Action Adventure News, Tips, Tricks & Ideas

Wiedenfels made the statement during a financial call to investors.

Turbo Kid is a 2015 movie set in a post-apocalypse in which a comic book fan battles a local tyrant, with gory, comedic, '80s-pastiching results. It was not a film I expected to get a metroidvania sequel, but here it is with a new demo and an April release date.

Inflexion is prioritising an offline play mode for Nightingale. This follows on from player feedback, with many questioning the developer's decision to make Nightingale online-only on its early access release earlier this month.

Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League has failed to meet publisher Warner Bros' expectations.

Several months down the line from Marvel's Spider-Man 2's launch, fans have been discussing the game's ending and whether elements should have played out differently.

Sons Of The Forest launches out of early access and into 1.0 today, bringing with it a whole host of tweaks and improvements. Most notably, there's a new ending, new mutants, new points of interest, proximity chat, a creative mode, and new uses for the game's mysterious artifacts. The rest of the changelog is an exhausting list of bullet points with the occasional hidden gem, like the introduction of raccoons and golf cart radio stations to give your drives some added pizazz.

After launching Nightingale into early access on Tuesday, developers Inflexion Games (led by former BioWare CEO Aaryn Flynn) have quickly realised a big miscalculation: lots of players want an offline mode. The gaslamp fantasy survival game requires you be online even if you want to play by yourself, which dovetailed poorly with server issues at launch to frustrate folks. Inflexion say that early in development they needed to make a choice between focusing on co-op or offline first, and now think they made the wrong call. They plan to remedy this, but it's not yet clear when they'll actually add an offline mode.

Epic Mickey, Warren Spector's action-platforming love letter to early period Disney, is heading to PC more than a decade after its original Wii exclusive release. It'll arrive as Disney Epic Mickey: Rebrushed, a "remake" with modern graphics and controls.

Palworld has been played by more than 25 million players since its launch, its studio Pocketpair says.

Flintlock: The Siege Of Dawn is one of those third person action adventure games I've been quietly looking forward to ever since I first read about it in Edge in May 2022, even though we've seen and heard relatively little about it since. Thankfully, the Flintlock train does seem to be kicking into a gear a bit more now that it's steaming toward its Summer 2024 release window, as yesterday developers A44 Games released a new gameplay teaser trailer for it, ahead of a wider reveal planned for next month. The trailer shows more of its melee and magical combat, though personally, I'm just glad to see that heroine Nor hasn't been neglecting her leg days, as we get to see some meaty and powerful kicks in there, too. Love a big kick, me.

Hi-Fi Rush will skip the current Nintendo Switch and instead arrive on the console's currently-unannounced successor. That's according to a report from Insider Gaming, which states that the absence of a Switch version of the game in yesterday's Xbox multi-platform announcement was due to it launching on Nintendo Switch 2 instead.

A recent patch for Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League has caused more issues than it fixed, fans say.

Shin Megami Tensei 5 is getting the Persona 5 Royal treatment, with an all-new Shin Megami Tensei 5: Vengeance edition that's out in June. It features a new story path, an improved battle system, new areas, and more, as you'd expect from Atlus' history of definitive editions. What's more, while SMT 5 was a Switch exclusive when it came out in 2021, the new Vengeance edition will be heading to PC and other consoles, too. Do I have time for another enormous JRPG? Probably not, but I'll admit that it's got me very interested indeed.

Find room to squeeze one more nail into the coffin scrawled with “Hopes for Bloodborne on PC”, as the head of developers FromSoftware has suggested that a Bloodborne remake might need to wait on another generation of console hardware.

A beefy update headed to Marvel's Spider-Man 2 will add a wardrobe of new suits and unlock a fresh New Game Plus mode for Insomniac's enjoyable superhero adventure.

Nintendo will hold its next Direct showcase today, Wednesday 20th February at 2pm UK time.

Undersea Soulslike Another Crab's Treasure now has a release date, as announced at today's Nintendo Direct.

Kemuri was first revealed at The Game Awards last December, a co-op parkour action game where you fight yokai and look cool from the creative and art director for Ghostwire: Tokyo, Ikumi Nakamura. The team at Unseen have done a seven minute video where talk a little bit about the content and vibes of the game, basically by just listing cool stuff. Think of something cool, and it's probably in Kemuri somehow. The video both excited and frustrated me, as it seems like an exciting game, but I very much feel the video does not answer the question posed by its own title.

Before founding Inflexion in 2021, Aaryn Flynn worked at BioWare. He's got credits on some of the studio's best-loved games, from Baldur's Gate 2 through Star Wars: Knights Of The Old Republic to Dragon Age: Origins and the Mass Effect trilogy. He was BioWare's general manager for several years, but left the company in 2017 following the release of the less-regarded Mass Effect: Andromeda. New survival sim Nightingale is his first early access project, and it's certainly been a learning experience, with Flynn obliged to rethink many of the things he learned about gamedev during his BioWare days. Speaking to me ahead of Nightingale's launch, Flynn talked about the difficulty of making headway as a new developer in an industry where the most successful competing live service titles have effectively become part of the landscape - indeed, a force of "gravity".

Kingmakers has too much going on to easily summarise, but I'll try. Really, though, you should just click below and watch the trailer, which will surprise and delight you with its twists and scope in a way my words will not.

Inflexion's fantasy survival sim Nightingale releases into Steam early access today. Our pre-launch impressions? Well, the procedurally generated landscapes are engrossing, a blend of British fairytale influences with many a hushed forest, spidery swamp and tempting ruin. We're also pretty keen as a team on the game's Realm cards system, which lets you shape those fairytale worlds both before and after you portal into them. But we were less enthralled by HUD and user interface elements such as the crafting menus and hotbar, which we found ornate and circuitous to the point of confusing.

The latest Assassin's Creed Mirage update is giving me flashbacks to that inglorious period in game design when every other action game had an insta-fail stealth segment to wind people up between cover-based shoot-outs and, I don't know, three-part glyph puzzles or what-have-you. Out today for PC at 12pm UTC, 1pm GMT, 7am ET and 4am PT, the 1.07 patch adds Full Synchronization Challenge, a permadeath mode (originally teased last year) that not only permakills you when you're slain by enemies, but also deletes your save file when you commit crimes such as slaughtering civilians, or going outside of "authorised map locations".

There's no room for mistakes in Assassin's Creed Mirage's new Full Synchronisation Challenge mode, which arrives in the game via a fresh update due today.

Assassin’s Creed Mirage’s delayed permadeath mode will be introduced as part of the game’s next title update.

Among the things I like bestest about Inflexion's alt-Victorian fantasy survival game Nightingale is its Realm cards mechanic, whereby you generate and modify worlds by playing Major and Minor cards. Major cards are used at portals to conjure up a particular biome or world type and set the difficulty, including an approximate choice of resident NPC factions, local fauna and resources. Minor cards are played within worlds to mess with their workings. You can lower the gravity for optimal umbrella gliding conditions, alter the weather or summon a Blood Moon (sorry, Zelda) that reduces your max health.

Helldivers 2 developer Arrowhead says it has had to «cap» concurrent players to around 450,000 to «further improve server stability».

Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League has already had bug fixes and a balancing patch, which is good news for players able to hop into the live service hero-biffer. It's less good news for those players struggling to play at all due to login issues and server issues.

Helldivers 2 is awarding all players a 50 per cent XP and requisition bonus to compensate players for «a problem» that's preventing players from receiving the correct rewards at the end of missions.

A Tomb Raider fan and modder has revealed that they put their own personal projects on hold for a very good reason: they have actually been leading the development of Tomb Raider 1-3 Remastered.

The first Streets Of Rogue was an RPS favourite when it launched back in 2019 (we literally couldn't stop playing it), and we've known for a while now that its sequel, Streets Of Rogue 2, is due to arrive later this year. Ahead of the game's launch, developer Matt Dabrowski has started releasing a series of dev diary videos detailing his design process and how it's all coming together. The latest is about how he creates the game's proc-gen open worlds and biomes, and it's a fascinating watch if you've ever wondered how its particular blend of randomised chaos works behind the scenes.

A standalone expansion for Disco Elysium, codenamed X7, has reportedly been cancelled and a quarter of developers at developers ZA/UM are at risk of redundancy. Around 24 employees are said to be affected, according to "sources close to the matter" who spoke to Sports Illustrated's video games site.

A member of the Palworld development team has advised fans to try playing other games while they wait for content updates.

When Forever Skies leaves PC early access later this year, it will also arrive on PlayStation 5 as a console exclusive.

Making good on their word, People Can Fly and Incuvo have released a rather chunky patch for Bulletstorm VR on PlayStation VR2 and Steam VR. This follows an earlier update on Meta Quest sets, which took aim at crashes and more.

Nintendo has revealed some more of Peach's transformations in Princess Peach: Showtime!.

An update to the Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth demo will improve the visual quality of Performance mode.

We've eschewed any Valentine's theming this year, but Edwin put this in our news queue last night as a sort of dare for our evening shift, and let the record show I am less of a coward than Graham Smith. The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood, a visual novel Tarot-themed card game from perennial (perhaps perineal, in this case) favourites Deconstructeam, was praised by Edwin in his review, and I was going to use the same strapline for this news post had he not got there first. Because now, in time for the season of romance, they've teamed up with sex toy purveyors Uberrime to create a frankly prohibitively massive dildo as an official tie-in for the game, which can be won in a free competition by three lucky people living in either the UK, EU, US or Canada (as in, they each win their own dildo; they don't have to time share).

The Silent Hill 2 remake's State of Play combat trailer doesn't give a full and proper representation of the game, Bloober Team's president Piotr Babieno has observed in an apparent swipe at publisher Konami, who Babieno portrays as responsible for the upcoming horror game's marketing. If you missed it, the trailer in question focuses on the "modernised" combat. It shows alleged "everyman" protagonist James Sunderland getting all Gears of Warry with some maggoty marionettes and rancid demon nurses.

Sons Of The Forest's 1.0 release date draws nearer. Players who prefer their cannibal islands as polished as possible can begin their visit on February 22nd, and there's now a release date trailer that shows exactly what kind of human monstrosities you can expect.

Magical first-person shooter Immortals Of Aveum launched last August and by the following month half its development team had been laid off due to poor sales.

Tomb Raider 1-3 Remastered begins with a content warning that explains the trilogy contains «offensive depictions of people and cultures rooted in racial and ethnic prejudices».

If you’d been gazing at the present glut of new survival games and bellowing for more, as though engaged in a drinking competition with some kind of cartoon Viking, then rest easy. Gord developers Covenant.dev have announced To The Star, a "whimsical" survival adventure that takes heavy inspiration from Alice In Wonderland, and features a cooking system that lets you combine monster parts with "suppressed emotions", so as to produce both consumable foodstuffs and weapons.

Steam Next Fest may be over for another few months, but dozens of demos are still alive and kicking, it seems - which is good news for me, who still has a good half dozen on my to do list, and also good news for you, as it means you still have time to check out the really quite good demo for Stand-Alone, a fast, 2D hack and slasher where you play as a robot-powered sheep packing a very large sword. Wolves have broken into your home and murdered all your friends, but you play as the one sheep who got away - or rather, a sheep that's been fused with a surprisingly powerful robot capable of producing a honking great greatsword to make their escape with. Thus begins the wolves' hot pursuit - not least because this robot also seems to be kind of sleeper agent for them - and your roguelike-shaped quest to avenge your fallen friends.

A mobile version of hit survival horror Lethal Company has popped up on the iPhone App Store and Google Play — but isn't what it seems. The game's developer Zeekerss has warned players this is «likely a scam of some sort», and not made with its permission.

The Thaumaturge, the detective CRPG blending together eastern-European fantasy, alt-history Warsaw and even a bit of Pokémon (or Persona, if you prefer), has been pushed back from its planned release date next week to the start of March. With development said to be finished, creators Fool’s Theory say that it’s simply to let the game breathe a bit easier.

The Thaumaturge will now launch slightly later than planned, on 4th March, despite work on the game being complete.

Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League is getting a new leaderboard thanks to a «major unintended bug» which caused the Burn status to scale incorrectly.

Viral co-op horror Lethal Company may only have released in early access in late October 2023, but it's already received almost 50 updates.

The demo for Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth has been out a week and, beyond sharing piano covers, now players are arguing about yellow paint.

Nintendo‘s next console will reportedly feature a custom Nvidia chip when it launches later this year.

Hideo Kojima dropped a bombshell at the end of January, announcing that — alongside development of Death Stranding 2 — he would also be returning to the action-espionage genre that put him on the map with the Metal Gear series, in the form of Physint for PlayStation 5. And now, in a new episode of his HideoTube web series, the designer has explained how a period of sickness and surgery — and thoughts of his own mortality — convinced him to 'change his priorities' and do something fans had been asking him to do for years.

The next game from Ori and the Blind Forest developer Moon Studios has been delayed slightly.

As I take my first steps out of a cave, surveying a familiar-looking plateau draped in nothing but a loincloth, I suddenly crash into a bulbous, bleating ball of cotton-wool. Half sheep, half sentient ball of fluff, it lets out a startled meep, curling into a ball and rolling head-first towards me.

Marvel's Spider-Man 2's much anticipated New Game Plus mode will arrive next month — on 7th March — which means soon we can all swing back around and go for another spin with Peter and Miles.

It's time to play everybody's favourite game - no, not GTA 6, but the GTA 6 Release Date Quiz. Who's stepping up to the podium this time? Why, it's Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot, who offered thoughts on the matter in a recent investor Q&A. Fingers on the buzzers, everybody!

When playing any character-driven videogame I sometimes experience a sensation akin to my eyes unfocussing, and remember that I'm not, strictly speaking, controlling a body in a world, but interacting with a simulation that includes representations of a body and a world. The character is just an interfacial node in a vast tangle of visible and invisible elements; by moving the character, I cause objects, surfaces, creatures to load or unload, spring into motion or change colour and a million things besides.

In an upsetting confirmation that February is in fact winter (and that the year doesn't just start with summer like my brain thinks it should) publisher Whitethorn Games held a 2024 Winter Showcase, where they revealed the existance of a game that answers the question "what if the slimes in Slime Rancher were in mortal peril, and had swords?". The answer is apparently "be ruddy heroes in a cute Soulslike". I think this game, too, looks very cute, although Slime Heroes doesn't have a release window yet.

A series of Easter eggs point to us seeing more of Batman in Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, presumably as part of a forthcoming post-launch update.

Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth players are already sharing piano covers from the game's demo, just days after its release.

Ubisoft's live-service pirate ship game Skull and Bones is a «quadruple-A» project, company boss Yves Guillemot has said.

Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot has said the company won't be increasing its investment into VR due to poor sales of Assassin's Creed Nexus VR.

A PC version of Dreams, the PlayStation 4-exclusive toybox-slash-game creation platform from LittleBigPlanet makers Media Molecule, was nearly completed before being cancelled late last year, according to a new report.

A re-release of the 90s point-and-click Discworld game «may happen», designer Gregg Barnett has teased. However, the developer said because of the way intellectual property rights work in the UK, 50 percent of the game currently belongs to the crown, which complicates matters a tad.

Ubisoft co-founder and CEO Yves Guillemot has defended the $70 price tag for Skull and Bones, calling it a “quadruple-A game”.

Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot believes the launch of GTA 6 will be «positive for the market» and expects it to launch after April 2025.

Square Enix showed off 20 more minutes of Final Fantasy VII Rebirth during a special State Of Play stream last night, and holy heck, they sure are bringing it with the mini-games in this one. There's a whole Gwent-like card game called Queen's Blood (watch out Triple Triad), dolphin ride obstacle courses, playing with Mooglets, the return of Intergrade's Fort Condor battles, a strange bit of chicken wrangling, photographing Red XIII, frog jumping... and that's before we even get to all the stuff at Gold Saucer. Honestly, Like A Dragon better watch out, as Rebirth is clearly making a play for its mini-game crown in this second part of Squeenix's Final Fantasy 7 Remake project, and man alive, I'm so very here for it.

Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth has become the series' most successful launch on Steam over its launch weekend.

Rocksteady and Warner's much-disparaged live service superhero snuff fantasy Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League goes into Deluxe-preorder-only early access today, Monday 29th January, at 9pm, or if you're from the UK or US east coast, Tuesday 30th January at 12am ET and 12 GMT. Non-Deluxe peons get to play it from Friday 2nd February. With just a handful of hours till the initial release we still don't have review code, which is generally a good sign that a publisher thinks the game in question is going to get a mild-to-severe kicking.

Visions of Mana, Square Enix's forthcoming action-RPG, will reportedly release on Game Pass on day one.

Publisher Annapurna Interactive has announced a delay to the release of narrative adventure game Open Roads.

I think fighting skeletons might be one of the most fundamental joys of video games. The more implausible its ambulation seems, the better, but I'm happy as long it clatters to the floor as a collection of distinct physics objects once I'm done.

I've played certain demos for longer than I have many full games, eking every last atom of enjoyment out of a single level or character, to the point that the final release felt like unnecessary bloat. I am already concerned the same might be true of Arco's demo, which is now available on Steam. You've hopefully read Katharine's breakdown of this "triptych of revenge stories set across the deserts, plains and forests of a fantastical, South American-style landscape". Well, now's your chance to get to grips with its nifty combat system, which is broken into turns with each turn's actions unfolding in real time.

A planned live-action adaptation of MMO Final Fantasy XIV is officially “dead”, according to the TV series’ producers. A combination of the pandemic and the “size and scale needed to do it right” are apparently to blame, with Amazon reportedly coming closest to making it a reality - but to no avail.

As The Last of Us Part 2 strides back in the spotlight thanks to its recently released PlayStation 5 remaster, developer Naughty Dog has announced an arrival date for its previously revealed making-of documentary, which will be available to watch on YouTube and in-game via an impending Remastered patch from Friday, 2nd February.

Graham has been bandying Abiotic Factor around the Treehouse as "Half-Life designed for co-op survival japes", which is obviously a noteworthy combination of words, so let's have a look at the Steam page, trailer, and gosh, there's a demo here too. That's Friday night sorted.

Ubisoft has announced an open beta for Skull and Bones.

The much delayed, rebooted, and delayed live service pirate 'em up Skull And Bones actually pencilled in a release date not long ago. Just when you thought it couldn't get any more remarkable, Ubisoft have also announced it'll get an open beta before it launches. In only a couple of weeks, you'll be able to sail the seven seas with a purple rarity cannon firing off common rarity cannon balls that you bought off a rank 25 landlubber with your Skullbucks. Cool!

Ubisoft will hold an open beta for Skull and Bones ahead of the game’s release next month.

PC players who've been patiently awaiting the arrival of Horizon Forbidden West on their platform of choice now have a date to mark in the calendars: the action-adventure sequel is coming to Steam and the Epic Games Store in its Complete Edition guise on 21st March.

Back in 2022, Blizzard announced that they were working on a survival game set in an "all-new universe". Not much more was known about the game except that the studio were actively ramping up recruitment, seemingly after having been working on the project since 2017.