Little Town Hero, developed by Pokemon studio Game Freak, tries to do a lot with a little. Fast-traveling from the mines near its titular town to its main street, the two furthest points on the map, only saves you about a minute or so of travel time. But the game wants its small village to matter, as it spends several hours familiarizing you with the small area and its residents. Its gameplay works the same way, doing for card-battlers what Pokemon did for party-focused, turn-based RPGs: distilling it into something the average person can wrap their head around.

And it works, sometimes. When you face down an imposing monster and cobble together a hard-earned win with all the tools at your disposal, it can make the equipment upgrading, crafting systems, and myriad currencies of other games feel like bloat. But more often, Little Town Hero doesn't leave the strict confines it creates for itself; instead, it plays things safe by constraining your options so things don't get too out of hand. While that occasionally produces some challenging moments, battles quickly begin to repeat themselves, making you wish you could see what its combat might be capable of if it weren't afraid to take more risks.

The star of Little Town Hero's tiny village is Axe, a young troublemaker quickly thrust into defending his home from monsters after he acquires a red stone that gives him an edge against them in battle. Because the village is protected by a castle and surrounded by steep cliffs, no one knows where the monsters are coming from, so Axe and his friends begin tracking down their origins.

The crux of Little Town Hero is its turn-based gameplay, which borrows elements from card games but throws in a couple of twists. Fights revolve around a small deck of cards, called Ideas. Cards can be red (which have high attack values and can damage the opponent directly), yellow (which can fight multiple times a turn as long as they have the health for it, but can't damage your opponent), or blue (which don't have attack or defense values but activate powerful effects). The goal in most fights is to break all three of your opponent's hearts by destroying all of their cards in a single turn by having them trade hits with yours, then attacking them directly.

Unfortunately, this setup lacks key aspects of other card games. The most glaring omission is that you can't actually build a deck of your own; for most of the game, you're stuck with a deck that caps out at just 13 cards. You can't alter or customize which cards you bring to battle, so standard battles play out predictably; you look at the defense of your opponent's cards, match them with the cards that can break them, and see if your hand can break theirs. Some cards have special effects, but you won't see any outlandish gameplay mechanics; most effects either buff your current cards, deal damage, or add another card to your hand. Fights get boring quickly, especially after you upgrade your cards by working your way through the skill tree using the Eureka points earned from fights.

You can also mitigate much of the luck that factors into most other card games, which makes it easier to get the cards you need but also drives home how simple the strategy behind each fight is. In order to survive longer fights, you need to recycle cards by either losing a heart or spending BP (a resource you build whenever you destroy all of your opponent's cards but don't have a card to break through and damage them directly). You can even swap out cards in your hand for those in your deck at the cost of BP.

While this curbs the element of chance that can sometimes be aggravating in card games, it also emphasizes just how often you end up using the same strategies each fight. Already used the card you needed to pierce through a boss' defense to win the last round? No problem; with 3 BP, you can revive your entire deck and add that car right back into your hand. You end up sticking to one or two strategies and running them time and again because, again, your deck is made up of just 13 cards.

Because of how small your deck is and how well you can mitigate the element of chance, decision-making is crucial, and I did have a few of the a-ha moments where I was backed into a corner but, through a series of smart decisions, came out on top. But those moments quickly give way to going on autopilot. There might be a few deviations based on whatever tricks your opponent pulls or which cards you draw in the first turn, but at some point, I was able to run my plan of making several of my defensive cards invincible, steamrolling whatever offense the boss had, and hitting them for obscene amounts of damage in a single turn.

Boss fights are a little more exciting, since they introduce a couple of strategic layers. Instead of fighting in place, you take on monsters across a large swath of the village, mapped out like a small board, moving a random number of spaces each turn (though you can control where you move with certain cards). Most spaces on the board have a special effect when you land on them, granting access to an ally who can deal direct damage, allowing you to combine two cards into one, or letting you use certain cards to activate explosive barrels or cannons. Some villagers might even have suggestions, like punching a monster in the nose, that add new, one-use cards to your deck specific to that fight. Planning out where I'd travel across multiple turns depending on which cards I had that turn made from some well-timed plays that won me some fights.

To counter these powerful bonuses, bosses offer up the kind of challenge the rest of the game lacks. Each boss has its own gimmick that nudges you toward different strategies; one boss might counterattack when you hurt it (encouraging you to find more indirect ways of wearing it down), or introduce cards that add a short timer to all of your moves until they're destroyed, forcing you to be quick and possibly screw up. For the first half of the game, I had a tough time against monsters, since it seemed like they always had the upper hand. As I upgraded my deck, that tide slowly shifted.

This doesn't make later boss fights breezy--some of them are tough. But even here, because you don't have that many options to choose from, your path to victory doesn't feel personal or creative. It also doesn't help that during boss fights, both sides gain a protective shield that has to be whittled down before hearts will take damage, which makes boss fights take longer than regular fights--certain battles took the better part of an hour to get through. The combination of the gradually lowered difficulty and increased length of battles meant I knew I'd emerge victorious, but I dreaded the 15 to 20 turns it'd take to get there.

Outside of battles, you can trek back and forth across the village to run errands for shopkeepers and complete side quests that earn you Eureka points. But the village itself isn't big enough to hold your attention for long; there are no other meaningful ways to engage with anyone outside of the couple of times they might ask you to get something for them, if at all. The only resource you have are Eureka points, so there are no minigames, equipment to buy, or anything else that might give combat more depth or provide an alternative from all the card-battling. The town only comes alive when monsters attack it.

Little Town Hero finds some success in avoiding some of the complex systems and tedious menus that can bog down other card games and RPGs, but it ends up suffering for it.

The story you unravel along the way and strings all the fights together is somewhat involved, but predictable and boring. Discovering the origin of all the monster attacks has a couple of twists, but mostly leads to a predictable story that moves at a crawl. Characters are largely forgettable, quickly fall into archetypes, and play out their roles without much room for nuance. A couple of later moments get some emotional weight thanks to a strong score from Undertale creator Toby Fox and longtime Pokemon composer Hitomi Sato, but characters are too shallow to hold up their end of the bargain, and the town doesn't have enough going on to make it worth exploring beyond where quests tell you to go.

Little Town Hero finds some success in avoiding some of the complex systems and tedious menus that can bog down other card games and RPGs, but it ends up suffering for it. Keeping your card options limited allows you to approach encounters with clever instead of relying on luck of the draw, but the deck size is too limited to break the mounting doldrum of subsequent fights. And while I did get to know this town pretty well, that's because of how small and suffocating it feels as it refuses to push outside its own boundaries.

Little Town Hero, developed by Pokemon studio Game Freak, tries to do a lot with a little. Fast-traveling from the mines near its titular town to its main street, the two furthest points on the map, only saves you about a minute or so of travel time. But the game wants its small village to matter, as it spends several hours familiarizing you with the small area and its residents. Its gameplay works the same way, doing for card-battlers what Pokemon did for party-focused, turn-based RPGs: distilling it into something the average person can wrap their head around.

And it works, sometimes. When you face down an imposing monster and cobble together a hard-earned win with all the tools at your disposal, it can make the equipment upgrading, crafting systems, and myriad currencies of other games feel like bloat. But more often, Little Town Hero doesn't leave the strict confines it creates for itself; instead, it plays things safe by constraining your options so things don't get too out of hand. While that occasionally produces some challenging moments, battles quickly begin to repeat themselves, making you wish you could see what its combat might be capable of if it weren't afraid to take more risks.

The star of Little Town Hero's tiny village is Axe, a young troublemaker quickly thrust into defending his home from monsters after he acquires a red stone that gives him an edge against them in battle. Because the village is protected by a castle and surrounded by steep cliffs, no one knows where the monsters are coming from, so Axe and his friends begin tracking down their origins.

The crux of Little Town Hero is its turn-based gameplay, which borrows elements from card games but throws in a couple of twists. Fights revolve around a small deck of cards, called Ideas. Cards can be red (which have high attack values and can damage the opponent directly), yellow (which can fight multiple times a turn as long as they have the health for it, but can't damage your opponent), or blue (which don't have attack or defense values but activate powerful effects). The goal in most fights is to break all three of your opponent's hearts by destroying all of their cards in a single turn by having them trade hits with yours, then attacking them directly.

Unfortunately, this setup lacks key aspects of other card games. The most glaring omission is that you can't actually build a deck of your own; for most of the game, you're stuck with a deck that caps out at just 13 cards. You can't alter or customize which cards you bring to battle, so standard battles play out predictably; you look at the defense of your opponent's cards, match them with the cards that can break them, and see if your hand can break theirs. Some cards have special effects, but you won't see any outlandish gameplay mechanics; most effects either buff your current cards, deal damage, or add another card to your hand. Fights get boring quickly, especially after you upgrade your cards by working your way through the skill tree using the Eureka points earned from fights.

You can also mitigate much of the luck that factors into most other card games, which makes it easier to get the cards you need but also drives home how simple the strategy behind each fight is. In order to survive longer fights, you need to recycle cards by either losing a heart or spending BP (a resource you build whenever you destroy all of your opponent's cards but don't have a card to break through and damage them directly). You can even swap out cards in your hand for those in your deck at the cost of BP.

While this curbs the element of chance that can sometimes be aggravating in card games, it also emphasizes just how often you end up using the same strategies each fight. Already used the card you needed to pierce through a boss' defense to win the last round? No problem; with 3 BP, you can revive your entire deck and add that car right back into your hand. You end up sticking to one or two strategies and running them time and again because, again, your deck is made up of just 13 cards.

Because of how small your deck is and how well you can mitigate the element of chance, decision-making is crucial, and I did have a few of the a-ha moments where I was backed into a corner but, through a series of smart decisions, came out on top. But those moments quickly give way to going on autopilot. There might be a few deviations based on whatever tricks your opponent pulls or which cards you draw in the first turn, but at some point, I was able to run my plan of making several of my defensive cards invincible, steamrolling whatever offense the boss had, and hitting them for obscene amounts of damage in a single turn.

Boss fights are a little more exciting, since they introduce a couple of strategic layers. Instead of fighting in place, you take on monsters across a large swath of the village, mapped out like a small board, moving a random number of spaces each turn (though you can control where you move with certain cards). Most spaces on the board have a special effect when you land on them, granting access to an ally who can deal direct damage, allowing you to combine two cards into one, or letting you use certain cards to activate explosive barrels or cannons. Some villagers might even have suggestions, like punching a monster in the nose, that add new, one-use cards to your deck specific to that fight. Planning out where I'd travel across multiple turns depending on which cards I had that turn made from some well-timed plays that won me some fights.

To counter these powerful bonuses, bosses offer up the kind of challenge the rest of the game lacks. Each boss has its own gimmick that nudges you toward different strategies; one boss might counterattack when you hurt it (encouraging you to find more indirect ways of wearing it down), or introduce cards that add a short timer to all of your moves until they're destroyed, forcing you to be quick and possibly screw up. For the first half of the game, I had a tough time against monsters, since it seemed like they always had the upper hand. As I upgraded my deck, that tide slowly shifted.

This doesn't make later boss fights breezy--some of them are tough. But even here, because you don't have that many options to choose from, your path to victory doesn't feel personal or creative. It also doesn't help that during boss fights, both sides gain a protective shield that has to be whittled down before hearts will take damage, which makes boss fights take longer than regular fights--certain battles took the better part of an hour to get through. The combination of the gradually lowered difficulty and increased length of battles meant I knew I'd emerge victorious, but I dreaded the 15 to 20 turns it'd take to get there.

Outside of battles, you can trek back and forth across the village to run errands for shopkeepers and complete side quests that earn you Eureka points. But the village itself isn't big enough to hold your attention for long; there are no other meaningful ways to engage with anyone outside of the couple of times they might ask you to get something for them, if at all. The only resource you have are Eureka points, so there are no minigames, equipment to buy, or anything else that might give combat more depth or provide an alternative from all the card-battling. The town only comes alive when monsters attack it.

Little Town Hero finds some success in avoiding some of the complex systems and tedious menus that can bog down other card games and RPGs, but it ends up suffering for it.

The story you unravel along the way and strings all the fights together is somewhat involved, but predictable and boring. Discovering the origin of all the monster attacks has a couple of twists, but mostly leads to a predictable story that moves at a crawl. Characters are largely forgettable, quickly fall into archetypes, and play out their roles without much room for nuance. A couple of later moments get some emotional weight thanks to a strong score from Undertale creator Toby Fox and longtime Pokemon composer Hitomi Sato, but characters are too shallow to hold up their end of the bargain, and the town doesn't have enough going on to make it worth exploring beyond where quests tell you to go.

Little Town Hero finds some success in avoiding some of the complex systems and tedious menus that can bog down other card games and RPGs, but it ends up suffering for it. Keeping your card options limited allows you to approach encounters with clever instead of relying on luck of the draw, but the deck size is too limited to break the mounting doldrum of subsequent fights. And while I did get to know this town pretty well, that's because of how small and suffocating it feels as it refuses to push outside its own boundaries.

The PlayStation 5 is confirmed to be launching in the holiday season 2020. And while 2020 is already stacked with a lineup of promising games in the months before the next generation of consoles arrives, that also likely means a launch lineup with some new exciting games.

With that in mind, while we’ve already asked you what unannounced PlayStation game sequel you’d like to see for PS5, we also know that the PS5 launch will likely include a wide swath of familiar and new, games meant to give us a reason to shell out hundreds of dollars for new equipment in a year that already promises so many potentially stellar games for PS4.

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Jonah Hill has reportedly passed on joining the cast of The Batman.

According to Deadline, the Oscar-nominated Wolf of Wall Street and Moneyball actor turned down a villain role in the Matt Reeves-directed film. Hill had been up for the role of either Penguin or Riddler, but the production has now moved on to look at other contenders for those roles. (TheWrap claims the role Hill was up for was the Riddler.)

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Netflix says that the third season of Stranger Things set a views record for the streaming service. According to the video streaming giant, the latest season of the popular supernatural drama was view by more than 60 million households.

According to Netflix’s latest quarterly earnings report, the third season of Stranger Things achieved over 64 million views in four weeks. According to the company, this makes the show’s third season the most-viewed season of the show.

Furthermore, THR reports this figure easily surpasses the viewership for previously Netflix shows. However, it’s important to note that Netflix doesn’t freely reveal viewership numbers for its shows or movies unless it chooses to. But based on every previously released viewership data, the latest season of Stranger Things easily sits at the top.

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A beloved Pikachu design is making its way into Pokemon Sword and Shield through a Gigantamax transformation, a special kind form that gives certain Pokemon a unique design and move. Sure, Gigantamax forms for Charizard, Eevee, and Meowth were also revealed, but we're just here for Pikachu. Why? Because it's fat Pikachu.

Watch the new Pokemon Sword and Shield trailer below; the chonkster Pikachu appears at the 00:23 mark:

This wonderfully nostalgic design for Gigantamax Pikachu is far closer to how the iconic Pokemon looked at the start of the series. As shown in the art on the 1999 calendar and the two figures from the late 90s below, Pikachu took on more of a round mouse shape rather than its more slender form we see today. Pikachu also has a much longer, thinner tail which is also featured in its Gigantamax form.

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Another DC Comics icon will make their Arrowverse debut during the Crisis on Infinite Earths crossover. IGN can exclusively reveal that Detective Jim Corrigan, human host of the powerful cosmic entity known as the Spectre, will appear in the crossover.

The CW has cast Stephen Lobo (Continuum, Supernatural) as Jim Corrigan. The network isn't confirming whether The Spectre himself will appear, though given the character's role in the original Crisis on Infinite Earths comic, that seems a distinct possibility.

Photo credit: Dennys Ilic

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Full spoilers follow for Joker.

You smell ’80s Gotham before you see it. The Joaquin Phoenix Joker movie opens with a radio report of streets piled high with waste, the result of a garbage strike that has affected everyone in the city. Some, though, are hit by the stink sooner than others.

The rarefied air up in the balcony of Wayne Hall must be cleaner. In the television interviews that punctuate his mayoral campaign, Thomas Wayne draws a hard line between those who make something of themselves, and those he dubs “clowns.” It’s a comforting perspective for the privileged of Gotham - the idea that there’s a karmic reason for the suffering endured by those they step over in the street.

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Full spoilers for the ending of Netflix's Fractured below!

Social media is abuzz with talk of director Brad Anderson's new film Fractured, which is pretty impressive considering it debuted on Netflix the same day as El Camino: A Breaking Bad Story. But between its suspenseful premise and dramatic ending, Fractured is basically 2019's answer to Bird Box.

Read on for a breakdown of what exactly happens at the end of Fractured and why viewers are feeling so taken aback by its ending.

Fractured Ending Explained

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Update:

IGN reached out to Blizzard for further clarification on American University’s ban. We asked why it took a week for Blizzard to announce a punishment for the college team for breaking a rule, whereas Blitzchung was punished almost immediately afterward.

While Blizzard didn’t directly address this question, a spokesperson sent over the following response:

"Thanks for reaching out. We strongly encourage everyone in our community to share their viewpoints in the many places available to express themselves. However, our official broadcast needs to be about the game and the competition, and to be a place where all are welcome. If we allow the introduction of personal views about sensitive issues into the channel, it ceases to be what it’s meant for – esports. We have rules in place to support this, to which these competitors, as well as others at all levels, have agreed. They knowingly broke those rules and we’ve suspended them from Hearthstone esports for six months. The ruling is available here."

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