-exclusive action driving game that played out from entirely behind the wheel of a fleet of recognisable Bond vehicles. Developed by Eutechnyx, the developer of PS1 racing games like Total Drivin’ and Max Power Racing, 007 Racing was a good concept for resurrecting the idea of a SpyHunter-inspired, vehicle-based Bond game – but it was impossible to recommend over something like the Driver series, which was the king of 3D action driving at the time. A sequel to 007 Racing was planned but never eventuated.

The turn of the century brought with it exciting new consoles with the PlayStation 2, Xbox, and GameCube, and alongside this new hardware came a new era of Bond games – beginning with James Bond 007 in Agent Under Fire.

Agent Under Fire initially began life as the PS2 and PC versions of The World Is Not Enough. However, after development delays – and concern that interest for the film would’ve cooled off too much by the time it was released – The World Is Not Enough for PS2 was rebuilt into a new and original Bond adventure, albeit one that didn’t actually feature Pierce Brosnan as Bond this time around. This should be immediately clear from badly-lit Bond on the box art, which looks as if someone’s tried to take a picture of 007 without using a flash.

Released on PS2 in late 2001, and ported to GameCube and Xbox in 2002, Agent Under Fire was a short but solid Bond shooter – and far better than its fractured development might have suggested it should have been. Developed internally at EA, Agent Under Fire’s mix of first-person blasting and driving missions – which were more robust than one might expect thanks to EA’s Need for Speed experience – was entertainingly slick based on the standards of the era. It even introduced optional, cinematic-inspired flourishes throughout the action called Bond Moments, where keen-eyed players could tackle certain moments throughout the levels with a well-aimed shot or smart decision. Speaking of smart decisions, Agent Under Fire also boasted four-player splitscreen on all consoles, with usable jetpacks, no less.

EA followed Agent Under Fire with James Bond 007: Nightfire in 2002, which added Pierce Brosnan’s likeness back into proceedings, albeit not his voice. The home console versions were led by Eurocom, and the result was a slightly more refined evolution of Agent Under Fire that has the distinction of being the first Bond game with its own original song, and the first time we got to see an Aston Martin turned into a submarine.

In confusing circumstances – especially since Nightfire is typically considered one of the strongest Bond games in the history of the series – Nightfire’s PC port is an entirely different game to Eurocom’s console version, and it’s terrible in contrast. Developed by Gearbox, Nightfire on PC runs on a totally different engine, features no driving levels, and is regularly broken.

Indeed; let’s.

EA subsequently made a risky pivot, and 2003’s James Bond 007: Everything or Nothing arrived as a third-person shooter. In other words, EA had opted to follow up Nightfire, an otherwise well-received first-person shooter, by returning to territory previously soiled by the disappointing Tomorrow Never Dies. The shift to third-person probably represented better value to the EA beancounters – after all, if you’re going to pay for Pierce, you may as well try to put his head on screen as much as possible. But it certainly didn’t represent a sure-fire strategy.

Fortunately, it worked. Everything or Nothing was the best-looking Bond game to date, with a lengthy set of levels, explosive action, and quality driving missions. It also had a stacked cast of voices AND likenesses, featuring not only Bond alumni Brosnan, Judi Dench, and John Cleese, but also Heidi Klum, Shannon Elizabeth, and Richard Kiel as the famous Jaws. EA even got Willem Dafoe on deck to play the villain.

However, while the single-player component of Everything or Nothing was pleasingly strong, the multiplayer wasn’t quite up to the same standard. While Everything or Nothing introduced a fun, but slightly less-polished, co-op mode, the GoldenEye-inspired brand of four-player, FPS deathmatches was cast aside.

Unfortunately, after a robust three-year run, EA fumbled the bag with 2004’s GoldenEye: Rogue Agent for PS2, Xbox, GameCube, and DS, which was a disappointingly bland and cynical attempt to marry mid-2000s edginess with a recognisable brand.

Set in an alternate Bond timeline, GoldenEye: Rogue Agent is an FPS that follows an ex-MI6 agent who, after being ejected from the service for being reckless, recklessly joins forces with a host of Bond villains, including Goldfinger and Scaramanga – most of whom betray him. Lacking in the swagger or spirit of a true Bond game, GoldenEye: Rogue Agent also had the misfortune of being a first-person shooter released in November 2004 – the same month as Halo 2 and Half-Life 2.

For clarity, GoldenEye: Rogue Agent has absolutely nothing to do with the 1995 film or the N64 classic. It’s just called GoldenEye because the main character has… a golden eye.

Despite ending with a clear sequel tease, that was the end of the road for the GoldenEye: Rogue Agent experiment, and EA’s final Bond game in 2005 was a return to how things were before – and in more ways that one. That is, not only was it a third-person shooter like Everything or Nothing; EA turned the clock way back to 1963 for an adaptation of the Sean Connery classic From Russia With Love – starring Connery himself, no less, in his video game debut.

Developed for PS2, Xbox, GameCube, and the PSP, From Russia With Love was perhaps a little shallow overall, but its ’60s setting oozed charm and it was a significant step up from GoldenEye: Rogue Agent.

Unfortunately, the fun was just about to come to a dead end.

In May 2006 it was announced that Activision had acquired the Bond video game license. After a pair of spin-offs and half-a-dozen mainline entries, the EA cadence of yearly Bond games fans had enjoyed was suddenly over.

Unfortunately, things haven’t been quite the same ever since. In 2008 Activision released Quantum of Solace on a host of platforms, including PS2, Wii, PS3, Xbox 360, PC, and even DS. It was fine enough, but Daniel Craig’s video game debut was otherwise pretty unremarkable, even by contemporaneous standards.

Things did improve a little in 2010, with the release of two separate games: Blood Stone, developed by Bizarre Creations for PS3, Xbox 360, and PC, and a remake of GoldenEye 007 for Wii by Eurocom. Both games also had a DS version built by n-Space.

Blood Stone, an original Bond adventure featuring the voices and likenesses of Daniel Craig and Judi Dench, was a third-person shooter with a variety of driving sequences – the latter being a natural fit for the studio behind the Project Gotham Racing series. It was a well-produced action game, but it just wasn’t a long or revolutionary one.

GoldenEye 007 on Wii fared better. Replacing Pierce Brosnan with Daniel Craig and updating the story made for a pretty… iffy reimagining of the source material, but it gathered a good deal of praise for being one of the better first-person shooters for the Wii. For Bond fans without a Wii, GoldenEye 007 was ported to PS3 and Xbox 360 in 2011.

But then, in 2012, we got 007 Legends.

007 Legends, for PS3, Xbox 360, PC, and Wii U, was the last Bond game published by Activision. Unfortunately, it was also the last ever game made by regular Bond developer Eurocom, which was shut down less than two months after the game’s release, after 25 years of operation.

Released to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the film franchise, 007 Legends had grand plans to celebrate the entire series, and its single player campaign was built to contain missions from films featuring all six different Bond actors. That is, Goldfinger for Sean Connery, On Her Majesty's Secret Service for George Lazenby, Moonraker for Roger Moore, Licence to Kill for Timothy Dalton, Die Another Day for Pierce Brosnan, and Skyfall for Daniel Craig. However, like the GoldenEye 007 remake, it simply used Daniel Craig’s likeness in place of all the previous actors.

Unfortunately the end result was a tepid Call of Duty clone that did very little to capture the spirit of Bond, and even less to translate what fans love about these films.

007 Legends doesn’t just misunderstand Bond; it gets him totally wrong. Hell, he even completely flubs his most famous line, “Bond. James Bond.”

Mowing down mooks with a mounted minigun may be pretty typical shooter stuff, but it isn’t what James Bond is about. He’s a spy, not a super soldier. There are parts of 007 Legends you can play by keeping a low profile, but they mainly boil down to slinking around slapping blokes on the arse so firmly they die.

All Activision Bond games were suddenly pulled from Steam and the publisher’s own web store in January 2013. The move, which happened less than three months after the release of 007 Legends, came completely unannounced and without explanation. Since Activision originally announced its deal with MGM was supposed to last until 2014, the premature termination of the license led to speculation that things had soured significantly.

The spirit of Call of Duty killing James Bond was deeply ironic considering it’s been suggested that the James Bond game series very nearly prevented the Call of Duty series from ever happening in the first place. That could have happened if EA had partnered with Call of Duty creators Vince Zampella and Jason West, who had pitched for the PC port of Nightfire back in the early 2000s. As it turned out, EA went with Gearbox, and Zampella and West accepted a deal from Activision and founded Infinity Ward.

At any rate, the funk of 007 Legends has sadly hovered for some time, and there have been no new Bond games for over a decade. He didn’t quite disappear completely, though. 10 classic Bond cars, complete with gadgets, made their way to Forza Horizon 4 in 2018, and two Bond Aston Martins hit Rocket League in 2021. In 2023 the original GoldenEye 007 fought its way out of licensing purgatory and onto Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, and Nintendo Switch. In 2024 a confidential sizzle reel concerning a past pitch to make a LEGO James Bond game even leaked onto the internet; the idea looked and sounded incredible, but it obviously never made it into production.

Happily, Bond’s long hiatus is just about over thanks to the imminent arrival of IO Interactive’s 007 First Light in May. A modern and original origin story for Bond, which appears to be a more explosive riff on the sort of gameplay IO has been refining within its Hitman series for the past two decades, First Light features Irish actor Patrick Gibson as Bond, with Lenny Kravitz aboard playing the villain.

For more deep dives into the histories of long-running licensed video game franchises, you can check out IGN's look back at the terrifying (and sometimes terrible) history of Alien games, and embark with us on a crusade through the history of Indiana Jones games.

Luke is a Senior Editor on the IGN reviews team. You can track him down on Bluesky @mrlukereilly to ask him things about stuff.

The owner of a leaked copy of Subnautica 2 appears to have accidentally revealed themselves — after contacting the game's developer for support.

Hit underwater adventure Subnautica 2 launched this week in early access, though after illegitimate and unfinished copies of the game began circulating online.

At the time, developer Unknown Worlds acknowledged in a statement to IGN that leaked copies were now being downloaded, though cautioned that these were "incomplete development versions" that "do not reflect the content or gameplay experience being prepared for the official release."

It's unclear exactly what issue the leaked copy owner contacted Unknown Worlds about, but it seems clear enough that they were trying to play an incomplete version of the game, and a staff member quickly wised up.

"It took some doing, but this guy self-reported," Unknown Worlds developer Anthony Gallegos said of the user via the game's official Discord (as spotted by RespawnFirst). "Thanks for pirating a game that I've spent years working on. I'm disappointed that you'd do that when it's kind of how we make our living. I hope you rethink your life choices."

"Just to be clear, pirates are gonna do their thing. We were all kids once," Gallegos continued later. "Money and the economy is very hard. I get it. It wasn't the piracy that bothered me. It was the people that flagrantly walked in here and wagged it in the faces of people who were waiting to play legitimately. That was the part that aggravated me.

"I understand and thank you for supporting the studio ultimately. I cannot condone piracy, but I get why people do. I would much rather people buy the game, try it for an hour, and return it than go play it illicitly."

News that illegitimate copies of Subnautica 2 were being spread online bizarrely followed several other high profile video game leaks in quick succession, including at least one user being able to access their pre-ordered copy of LEGO Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight days early.

Then, earlier this week, Forza Horizon 6 developer Playground Games issued a dramatic warning to anyone found playing a leaked build of Xbox's new racing blockbuster. Those found doing so risked incurring "franchise-wide and hardware bans", the studio said, and one player subsequently reported receiving a hardware ban until the year 10,000.

Still, the leaks don't seem to have sunk Subnautica 2 — quite the opposite. Already, the game has sold a stunning 2 million copies within 12 hours of its early access arrival. Peak concurrent players across all launch platforms exceeded 651,000, with Steam alone reaching a peak of more than 467,000 concurrent players. That’s nearly nine times the all-time peak concurrent player count of the original Subnautica, which launched in 2018.

And Unknown Worlds has just released the Subnautica 2 early access roadmap, detailing what fans can expect over the next few months. We’ve got a Things to Do First in Subnautica 2 guide to check out before you dive in, plus resource location guides to help you find Titanium, Silver, and more. Discover blackbox and supply crate locations on our interactive Subnautica 2 map, and make sure you don’t miss any Angel Comb Adaptations or Blueprints.

Tom Phillips is IGN's News Editor. You can reach Tom at tom_phillips@ign.com or find him on Bluesky @tomphillipseg.bsky.social

Fresh from its huge launch, underwater survival and crafting adventure Subnautica 2 now has an early access roadmap detailing the updates players can expect to see over the next few months.

Unknown Worlds said it’s working towards a “big drop” that will expand the world with biomes, creatures, resources, tools, vehicles, and the next chapter of the story. But in the meantime, improvements will be added to the game. The first update will include quality-of-life fixes that Unknown Worlds said “should help adjust and address some areas that need a little tweaking to make your Subnautica 2 experience even better.” The second update, meanwhile, will focus on improving the co-op experience.

Unknown Worlds stressed that the roadmap is subject to change, but there’s plenty here that should excite fans — and there are a lot of them. Subnautica 2 sold an incredible 2 million copies in just 12 hours, and obliterated the first game’s Steam concurrent player peak. IGN’s Subnautica 2 early access review returned a 7/10. We said: “It’s pretty impressive that wading in the shallow tides of Subnautica 2's early access debut is as fun as it is already, and that should be a great sign of things to come, but I also wouldn’t blame anyone for waiting for these waters to rise a bit before getting their feet wet.”

We’ve got a Things to Do First in Subnautica 2 guide to check out before you dive in, plus resource location guides to help you find Titanium, Silver, and more. Discover blackbox and supply crate locations on our interactive Subnautica 2 map, and make sure you don’t miss any Angel Comb Adaptations or Blueprints.

The roadmap details, courtesy of the Unknown Worlds website, are below:

Planned improvements to:

• Biomods system
• Blight encounters
• Wrecks gameplay
• Vehicle docking and fabrication
• PDA Databank
• Voicelogs priority system

Planned additions:

• More passive Biomod slots
• Storage cache
• Sprint

Planned improvements to:

• HUD signals
• Base builder tool
• Pinned recipe system

Planned additions:

• Voice chat
• Emotes
• Player trading
• Player revive
• Additional customizations

New region:

• Expand the world
• New biomes
• New creatures
• New resources
• New tools
• New vehicle
• Next chapter of the story

Ongoing improvements:

• Big fixes
• Balance tuning
• Optimization
• And other continuous updates

Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.