Monthly Archives: May 2018

20 Crazy Unrealistic Things Battlefield Does, and One Realistic One

While we didn’t get to see real gameplay, EA and DICE’s reveal of Battlefield V did shine a light on a lot of details about the upcoming game. It’s coming out October 19, it’s going back to the series’ World War II roots, and it will not have a premium pass, meaning that all major post-release content will be free to everybody.

But along with these facts has come a backlash from a vocal minority around the fact that the trailer and box art focus on a female soldier with a prosthetic arm. The argument is that this detail means that we won’t be getting an “authentic” World War 2 experience from Battlefield V because there were no women in combat in World War 2. We’ll revisit the accuracy of that last assertion in a bit, but before we do, we have to challenge the premise that anyone has ever gotten an “authentic World War 2 experience” from any Battlefield game.

Continue reading…

Godzilla 2 Has Been Delayed

Warner Bros. has delayed its Godzilla sequel, King of the Monsters.

Deadline reports the film has been pushed back from March 22, 2019 to May 31, 2019. King of the Monsters is directed by Mike Dougherty and will feature Godzilla battling Mothra, Rodan, and the three-headed King Ghidorah.

The Shining sequel Doctor Sleep received an official release date. The film, which follows a 40-year-old Danny Torrance, will hit theaters on January 24, 2020. Gerald's Game director Mike Flanagan will helm the movie.

Continue reading…

Conan Exiles Review: Dull And Dense

For a game that’s based on the world of Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Barbarian, Conan Exiles has remarkably little to do with any part of that universe. It’s a big, open-world survival sim that sticks true to its initial hardcore vision to a fault. When you combine the steep learning curve of a deep but confusing crafting system with largely monotonous gameplay and a spectacularly awful UI, Conan Exiles feels like it does everything it can to push back on those curious enough to step into its admittedly intriguing but highly flawed world.

The game opens as you regain consciousness in the scorching desert, completely naked and vulnerable. As an exile, you are trapped in a doomed and cursed land with nothing but the faint memory of being cut down from your crucifix by Conan, the giant hunk of man-meat himself. From there, you’re free to wander off into the wild yonder. The exiled lands are massive, made up of different environmental biomes that can be explored freely from the outset. Spectacular-looking sandstorms can roll in out of nowhere, forcing you to seek shelter lest they consume you. You can climb anything from mountains and trees to walls and buildings, provided you have the stamina. This adds an extra dimension to exploration, with the added payoff of some lovely views of Conan's varied world.

No Caption Provided
Gallery image 1Gallery image 2Gallery image 3Gallery image 4Gallery image 5Gallery image 6Gallery image 7Gallery image 8Gallery image 9Gallery image 10

You start out small, picking up rocks and sticks and crafting simple tools. Almost everything you find can be broken down one way or another, and while it's neat to watch rocks chip apart and trees topple over as you hack into them, the humdrum motion of harvesting never feels rewarding. Eventually you’ll need to build shelter and a bed, which becomes your new spawn point. Given the game’s brutal loss of items and resources after death, doing this sooner rather than later can save you some real heartache.

Shelter can mean anything from a small stone shack all the way to a giant castle, complete with reinforced walls, towers, and even a trebuchet. Building is block-based and relatively free form, allowing for hugely elaborate base designs that can be some fun to build, provided you take the time to gather the raw materials to build everything you need. That's all well and good, except for the part where you aren’t shown how to do any of it. It’s all up to you to simply figure out or dive head first into a wiki to have anything explained in detail.

If you aren’t motivated by curiosity, Conan Exiles' single-player mode will feel empty and largely aimless. It's more like a practice mode, with only a handful of NPC outposts and structures to find. When you do, most of them are hostile, and the few that aren’t only offer minimal interaction. Multiplayer changes this up for the better in a few ways, mainly through the addition of other human players.

More importantly, though, multiplayer gives you more purpose and clearer goals to achieve. This includes defending your base from other players as well as The Purge, an army of NPCs that might attack and destroy your base as you gain XP--there's also an option to activate The Purge within the single-player mode. You can also join Clans, which will allow you to build collectively, either on or near clanmates' already-laid foundations. For times when you do have to leave home behind, you can create Thralls--human NPCs with specialised abilities you can knockout, bind, and drag back to base to enslave--to help protect it, and they do a decent enough job.

Character progression in both single and multiplayer takes place in the Journey, a series of tasks grouped into chapters that, when completed, grant you attribute points to spend on any one of seven main ability slots. You also gain knowledge points to unlock new crafting recipes, of which there are a lot. The number of things you can craft is staggering; weapons, armor, survival items, and even religious altars to help to deify the gods of the world and earn their favour.

No Caption Provided
Gallery image 1Gallery image 2Gallery image 3Gallery image 4Gallery image 5Gallery image 6Gallery image 7Gallery image 8Gallery image 9Gallery image 10

Once you start crafting more complex items, you get better acquainted with one of the game's worst aspects: its UI. There’s nothing intuitive about it, and like the rest of the game, there’s very little explanation given as to how it works. On top of that, it's overly complicated, requiring you to place the resources along with any fuel required into the crafting bench first, select what you want to build from the menu, and then hit the play button to actually craft it. There’s also almost no difference between the console and PC UI, so it's an absolute nightmare to do any kind of inventory management with a controller. And like in most survival sims, it’s what you inevitably spend a significant amount time doing, making it a constant source of frustration.

When you get tired of chipping away at trees and rocks, which you will, you can chip away at creatures or other humans instead. There are all manner of things in the exiled lands for you to kill or be killed by, from animals and beasts to monstrous boss creatures like a giant black spider and a huge, spiked Dragon. But despite the sizeable enemy variety and the large array of weapons you can smith--from daggers to axes and giant mallets--combat is just plain bad. Both light and heavy attacks feel unwieldy thanks to sluggish animations, and weapon strikes lack any impact, resulting in dull and monotonous fights.

Conan Exiles is one of the most unsatisfying games I’ve ever played.

To top it off, Conan Exiles just feels really unpolished. The bodies of harvested enemies simply disappear into thin air, and large areas of the world can pop in and out of view at any time, clipping your character through the ground then respawning you somewhere else on the map. When the night starts to come, the moon’s light casts upwards from the ground, creating an bottomlit effect that looks atrocious. It’s also not in the most stable condition, with a number of crashes affecting gameplay randomly on both PC and Xbox.

Ultimately, Conan Exiles is one of the most unsatisfying games I’ve ever played. Its crafting and resource systems may be dense enough that the ultra-patient could find something to enjoy here, but anyone else would likely walk away with their hands thrown up in defeat. The mind-numbing tedium of harvesting resources, woefully boring combat, and a slew of bugs left me feeling completely underwhelmed and unimpressed when it was all said and done.

Logan Director to Helm Boba Fett Star Wars Movie

James Mangold, the writer and director of Logan, reportedly is set to pull double duty on a standalone Star Wars movie focused around bounty hunter Boba Fett.

THR reports Mangold will write and direct the film, which would follow in line with the "A Star Wars Story" standalone features Lucasfilm has released alongside the main, episodic Star Wars films. No story details about the solo film have been revealed yet, however.

IGN has reached out to Lucasfilm for comment and will update this story should they respond.

A Boba Fett Star Wars movie from Fantastic Four director Josh Trank was reportedly in the works and allegedly supposed to follow Rogue One as the next Star Wars anthology film. Trank reportedly left the project in 2015, though plans for it had apparently progressed far enough that reports suggested a Boba Fett movie announcement was canceled "at the last minute" in 2015.

Continue reading…

Nintendo Voice Chat LIVE – Today at 3 pm PT/6 pm ET!

Hey! Listen! NVC will be live streaming IGN's weekly Nintendo Podcast today exclusively on ign.com!

Join Filip, Peer, Brian, and Tom today at 3:00 PM PT/6:00 PM ET as they share their thoughts on newly announced Resident Evil 7 Cloud Version for Switch, the rumored N64 Classic, Nintendo's dockless Switch bundle for Japan, Mario + Rabbids DLC, and much more!, and chat with the community LIVE! Don’t worry, you can still catch the full episode on Friday as usual on YouTube.com/NintendoVoiceChat and your favorite podcast listening services.

NVCLive (1)

Continue reading…

NES Castlevania Lookalike Out Today: Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon

Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night spinoff Curse of the Moon is now out.

The game, which is a spiritual successor to Castlevania from series creator Koji Igarashi, is available on PC via Steam, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, 3DS, and PlayStation Vita. The Xbox One version will come out on June 6.

Curse of the Moon is priced at $10/£8 and features an 8-bit aesthetic and side-scrolling gameplay. Players will assume the role of a demon slayer named Zangetsu, who must defeat a powerful demon residing in a dark castle.

You'll meet several playable characters throughout your adventure, each with their own abilities that will unlock new areas to explore. Recruiting these characters will change the game's difficulty and could affect the ending as well. Check out the first 10 minutes of the game below.

Continue reading…

Incredibles 2 Set to Have Biggest Domestic Opening for an Animated Movie

The Incredibles 2 is set to have the biggest domestic opening of all time for an animated film.

Per THR, the movie is tracking to make north of $140 million when it hits theaters in the US on June 15. The current record holder is another Pixar movie, 2016's Finding Dory, which had an estimated $135 million debut.

For context, the first Incredibles film opened with roughly $70.5 million back in 2004, unadjusted for inflation. Meanwhile, last year's Coco made $49 million in its domestic opening and has since grossed an estimated $805 million worldwide, according to Box Office Mojo.

Continue reading…

Jason Bateman Apologizes to Arrested Development Co-Star Jessica Walter

Jason Bateman has issued an apology to his co-star Jessica Walter following a controversial Arrested Development New York Times interview.

Jeffrey Tambor previously revealed he had a confrontation with Walter, which resulted in Tambor verbally harassing his co-star on the set of the comedy series. In the NY Times interview, Walter addressed the incident for the first time while breaking down in tears.

During the same interview, Bateman repeatedly excuses Tambor's behavior.

“Again, not to belittle it or excuse it or anything, but in the entertainment industry it is incredibly common to have people who are, in quotes, ‘difficult,'" Bateman said during the NY Times interview. "And what you learn is context. And you learn about character and you learn about work habits, work ethics, and you start to understand.

Continue reading…

Far Cry 5’s First DLC Gets a Release Date

Far Cry 5: Hours of Darkness launches on June 5 for PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One for $11.99 USD. Hours of Darkness is the first post-launch DLC for Far Cry 5 and is set in Vietnam during the Vietnam War. "Vietnam-themed" assets will also be available in the Far Cry Arcade today.

Wendell "Red" Redler, a Vietnam War veteran from a Far Cry 5 side mission, makes a return in Hours of Darkness as the playable character. The DLC campaign follows Red on a mission to save his imprisoned squad mates in Vietnam.

Watch the Far Cry 5: Hours of Darkness teaser trailer below:

Hours of Darkness is playable in solo and online co-op. Upon completion, players can unlock the more difficult Hours of Darkness: Survivor Mode or the over-the-top Action Movie Mode.

Continue reading…