Gaming

I have been waiting for Dragon Age: The Veilguard for 10 years. The last game developer BioWare put out was 2019’s Anthem, an ill-fated loot shooter that chased live-service trends and felt like a misuse of the team’s talents. In the years since, there have been reports and admissions from the studio that the fourth

After finishing a frustrating boss fight in Funko Fusion against a never-ending stream of baddies in a grocery store, I was finally done with Hot Fuzz’s fourth level. I could move on. A cutscene played but the audio was missing. That happens a lot in this game. And then the final screen appeared, showing me

I really miss Swordbreaker, a shotgun from the first Destiny game that became a staple of my loadout back in the day. Over the three years that I played Destiny, no part of my loadout felt as central to my identity as it did. I changed subclasses depending on the task before me, and I

Warhammer 40K: Space Marine 2, made by Saber Interactive, is the sequel to a beloved 2011 shooter and has been praised for, among other things, feeling like an old-school Xbox 360-era game. But some have marshaled that classic mystique into a rebuke of modern games that don’t conform to certain views they have about who

The Life is Strange series is a pretty odd one. At the time of the first game’s release, I wasn’t really aware that there was much interest in the goings-on of a bunch of teenagers in the Pacific Northwest. Boy, was I wrong, because nowadays Life Is Strange is a core franchise for Square Enix,

Pokémon Go has continuously added new Legendaries and mechanics over time—Alolan Legendaries joined only earlier this year during Pokémon Go Fest 2024. But the latest major update is one of the biggest changes the game has seen in years. Alongside finally adding the starters from the Galar region, more significantly it adds the region’s unique

Efforts to preserve, spotlight, and celebrate important games of the past have been gaining steam in recent years. Consider, for instance, Digital Eclipse’s Atari 50, a compilation of games from across that company’s history that provides wonderful context in the form of interviews and archival materials, illuminating their colossal impact on gaming. Now, we have

Hayao Miyazaki is a legendary director and animator whose entire filmography is exceptional, so ranking his films is no easy feat. You’d be hard-pressed to find a “bad” film from the Studio Ghibli co-founder, so this piece is more about ranking from great to masterpiece rather than from good to bad. Miyazaki’s meticulously crafted, hand-drawn

The PS5 Pro has been rumored for over a year now and turned out to be exactly what most people expected: a similar-looking machine that runs games with incrementally better graphics and performance. The only thing people weren’t expecting was the $700 price tag, and the sticker shock has turned some pretty straightforward discussions about

The PlayStation 5 has been the more dominant console of the generation, lapping the Xbox Series X/S multiple times since their respective launches at the tail end of 2020. That’s likely due to the fact that since the end of the PS3’s lifetime, Sony’s studios have been producing megaton blockbusters that have managed to connect

Have you been playing Astro Bot? Sony’s big PlayStation-celebrating platformer is out now on PlayStation 5 and despite some glaring omissions, it’s a delightful game worth playing. It’s especially rewarding if you’re a long-time PlayStation fan who has played a lot of the company’s games over the past 30 years. Advertisement If your experience with

Shadow of the Erdtree warned you right at the outset that it was out to hurt you, and continue hurting you, but once you’ve burned down the Sealing Tree, and made it through the final dungeon, you just might be feeling pretty confident again. The final boss, Radahn, changes that. Immediately. Even after his recent

The aftermath of the apocalypse is a familiar playground to anyone who plays games nowadays. Over the course of the last decade and a half, it’s become the de facto setting of many prestige AAA titles, such as PlayStation’s esteemed The Last of Us series, as well as indie games like Stray. I’m not entirely

The Boy and the Heron is legendary director Hayao Miyazaki’s masterpiece. The 2023 Studio Ghibli film is a triumphant work of art that revisits and interrogates every theme Miyazaki has spent his lengthy career digging into across numerous animated features that have become classics across the globe. Now a companion piece to the film, a

We’ve all got gaps in our gaming history that need to be filled. I certainly haven’t played every game ever, and neither have you. It can be hard to find the time and money to snag and play older and important games, but every now and then there are sales that make it that much

After farting around in Solstice trying to get some glow in our gear, break time’s over, Guardians. Maya Sundaresh is up to some creepy nonsense with the Vex, which means it’s time to put in that work again. And compared to the cakewalk Arena/Battlegrounds quests of Episode: Echoes, Encore: Overture is long and deceptively tricky.

World of Warcraft: The War Within has a lot to live up to. The first in a trilogy of expansions Blizzard has dubbed The Worldsoul Saga and the followup to the stellar previous expansion in Dragonflight, it’s easy to imagine it crumbling under lofty expectations. Luckily, however, The War Within builds wonderfully on the best

As a “definitive” edition of the phenomenal 2006 RPG, 2024’s Persona 3 Reload was lacking in a few key features like the 2009 PSP port’s female protagonist route. Still, perhaps the most egregious omission was the lack of The Answer, the meaty, playable epilogue that was included in the 2007 Persona 3 FES re-release. Though

Alright, I’ve mourned summer enough, please bring on the fall weather and everything that accompanies it. Well, almost everything. The neat thing about summer is that it’s prime time for deals on video games,, and this narrow window between the end of summer vacation and the actual beginning of autumn is the last bit of

If you’re not a Sonic the Hedgehog fan, you might be wondering why the internet is losing its collective mind about Keanu Reeves’ Shadow the Hedgehog in the trailer for the third live-action movie, premiering on December 20. You may also be confused as to why Sega would dedicate an entire year to celebrating the

Visions of Mana is one of the cutest RPGs Square Enix has ever created, but it houses some fascinating secrets underneath its cheerful surface. I’m not talking about its story, though you will see some dark turns before your journey in Fa’diel ends. Instead I mean that underneath the bright and casual facade of Visions

PAX West continues to be one of North America’s most prolific gaming conventions. It’s not only a great place for the gaming community to gather and celebrate our favorite pastime, but also an excellent opportunity to check out the upcoming slate of games coming this year and early in 2025. Coming hot on the heels

Puzzle platformer SCHiM is all about exploring the world via shadows. It’s a gorgeous, catchy game in which you must move using the the shadows cast by others in the world, and along the way there are so many collectibles to find. This epic guide will tell you how to get your hands on every

Disney animator turned legendary director Tim Burton is famous for making films that have a macabre whimsy, an absurd sense of humor, and a distinct visual style. Tim Burton’s movies are sumptuous eye candy with exaggerated set designs and sharp juxtapositions between gloomy grays and vivid colors. And all of his films center on misfits

I was staring at a wall. It was an early mission in Ubisoft’s latest behemothic RPG, Star Wars Outlaws, in which I was charged with infiltrating an Empire base to recover some information from a computer, and this wall really caught my attention. Advertisement It was a perfect wall. It absolutely captured that late-70s sci-fi

The WWE’s first ever Bash in Berlin Premium Live Event took centerstage this past weekend in front of a packed house in Germany, and it did not disappoint. We ended the event with new Women’s Tag Team Champions, retribution for the Terror Twins, an uncontroversial finish between Gunther and Randy Orton, and, perhaps most importantly,

A great science fiction movie might scare you. It might inspire you. It might speculate about the nature of the human race, and what lies beyond our limited knowledge of the universe around us. It might propose an alternate past or a potential future. It might introduce you to an extraterrestrial or a brand-new scientific

Diablo 4‘s next big update arrives in October as part of the game’s next season, which is also coming at the same time as its first paid expansion. This new update, which is going to be tested by players in September, is changing quite a lot of things, including the level cap, how monsters scale,

It’s a three-day weekend! It’s Labor Day on Monday. You’d totally forgotten, but don’t worry, we’ve got you. So, unless your free time will be spent with the awful obligations of hanging with friends and family, what games will you fill it all with? And don’t all say Star Wars Outlaws. Even if it’s true,