Over the last five years or so, handheld gaming PCs have become one of my favorite ways to play games. And, it helps that they’ve been getting better pretty much every year, thanks both to more powerful hardware – shout out to the Intel Arc G3 Extreme – and both Microsoft and Valve improving their respective operating systems.
If I was able to totally ignore costs, I’d straight up just say that the handhelds that have come out in the last year are incredible, almost across the board. The Xbox Ally X brought a controller-friendly UI to Windows for the first time and the MSI Claw 8 EX AI+, thanks to its incredible innards, is able to play games at higher than minimum settings with a framerate that doesn’t give me motion sickness.
But I...
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Maybe it’s the excitement of knowing we’re about to see a whole load of GTA 6 soon, or maybe it was just another weekend where it felt too hot to move, but I decided to boot up Grand Theft Auto 4 for the first time in 18 years. This may not surprise many of you, but I’m here to tell you that it’s still very fun. Niko still rules. I love the lived-in feel of Liberty City. I even really enjoy the driving — somewhat controversial, I know. What I’m trying to say is: GTA 4 is still good, innit.
IGN gave GTA 4 a 10 way back in the day (I didn’t review it; I was still in school at the time), and, while I may not agree with it being a full-fledged masterpiece, there’s still plenty to admire. I’m not going to give it a full re-appraisal here...
Jared Bush, chief creative officer of Walt Disney Animation Studios, spoke about the possibility of a Kingdom Hearts feature film, and he didn’t rule out the idea.
Kingdom Hearts fans are on top of the world after footage of the fourth game was shown off at D23. Sora and the gang are back to fight the heartless, which are wreaking havoc in the Land of the Dead. Coco’s universe is an explorable world in Kingdom Hearts IV, and Sora even gets a keyblade themed after Héctor's Guitar, along with some calavera facepaint to match.
A Kingdom Hearts animated series was also announced at the event, coming to Disney+ on an as-yet undetermined date. With these two big reveals in mind, IGN’s Jeffrey Vega quizzed Walt Disney Animation Studios’...
Big Kingdom Hearts news here at D23, with a new trailer for Kingdom Hearts 4, a late 2027 release window, and — surprise! — a Disney+ anime series.
The new trailer shows the addition of Pixar's Coco. Also at D23, Disney set a November 2029 release for Coco 2.
As for the Kingdom Hearts Disney+ anime, it's developed with creator Tetsuya Nomura and Square Enix, and reimagines the video game franchise with a brand-new story "that will expand on the universe of Kingdom Hearts while celebrating the characters that have captured the hearts of millions of fans around the world."
“Kingdom Hearts has captivated gamers everywhere with its unique blend of adventure and imagination,” said Ayo Davis, president, Disney Kids & Family. “There’s...
The Simpsons: Hit & Run "is coming back in some form," according to series creator Matt Groening.
Yes, at least as far as the mind behind Springfield and the Simpson family is concerned, Vivendi Games and Radical Entertainment's classic 2000s video game spinoff will finally soon let players get behind the wheel again. He shared his comments during a The Simpsons panel at Disney fan event D23 2026, but it sounds like, maybe, he should have pumped the brakes when it came to any announcements for The Simpsons: Hit & Run.
"I think the original game is coming back in some form," Groening said (via Empire).
Just as Groening let it slip that the Grand Theft Auto-inspired game was coming back, current series showrunner Matt Selman stepped...
The original Toy Story 3 video game will soon be delisted from the digital Xbox store ahead of the launch of its new remaster in October.
The store page for 2010's unlikely classic has recently been updated with messaging confirming it will be pulled starting September 29, 2026, as shared by TrueAchievements. It means the Pixar video game will no longer be available for purchase at its $9.99 price tag on Xbox One and Xbox Series X | S after that date, though those who already own the game will still be able to play it.
You can probably guess why Toy Story 3 is being delisted; a remaster is right around the corner. Come October 15, a little more than two weeks after the original is delisted, Atari and Digital Eclipse will release Toy...
It’s somewhat sobering to think that the Mafia franchise is nearly a quarter of a century old. Many of the people who make the games have been working on it for even longer. What began life in 2002 with the release of Illusion Softworks’ Mafia has become a significant franchise for publisher 2K. And, like most other series of similar vintage, Mafia has seen its ups and downs. But it is still alive and kicking, even now, 25 years later.
Today, August 14, 2K releases Mafia: The Omertà Collection, which includes Mafia: The Old Country Definitive Edition, Mafia: Definitive Edition, Mafia 2: Definitive Edition, and Mafia 3: Definitive Edition. There’s also a free update for Mafia: Definitive Edition on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X and S...
Resonants are the biggest threats that Control Resonant has to offer. The big bosses at the centre of the game’s corrupted New York play a massive role in Remedy’s latest story, as well as the world around them. We’ll get into that, and much more about how killing them might make your life harder in our next IGN First drop. For more on the game, you can check out the exclusive Metro Fault mission gameplay we revealed last week, as well as a deep dive into Control Resonant’s combat system and the philosophy behind it.
For now, it’s time to watch Dylan in action as he takes on the Central Resonant, a giant, fiery monster that loves to turn the floor into lava and spurt bursts of magma in your direction, as well as a little bit of run-up...
In a totalitarian state, you play an observer who watches your neighbors in a strange city called Z. This is the premise behind The Watcher (aptly named!), which is in development for PC. Check out the first trailer above and the first screenshots in the gallery below.
The developer, indie studio Yesterday's Sandwich, describes The Watcher like this: "The Watcher is a surveillance simulator set in a psychological thriller world. You play an unknown observer watching the residents of an apartment building across the street, in the strange city of Z, part of the totalitarian State of Nodia. It will remind you of Don't Feed the Monkeys and Orwell in terms of story and some game mechanics. But we've taken it further."
Be sure to wishlist...
Xbox is trying something new with the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 beta, as the company has announced this month's pre-release tests will include a single-player campaign mission for the first time.
Activision's best-selling first-person shooter franchise is no stranger to beta tests. The series has long relied on similar testing methods to get early feedback (and push pre-orders) ahead of launch, but while every installment thus far has focused on multiplayer offerings, this year's Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 beta is changing things up with early access to a single-player campaign mission called "Entrenched."
Xbox CEO announced the move herself with an X/Twitter post, confirming that, in addition to a host of multiplayer modes...
Korea-based developer Mayfly is developing Project Revenant, a unique 2D sidescrolling action game for PC where you'll need to use your mouse to specifically target enemies in order to hit them. No spray-and-pray here! Watch the new trailer above and check out almost two dozen gameplay screenshots in the gallery below.
"This is not a game where you can spray bullets and hope for the best," the developers said. "To survive, you must master the unique combat system known as 'Precision Aiming,' where only enemies directly under your cursor will take damage. This is not a game where you can spray bullets and hope for the best. You’ll need to carefully analyze each enemy’s position and attack pattern, then strike with accuracy. Headshot an...
This is an IGN opinion piece from Ryan McCaffrey, who worked at Official Xbox Magazine from 2002-2012 during the original Xbox and Xbox 360 era before joining IGN, where he remains “the Xbox guy.” In the run-up to Xbox’s 25th anniversary, he’ll be sharing his memories from the platform’s first quarter-century.
Inside. Holy shit. That’s still the first thing that comes to mind when I think about that game. It has now been 10 years since it was released… as an Xbox exclusive. I expect most people probably don’t remember this, but Inside was, for a brief few days in late June/early July 2016, only available on Xbox One. It then released the following week on PC, but it would be almost two months until it arrived on PS4 at the end of...
Kingdom Hearts is one of nine billion-dollar franchises Disney has under its video game banner.
The news comes ahead of a hotly anticipated panel at D23, where Disney is expected to talk about Kingdom Hearts 4.
In a blog post, Disney said its Disney Games Group portfolio “spans nine billion-dollar franchises including Kingdom Hearts and Marvel Strike Force.” More than half of these billion-dollar franchises have come out in the last 12 years.
Disney games have driven an estimated $3.5 billion in consumer spend annually for the past four years — and crossed $4 billion this past fiscal year, Disney said. That includes all Marvel games, all Star Wars games, indeed all games based on any Disney IP, of which there are many.
Upcoming...
Over the next few months, I’m going to be taking a look back at each of the core Grand Theft Auto games and replaying them in the lead-up to the arrival of Grand Theft Auto 6. What we’ll be putting together won’t be traditional re-reviews, and they won’t carry IGN’s typical score out of 10, because it really wouldn’t be at all fair to simply pick apart old games published multiple hardware generations ago and make them sweat under the harsher standards of 2026. What we will be doing, however, is re-examining what made each GTA remarkable upon the time of its release, digging into what they achieved and the legacies they established, and rediscovering how much fun each of them remain today. We’ll also be identifying both the parts of the...
We're rapidly racing towards the holidays (I know it's only August, but in the video game world, "Fall" starts in earnest in August), and that means we've got a ton of big games coming our way over the next few months. Most of them aren't named Grand Theft Auto 6, even! And so we thought we'd start a new weekly roundup of game preview coverage on IGN in case you missed anything over the course of the week. Some heavy hitters stepped up to the plate this week: Marvel's Wolverine, Star Wars: Zero Company, Fire Emblem: Fortune's Weave, and Job Simulator: Human Relations. Be sure to click through for the full previews of each game below, and buckle up – it's going to be one heck of a sprint to 2026's finish line in the video game world...
Cast your mind back to November 2011, and two big fantasy games based on established IPs came out pretty much at the same time: Bethesda’s The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, which went on to sell over 65 million copies, and Snowblind Studios’ The Lord of the Rings: War in the North, which failed commercially.
In retrospect, it was perhaps unwise for publisher Warner Bros. to release The Lord of the Rings: War in the North in the same week as Skyrim, given the extreme hype Bethesda’s behemoth enjoyed ahead of launch. But that’s exactly what Warner Bros. did — despite, it seems, the advice not to do so that it received from at least one high-ranking developer it had on its books.
Christian Allen was the design director on the WB Games Seattle...
Xbox's separation from Compulsion Games – one of four studios it spun out independently during the recent Xbox "reset" amidst thousands of layoffs – appears to be complete, as the developer itself is now listed as the publisher of 2025's award-winning South of Midnight on Steam instead of Xbox Game Studios. The change was first pointed out by indie developer Michael Klamerus on Bluesky. (Hat tip to IGN Discord member Tommy for flagging it to us.)
Interestingly, Xbox Game Studios is still listed as the publisher of Double Fine's Psychonauts 2 on Steam despite the San Francisco game developer also becoming independent after Xbox's recent sweeping changes. The same is also currently true for Undead Labs' State of Decay 3 and Ninja...
Netflix is shuttering its Los Angeles-based game studio Night School, best known for side-scrolling psychological thrillers Oxenfree and Oxenfree 2: Lost Signals.
The streamer is also shutting down Moonloot, its game studio based in Helsinki, Finland, which has not yet released any titles but was developing an unannounced life-sim project.
Speaking with GameFile, a Netflix spokesperson confirmed the company still intends to release games on its platform, saying this latest move was an effort to streamline these efforts.
“We see an opportunity to be more focused in our execution, so we are making organizational changes to the business to match those priorities,” the spokesperson said. “We are incredibly grateful to the talented...
I remember where I was the first time my friends and I beat Andross in Star Fox 64. We’d been trading controllers all day, but Brian was the one who pulled it off. I remember the light streaming through the big windows of his media room, the way it flanked his TV. I remember the way we cheered. I was eight years old. I also remember introducing it to my then-girlfriend-now-wife more than a decade later, and I remember watching my friends play through it for the first time earlier this year. Normally, I try not to compare one piece of art to another when I’m writing a review. It’s bad practice and poor criticism. But Wild Blue Skies invites nostalgic comparisons like this at every turn, and is lesser for them. It often pulls directly...
One of the creators of Halo has issued a few choice words for Xbox’s latest remake of Combat Evolved, specifically the ring we see in the main menu and the lack of PvP.
Marcus Lehto was one of the key people behind the creation of Halo at Bungie, and while he left the studio a long time ago, he is still a popular figure among fans of the first-person shooter franchise. So when Lehto took aim at a Halo ring in the recently released Halo: Campaign Evolved, fans took notice.
“While Forerunner tech was metal (not stone) it was also ancient, vast, alive, and a tomb to the horrors that lurked within,” he began in a series of tweets on X. “It had seen hundreds of millennia of conflict. Yet the game shows it as shiny metal that looks like it...
Magic Design Studios, the developer behind 2022's excellent Have a Nice Death, has revealed its newest project, called Nautus. It's double-sided exploration game, where things are cozy and comfortable on the island surface, but when you take your upgradeable and customizable submarine below the water, things get far more mysterious. It's playable solo or in four-player co-op, and it's in development for PC.
The team describes Nautus's setup like this: "After getting an unsettling radio message from your uncle you’ll go out on an adventure, where you arrive at the remote N.A.U.T.U.S. research station only to find the local scientists have lost their memories and developed a paralyzing phobia of the ocean. As the only one brave enough to...
Here's a first look at gameplay footage from Game of Thrones: War for Westeros, the upcoming real-time strategy title that lets you conqueror the Seven Kingdoms on your own terms.
Want a different ending to Game of Thrones? You're not alone, and happily you don't need to be when playing War for Westeros either — as you can capture the Iron Throne solo with a different or against others in multiplayer.
Today's glimpse shows a horde of soldiers dressed in red and holding Lannister banners, charging forward into battle. But oh, what's this? A gigantic shadow of a dragon flying overhead? I wonder what will happen next! Ah well, it is barbecue season.
Previous teases have confirmed that many of the characters and houses you'd expect will...
Releasing recently on August 11, Insight Editions' Call of Duty Black Ops Zombies: The Art of Treyarch is topping several best-seller charts at Amazon right now.
It's even appeared at #2 in the comic charts, most surprisingly, despite it being an art book and not a graphic novel, only behind the latest issue of Absolute Batman.
Besides that, it's now available for $46.60, and 7% off its MSRP of $49.99. It's not the biggest discount in the world, but it's still notable for a fairly new release.
I'm sure many of us still fondly look back on the glory days of CoD: Zombies, and do have some sense of wistful nostalgia for it. Well, this art book fully engages your nostalgia, that's for sure.
"The Art of Treyarch" takes the reader...
Creative Assembly’s Total War: Warhammer 3 will soon get the biggest piece of DLC in the series’ 10-year history, with Lords of the End Times due out on September 24.
This massive expansion for the strategy game set in Games Workshop’s fantasy universe adds four new Legendary Lords as well as loads of new units. In a first for the series, any purchase of the DLC content grants standalone access to the Immortal Empires campaign (this means you don’t need to own any Total War: Warhammer game to play), and the expansion launches alongside a major free update featuring Vampire Queen Neferata.
Each new Legendary Lord represents a brand-new strategic gameplay experience inspired by Warhammer lore, Creative Assembly said.
Total War...
This is an IGN opinion piece from Ryan McCaffrey, who worked at Official Xbox Magazine from 2002-2012 during the original Xbox and Xbox 360 era before joining IGN, where he remains “the Xbox guy.” In the run-up to Xbox’s 25th anniversary, he’ll be sharing his memories from the platform’s first quarter-century.
Not every band hits it big with their first record. Sometimes it takes an extra album or two for the right storm of creativity to create lightning in a bottle. So too is this the case with video game development studios. Treyarch is one notable example: it was best known for making mostly mediocre licensed superhero games (ironic, given the subject matter of this column) before it broke out big as Infinity Ward’s partner on...
Embracer group has offered updates on a number of its upcoming video games, narrowing some release windows for big titles.
Tomb Raider: Catalyst, the next Kingdom Come game from Warhorse, and Darksiders 4 are all due out during the 2028 financial year, Embracer Group CEO, Phil Rogers, said. That means — as it stands now, we all know how video game development can go — all three high-profile games will be released by April 2028, as Embracer’s financial year ends on March 31. But not before April 1, 2027, when the next financial year begins.
Speaking of this financial year, Metro 2039 and Tomb Raider: Legacy of Atlantis are both due out in February 2027, and had confirmed release dates already. If you're wondering, Legacy of Atlantis is...
Earlier this week, UK studio Kinetic Games (of Phasmophobia fame) showcased the first batch of titles to be released under their new indie publishing arm, Kinetic Publishing. From a whimsical wizarding life-sim to a metroidvania that takes place on the back of a giant snail (!), here’s a breakdown of what was revealed.
Contact Protocol
Choices, paperwork, torpedoes and teabags – that’s how the dev team behind Contact Protocol describe their game, but this sci-fi workplace sim has a lot more going on beneath the surface.
You play as the security officer aboard PALE HORSE, a vessel owned by Galileo Corporation, which is heading to Jupiter's biggest moon. In this reality, humanity has spread throughout the solar system and PALE HORSE is...
This is an IGN opinion piece from writer Jeremy Peel, who had played over 200 hours of 'regular' Marathon before trying out the new experimental Vault Breaker PvE mode, which is live until August 18.
The vault’s door rolls back with a yelping alarm, as if the very act of opening comes as a shock after a century of stillness and silence. Its stalactite-strewn staging area is home to trolleys laden with toolboxes – a suggestion that this place once knew human hands. But further in, the walkways narrow to crawlspaces walled by thick pipes and electrical cabling – the domain of only the most unfortunate engineers aboard the UESC Marathon. Vents coat the floor in frost, and a simple sign warns staff to ‘WORK IN PAIRS, LEAVE IN PAIRS’...
For Phantom Blade Zero, the team at developer S-Game is clearly pulling out all the stops in order to bring its bold and exciting vision for kungfupunk to life. By drafting in action movie megastar and martial arts master Donnie Yen to serve as co-producer on its wuxia-inspired action RPG, the Chinese developer is ensuring that every kick, punch, and scintillating sword-slice is delivered with the utmost authenticity and heart-stopping intensity.
In 2025, I was fortunate enough to be invited over to S-Game’s Shanghai studio to get an insight into its groundbreaking approach to kung fu motion capture, and to speak with both creative director Soulframe Liang and Donnie Yen himself. It was genuinely spectacular to see Donnie’s team in...
The boss of Rideshare Stimulator publisher Saber Interactive has confirmed that an AI label will be added to the game's Steam page, following public criticism.
Speaking to IGN, Saber CEO Matthew Karch said that the publisher wasn't "shying away" from the game's AI-powered features, which include generative speech and text in a secondary mode. "Once it's finalized we will update the Steam page," he added.
"In Rideshare we added an unrelated experimental mode to the game to play around with these concepts," Karch told us, referencing its Free Ride mode which features an "infinite" number of characters. "It's not the core experience. And even in this case it required us adding two writers and multiple coders to work with AI tools to try...