As the second season of The Mandalorian reaches its halfway point, a new Fortnite leak has suggested that the eponymous bounty hunter will be available as a premier skin in the Season 5 battle pass.
Earlier this month, a dataminer leaked a collaboration between Fortnite and Disney+, revealing that players who spent money in Fortnite could get a free two-month subscription to Disney+ if they weren’t already subscribed. It’s no surprise then that Fortnite players will be seeing further collaboration with Disney+, with The Mandalorian being the streaming service’s flagship series.
The leaked image shows the Mandalorian front and center, with two unrelated skins behind him. Baby Yoda is also in the image, hovering in his pod slightly behind Mando. The Star Wars character has also appeared in other leaked promotional shots, right alongside the battle pass icon.
Players have speculated that the image could mean a full Star Wars-themed season is coming, similar to the Marvel season that is currently in progress. Others have suggested that the next season will focus more on Mando himself as the season’s pivotal character.
This isn’t the first time Fortnite has seen a big Star Wars collaboration. Infamously, Fortnite was the only place where fans could hear the “Palpatine broadcast” that Star Wars: Rise of Skywalker’s entire plot was based around–meaning Fortnite is basically a part of the official Star Wars canon at this point.
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But HBO Max is not available in other parts of the world, and as such, the superhero movie is going ahead with a theatrical release that begins before the film debuts in America. Warner Bros. has now announced the full international release scheduled for the sequel, and it kicks off on December 16 in Belgium, Bulgaria, Egypt, Estonia, France, Greece, Holland, Iceland, Indonesia, Portugal, South Africa, Switzerland, and the UK.
Then on December 17, the movie will open in places like Brazil, Denmark, Mexico, Singapore, and the United Arab Emirates. Wonder Woman 1984 will premiere in China, Japan, and Spain on December 18, with Germany, Korea, and Austria to follow on December 23. Hungary and Slovenia get the film on Christmas Eve, while the Christmas Day markets include the US, Venezuela, Sweden, Norway, Lithuania, Latvia, Indie, Finland, Colombia, and Canada.
On December 26, Wonder Woman 1984 comes to more markets, including Australia and New Zealand, with other countries to follow later in December and into January. You can see the full international release plans for Wonder Woman 1984 below, as compiled by Variety.
Regarding the move to HBO Max, Warner Media boss Ann Sarnoff said, “As we navigate these unprecedented times, we’ve had to be innovative in keeping our businesses moving forward while continuing to super-serve our fans. We realize that a lot of consumers can’t go back to the movies due to the pandemic, so we also want to give them the option to see Wonder Woman 1984 via our HBO Max platform.”
Unlike the Disney Plus release of Mulan, Warner Bros. will not charge HBO Max subscribers an additional fee to stream Wonder Woman 1984.
Wonder Woman 1984 International Release Plans:
Wednesday, December 16 — Belgium, Bulgaria. Egypt, Estonia, France, Greece, Holland, Iceland, Indonesia, Portugal, South Africa, Switzerland, United Kingdom
Thursday, December 17 — Bolivia, Brazil, Costa Rica, Croatia, Cyprus, Denmark, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Mexico, Middle East, Nicaragua, Panama, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Serbia, Singapore, Slovakia, Taiwan, Thailand, United Arab Emirates
Friday, December 18 — China, East Africa, Japan, Nigeria, Spain, Vietnam
Wednesday, December 23 — Austria, Germany, Korea
Thursday, December 24 — Hungary, Slovenia
Friday, December 25 — Canada, Colombia, Finland, India, Latvia, Lithuania, Norway, Sweden, Venezuela, United States
Saturday, December 26 — Australia, New Zealand
Thursday, December 31 — Argentina
Thursday, January 7 — Ukraine, Uruguay
Friday, January 8 — Philippines
Thursday, January 14 — Azerbaijan, CIS Others, Czech Republic, Kazakhstan, Russia
Friday, January 15 — Romania, Turkey
Thursday, January 21 — Chile, Peru
Friday, January 22 — Poland
Thursday, January 28 — Italy
TBD — Bahrain, Ghana, Israel, Kuwait, Lebanon, Asia – Other, LatAm – Other, Islands – Other
Ahead of the December 25 release of the Monster Hunter movie, players of Monster Hunter World: Iceborne will be able to meet the film’s protagonist and play as her. Artemis, who is voiced by movie actor Milla Jovovich, will join the game on December 4 for two special quests.
Capcom has shared some details, alongside a trailer, which you can watch below.
These Event Quests are called The New World and To Our World, and see Artemis being transported from the “real world” into the world of Monster Hunter. In the first quest, Artemis will fight a Black Diablos in Wildspire Waste, and victory will earn her an armor set from the movie. The second quest will pit her against a Rathalos, and you can unlock the Artemis Layered Armor by defeating it.
Before this update lands, you can score some freebies just by logging in. These items, which are available now, include:
Ancient Potion x30
Dust of Life x30
Golden Egg x10
True Armor Sphere x3
Earplug Jewel+ x1
Monster Hunter World: Iceborne received its final major free update in September, which makes this movie tie-in a nice and unexpected bonus. The next Monster Hunter game coming is the Switch-exclusive Monster Hunter Rise.
One of the most exciting next-generation innovations for Sony’s PS5 is the DualSense controller. Its haptic feedback system and adaptive triggers can be fine-tuned by developers for a variety of purposes to make actions feel more realistic, and the controller has been largely praised by those who have used it. Xbox boss Phil Spencer is among those who are excited by the DualSense.
He said in an interview with The Verge that he applauds Sony for the DualSense controller, and more widely how the company looked to the future and pushed further innovation with it.
“I applaud what they did with the controller, not actually for–well, I shouldn’t say not for the specifics of the controller, but more than just the specifics of the controller,” he said. “I think for all of us in the industry, we should learn from each other and the innovation that we all push on, whether it’s distribution of business model like Game Pass, or controller tech, or the Wii back in the day, which clearly had an impact on us when we went off and did Kinect and Sony did the Move.”
Spencer said he hopes other industry players will look at this new type of innovation and learn and grow from it.
He said he hopes the platform-holders will say, “‘Okay, what’s really going to break out and become a common part of a platform that developers and players are going to look for?’ Or, ‘What is more vertical around a specific scenario on a specific piece of hardware?’ We’re trying to be eyes open on that. For any technology, whether it’s a controller, or any VR, or anything else…”
In Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War, the DualSense controller allows for weapons to feel distinct, and when you’re low on health, you can feel your heartbeat in your hands. Sony’s own PS5 launch title Astro’s Playroom uses the DualSense controller for a variety of exciting and unique purposes, and you can even blow into the controller to spin a fan.
My six-player Destiny 2 fireteam fired away as the Deep Stone Crypt raid boss, the toughest enemy of the Beyond Light expansion, teleported around the arena and roared with rage. We threw everything we had left at the flying monster in a desperate attempt to stave off defeat. Bullets and grenades filled the air as chunks of orbital debris slammed down onto the landscape, threatening to crush us as we scrambled for cover. It was now or never–if we didn’t manage to kill this thing immediately, it would kill us, and we’d be back to the start of the lengthy fight. And we’d sunk more than 12 hours into the raid over the past two days already.
But then: an explosion. The boss twisted in pain and a cheer went up from our crew. Finally, we’d bested the greatest challenge of the new expansion, after hours of struggling to work out the mechanics and suffering death after death to its powerful enemies. It’s moments like this one that keep me coming back to Destiny 2. There’s nothing quite like powering through a Destiny raid, relying on teammates to handle complex roles and cooperate through some of the game’s most creative designs.
Beyond Light provides more of what Destiny 2 is good at: satisfying first-person shooting, a great raid, fascinating places to explore, and a whole lot of punchy guns to try out. It also maintains some of the game’s lingering problems though, like a reliance on repetitive content and time-sucking grinds to arbitrarily raise numbers. To put it simply, Beyond Light is largely more Destiny–if that’s a thing you like, you’ll enjoy it, and if it’s a thing you complain about, you probably won’t.
But the last two years have seen Bungie making changes to Destiny 2, both large and incremental, that are improving the game, deepening its world, and expanding its experiences. Beyond Light is perhaps the best-told, most fleshed-out story developer Bungie has yet put forth in its game. The focus is on characters who have feelings and motivations, whether they’re heroes or villains, which allows them to grow beyond just a collection of voices on the radio yelling at you to go shoot another world-threatening alien. And new additions to the game, like a host of freezing abilities called Stasis, change up gameplay and combat strategies in fun and unexpected ways.
The new expansion takes you to Europa, one of Jupiter’s frozen moons, to uncover secrets about the latest threat invading the solar system. This is a godlike alien force colloquially known as the Darkness, carried on pyramid-shaped ships and collected in angular, metamorphic black artifacts. For the last few seasons of Destiny 2, we’ve been puzzling out what the Darkness has in store for us–while it has invaded (and, lately, vanished) entire celestial bodies like Mars and Mercury, it hasn’t attacked. Instead, the Darkness is offering seductive power. It doesn’t want to kill the superheroic Guardians that players embody–it wants to own them.
Much of the story of Beyond Light concerns characters figuring out how to harness the powers offered by the Darkness in order to combat it. The immediate issue is that Eramis, a member of the alien race known as the Fallen, has gotten hold of Stasis, the Darkness’s power, and is raising an army to wield it. Taking her out is the concern of the first few hours of the story campaign, but that’s mostly a vehicle to getting Stasis into your hands so you can run amok with it.
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Stasis is the real star of Beyond Light, offering a new brand of abilities that require a big rethink of combat strategies. The powers of Stasis debuff enemies, doing things like slowing them down, freezing them solid, or walling them off behind giant ice crystals. Where most abilities and supers in Destiny 2 are dedicated either to doing direct damage to enemies or providing healing to teammates, Stasis adds capabilities for controlling the battlefield, changing the landscape, and altering the odds.
These powers are a nice refresher for Guardian capabilities, since we haven’t seen new subclasses since September 2018’s Forsaken expansion. They feel significantly different from everything else already available, pushing you to figure out how to best use them against enemies and develop creative solutions to avoid getting frozen and shattered into tiny pieces by opponents. As Stasis becomes a more regular part of Destiny 2, it’s easy to imagine ways it can be paired with existing abilities and weapons to pave the way for a whole new set of tactics. Stasis also comes with a bunch of customizations you can earn as you play, amping up the effectiveness of some elements of your new capabilities while exacting tolls like drops in character stats. Destiny 2 has come a long way in pushing you to think about how to spec out your characters, and Stasis deepens that system with additional satisfying choices that let you tune your playstyle for specific situations and requirements.
However, much of Beyond Light is Destiny as usual. The quest to get your new Stasis powers, for instance, largely consists of the usual “go here and shoot x number of this baddie” grind. There also continues to be a heavy reliance on bounties, which require completing minor objectives that are mostly about racking up kills with specific weapons or abilities, and which can be a boring slog to get through, especially as you’re battling to unlock the cool new Stasis customization elements.
But while some of the gameplay can be predictable, Europa is an impressive new offering. It’s a big location with varied environments to explore, including frozen wastes, ravaged ruins, a Fallen city, and huge sci-fi facilities. The destination adds dynamic weather for the first time, and while it’s not a drastic change, a blizzard whipping up in the middle of a firefight to kill visibility forces you to change how you play just enough to give Europa a dangerous and shifting feel.
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Bungie mixes in its trademark gorgeous vistas with lots of little crevices to plumb for mysteries, but what makes the new landscape stand out is that so much of Europa feels like the tip of a much larger story iceberg. In the first two weeks of the expansion, portions of that iceberg have been steadily uncovered. The new Europa Strike isn’t just about finding and killing a big enemy; it expands the story both of Eramis in the present as she uses an alien portal for her own ends as well as the shadowy human industrialist, Clovis Bray, who built that portal centuries earlier. Venturing into the depths of the Braytech Exoscience facility doesn’t just give you another venue for gunfights; it reveals the circumstances that created one of Destiny 2’s player races, the robotic Exos, and fills in their story as a tragic, lost people.
Bungie has also gone much further in developing the story you uncover along the way through the expansion. The battle against Eramis is mixed up with Variks, an old Destiny 1 character who has been absent outside of lore text since Destiny 2’s release, and deals with the two characters’ disagreement on how best to serve and protect the scattered Fallen race. Finding and harnessing Stasis expands the story of the Exo Stranger, another Destiny 1 character, and finally sheds light on a bunch of questions that have lingered since the confusing and haphazard Destiny 1 campaign. This expansion tells a coherent story that’s grounded in interactions between characters you’ve spent time with over the years, while reaching into the lore in smart ways to build on the huge Destiny world. You don’t have to have read a ton of lore to understand what’s going on in Beyond Light, but the storytelling will make you want to do so, and reward you with additional nuance for the investment.
We’ve also seen a little bit of new content for the ongoing Season of the Hunt, which shores up the drip-feed nature of the season pass model with some serious story relevance. The season centers on Uldren Sov, one of the major antagonists of the Forsaken expansion–he’s the guy players hunted down to exact revenge on for the murder of Cayde-6, one of Destiny’s biggest personalities. Uldren has been revived as a Guardian, losing the memories of his past life in the process. He sends you on hunts to take down a variety of bosses to earn specific perk and stat rolls on gear, and those activities are brief but engaging diversions that don’t carry the same frustrations (like relying on other, random players) as past short-lived seasonal activities.
While this season, like others, will mostly consist of replaying the same few activities to chase various guns and armor, the simmering conflict of working closely with a guy your character executed makes the Season of the Hunt feel like it’s burgeoning with possibilities. Recent seasons have felt as if they didn’t have been a bit lacking in feeling like they really matter, outside some brief flashes, beyond providing large chunks of busywork, but the character implications of the Season of the Hunt already provide as big a draw to that content as the endless loot chase.
Even after six years, there are still growing pains with Beyond Light and Destiny 2 at large. Bungie has removed a huge swathe of content from Destiny 2 with the expansion, whittling down the number of destinations and activities by “vaulting” them, with a possibility that they could be re-released at some unknown point in the future. Europa’s a big place, but it’s true that there’s altogether less of Destiny 2 today than there was a year ago. That’s not necessarily wholly bad–the game was getting unwieldy, big chunks of it were barely visited by players, and just because you could unlock and use hundreds of guns didn’t mean they were all worth the effort. But for a game that is both built on and hampered by repetition, less content means less variety, and that means things can get stale all the quicker.
Destiny 2 has always felt like it’s being actively molded into the game Bungie envisions, advancing toward a perfect version in the future without ever quite getting there. The last year saw Bungie trying a new approach to worldbuilding, storytelling, and maintaining player engagement with seasonal content, but seasons felt a bit haphazard and unconnected, often spinning their wheels with limited-time diversions while hinting at something better down the line. Beyond Light comes closer to that vision, but it’s a step forward, not a leap. Destiny 2 still struggles with the same cyclical, repetitious core of completing busywork grinds to reach the content you actually want to play, and in some ways, Beyond Light also feels like it’s gesturing at a future point when Destiny 2 will finally become the game it’s always tried to be.
It might be somewhat smaller and more streamlined, but this is also the most alive Destiny 2 has felt, at least since the best days of the Forsaken expansion, and maybe ever. This is the closest we’ve ever been to its story, characters, and lore, and the most we’ve ever seen characters interacting with each other in meaningful ways. Already, we’ve uncovered a bunch of deep-cut, fascinating story beats about characters who have persisted in Destiny since its beginnings. The Deep Stone Crypt raid was an exciting, intense, and inventive challenge, and completing it altered Europa in some significant ways. It not only feels like Guardians are influencing the world of Destiny 2 right now, but because of the constant story underpinning of the dangers of wielding Darkness, that the world is influencing us back.
Beyond Light might not be the biggest expansion, but it does feel like we’ve entered a new chapter in the game’s life, with new priorities and an approach that makes the game more resonant in a way that goes beyond satisfying shooting. On the whole, Destiny 2 might be more of the same than it is different, but what’s the same about it–like its phenomenal raids and tight, satisfying gameplay–is still largely pretty great, and what’s different is mostly making the game all the more worthwhile.
An official PlayStation 5 version of Warframe will launch on November 26, developer Digital Extremes has announced. The upgraded PS5 version of the game has been detailed on the game’s official website, and it sounds like a big update.
Warframe on PS5 will run at 60fps, and support resolutions up to 4K. The visuals will be updated with new dynamic lighting too, and loading times will be cut down across the whole game.
Furthermore, the adaptive triggers on the new DualSense controller will be given a workout by this version of the game. Your weapons will be felt in the triggers, with melee attacks and gunfire being reflected by the controller. Crossplay and save are available, too, so you can continue your PS4 characters’ journey and play with friends who are still on PS4. Unfortunately, PS5 cross-save does not extend to other versions of the game.
Some freebies are coming for PlayStation Warframe players, too. On PS5, the PlayStation Plus Booster Pack V will be available to PS Plus members, featuring the following items:
PS5-themed Obsidian Sedai Syandana
7-Day Affinity Booster
7-Day Credit Booster
100,000 Credits
100 Platinum
There’s also an event for Warframe’s 7th anniversary with PlayStation running until December 2, and players who log into the game on PS4 or PS5 before then will receive the following:
Paracesis Obsidian Skin
Obsidian Monast Sugatra
Fully-built Forma
3-Day Resource Booster
Furthermore, the Azura Excalibur Glyph and the PSIV Color Palette will be available for the massively reduced price of 1 Credit during this period.
In a post on the PlayStation Blog, Digital Extremes boss Sheldon Carter has posted some thoughts on how the studio is “bringing nearly eight years of evolutionary content into the future for PS5.” Carter also points out the cross-generation play between the PS5 and PS4 versions is “a first for Warframe.” It’s a nice read for long-time Warframe fans who have picked up a PS5.
While Warframe will also get an Xbox Series X upgrade, the details and timing for this version have not been announced yet. The game is playable on the system right now through backwards compatibility.
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Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War has had a slightly rocky launch, with an overpowered MP5 weapon and some other weapon balance issues, and as patches ands fixes roll out players have several suggestions for improvements. In one interesting case, a player has encountered a visual glitch on the Cartel map–and other players agree that it represents a big improvement over what’s in the game.
On the game’s subreddit, user CapAustria has shared some screenshots from a session where he encountered a bug on the map, removing bushes from the middle of the map. As CharlieIntel points out, in a game of Domination, this is exactly where Point B sits–and the shrubs have become a popular hiding spot for players.
While these shrubs are likely there for this very purpose, in reality needing to clear each of them for hiding enemies can be annoying. The top comment on the Reddit post seems to reflect many people’s feelings: “That seriously looks so much better.”
Image credit: CapAustria
It’s possible that Treyarch is paying attention. There’s precedent for glitches and bugs to get turned into features in games–it happened with Animal Crossing: New Horizon’s camera mode earlier this year, to give a much less violent example.
Meanwhile, the much-anticipated Nuketown ’84 map is now live, so players can check out Cold War’s take on a Call of Duty classic. Black Ops Cold War received a 7/10 in GameSpot’s review, earning praise for its campaign but some criticism for its multiplayer suite. “Zombies is a good co-op time overall, but multiplayer falls flat, leaving the strong campaign to do most of the heavy lifting,” wrote reviewer Kallie Plagge.
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Secretlab Omega and Titan series gaming chairs on sale for Black Friday 2020.
Secretlab makes some of the best gaming chairs you can buy. This year, it’s running its own Black Friday 2020 sale, offering great deals on its popular Titan and Omega collections. Depending on what you get, you’re looking at up to $100 off some of the best gaming chairs on the market, in a variety of colors and designs.
Need help navigating the online shopping chaos of Black Friday 2020? Check out our Black Friday 2020 guide for a list of the best deals, major retailer store hours and Black Friday ad scans, and more. We also have a list of the best Black Friday gaming chair deals if you’re looking for something more affordable than Secretlab–but when it comes to gaming chairs, Secretlab is probably the most durable, high-quality, and comfortable option you’re gonna be able to find.
Secretlab Black Friday 2020 gaming chair sale
Check out Secretlab’s Black Friday 2020 sale for a full list of everything that’s on sale, plus more details on how to save. For specific deals, check out the discounted prices on Secretlab’s main collections, the Omega and Titan series.
Secretlab’s Omega series of gaming chair is one of its most popular options. It’s the more affordable of the two, between Omega and Titan, and it’s also slightly smaller than the Titan. The Omega is on sale for $350–that’s $70 off its usual asking price of $420 if you’re going for the default Prime 2.0 PU leather upholstery option and one of the Secretlab Originals color options. You can also get $100 off its more expensive Napa leather option. While that one usually costs $750, it’s down to $650–still very expensive, but $100 off is still a great deal if you’re looking for one.
The price can go up a bit more if you’re considering one of the special designs. Some of the Esports Editions skins, like a Cloud9 design, will run you about $380, but you’re still getting a $70 discount off a design that’s usually $450. Not all of Secretlab’s designs are available with this sale. Some are out of stock and many in the Special Editions section aren’t discounted at all, but they’re all clearly marked on the Omega Series page, so head over to Secretlab and find one you like! Omega series chairs also come with a memory foam headrest pillow and lumbar pillow.
Secretlab’s Titan series of gaming chair is its higher-end option, but it’s also slightly bigger than the Omega series chairs. The Titan is on sale for $390, which is $70 off the usual $460 asking price, unless you go for the more expensive Napa leather option, which is $700–again, $100 down from the usual $800.
Same as the Omega series, all of the Secretlab Originals color options are the same price, but once you get into Esports Editions skins and some of the Special Edition skins (the ones that are on sale, at least), the price spikes to $420–still $70 off the standard prices. Titan series chairs also come with a memory foam headrest pillow.
Secretlab Omega series vs. Titan series gaming chair differences
What’s the difference between the Secretlab Omega series and Titan series gaming chairs? The biggest difference, besides price, is size. Both the Omega and Titan series are made with the same high-quality upholstery materials and can be customized with the same set of special designs, but the size and shape differ slightly.
Secretlab Omega and Titan series gaming chair differences.
The Omega series is Secretlab’s “small” or “medium” gaming chair line. It’s recommended for people under 5’11” inches tall and under 240 lbs. Its backrest is 31.5″ inches tall, with a seat depth of 19.3″ inches and a width of 14″ inches, not including the raised sides, which would bring it to a total width of 22″ inches. You can find a full breakdown of its dimensions and specifications on the Secretlab Omega series product page.
The Titan series is Secretlab’s “large” gaming chair line. It’s recommended for people between 5’9″ and 6’7″ inches tall and up to 290 lbs. Its backrest is 33″ inches tall, with a seat depth of 19.7″ inches and a total width of 20.5″ inches. The Titan series doesn’t have high raised sides around the seat like Omega chairs. Its backrest is also more dramatically curved. Check the Secretlab Titan series product page for a more detailed breakdown of dimensions and specifications.
Unfortunately, the largest chair Secretlab offers, the Titan XL, does not appear to be featured at all in its Black Friday sale.
More great gaming chair options
If Secretlab is a little too much for your budget, we have a list of the best affordable gaming chairs. Our guide also breaks down the most important things to look for in a gaming chair. If you’re in the market for a gaming chair this holiday season, we recommend giving it a read before you make your decision!
Looking for more great Black Friday deals? Check out some of our roundups and guides below.
Black Friday 2020 is just around the corner now, and if you’re looking to pick up some great games on the cheap this year, you’ll have lots of options to choose from. Many retailers are offering some especially good video game deals during their respective Black Friday sales, including on some first-party Nintendo Switch titles like Yoshi’s Crafted World.
“Yoshi’s Crafted World is at its best when it’s relaxing and pleasant. The 2D-to-3D level design keeps you curious while the go-at-your-own-pace approach keeps the pressure off and leaves you to appreciate the small, imaginative details,” we wrote in our Yoshi’s Crafted World review. “Its most interesting ideas never evolve past their first introductions and are frequently confined to one or two levels, but individually, those levels both reward your curiosity and your willingness to slow down and look at what’s around you–and it’s those simple pleasures that provide the most joy.”
The adorable Astro’s Playroom may have stolen people’s hearts at the launch of the PlayStation 5 (no doubt in part thanks to it coming along for free), but any 3D platformer fan would do well to not leave Sackboy: A Big Adventure locked in the toybox. This spin-off (which is available on PS4 as well) is relentlessly charming, bringing creative level ideas to a familiar format with a focus on co-op play, even if it lacks the same precision and depth of the most-loved games in the genre.
While Sackboy may have been cut from the cloth of the LittleBigPlanet games before it, A Big Adventure feels far closer to the likes of Super Mario 3D World, both in structure and design. Levels are generally wide-pathed, isometric dioramas for you and up to three friends to run all over, grabbing point bubbles, beating up baddies, and hunting for collectibles as you do. It also drops the level editor or community sharing that have been iconic to the LittleBigPlanet series, instead focusing on telling a simple story about Sackboy trying to save Craftworld from the evil Vex.
The story is a cute if generic tale, but Sackboy’s sense of style and presentation is intoxicating – a nonstop slew of fun, feel-good stages made out of cardboard cutouts and other household objects. It’s all just so dang charming, and it was only the occasional frustration of a missed jump caused by an odd camera angle or unexpected landing behavior that stopped me from smiling the whole time. World themes range from yeti-filled temples to futuristic rocket labs that have you walking around on giant, interactive touchscreens, but they all share enough stylistic elements to gel into an eclectic but cohesive whole.
A huge part of their charm comes from Sackboy’s incredible music. That includes its original score, clever remixes and reworkings of recognizable classics (you might find yourself unexpectedly noticing the melody of Madonna’s Material Girl in the middle of an otherwise orchestral track), as well as its handful of explicitly music-centered levels. The latter reminded me of similar stages in Rayman Legends, having you jump and fight to the beat of songs like Mark Ronson’s Uptown Funk – although, while they are undoubtedly a blast, these levels not being on rails like Rayman’s makes their use of those songs a little more repetitive if you’re taking your time to collect everything.
Most stages in Sackboy are relatively easy to get to the end of, but can be tricker to 100% – that includes finding all the cosmetic items, completing it without dying, getting enough points for a gold medal, and collecting all of the Dreamer Orbs hidden throughout (which are used to lightly gate off new levels as you progress). Thanks to a generous life and checkpoint system, I only outright failed a level once in my first run of the campaign, but I also rarely got everything possible on that first attempt. That made Sackboy feel accessible to complete while still having plenty to entice me back for repeat attempts. Later levels and time trials also amp up the difficulty a little bit, but still in a way where that challenge is generally there if you want it and optional if you don’t.
Not to overcompare, but the structure here really does feel derivative of Super Mario 3D World, and Nintendo’s platformer playbook in general. That’s not inherently a bad thing (it’s a good playbook!), but when put so directly in competition with a game like that, the spots where Sackboy falls short can’t help but stand out – specifically, the feel and depth of its platforming. This is undoubtedly a fun platformer, but its jumping can definitely be unexpectedly imprecise at times, especially when trying to bounce on enemy heads or certain objects. The little flutter you can do to stay in the air after a jump feels about half as long as I expect it to be, and Sackboy lacks additional techniques that could offer more nuance to his moveset like Mario has – you can extend your jump distance by using a punch and a roll midair, but that’s about it in terms of getting creative with movement options.
Instead, what keeps the platforming fun is how often levels will shake things up and introduce new mechanics. One level might be a straightforward platformer, while another will have you herding adorable creatures into a pen, and another still will have you dodging spotlights while jumping from bubbles suspended in the air. Sackboy also swaps the camera perspective frequently, moving from isometric to side-scrolling to top-down as needed. One of my favorite levels has you riding a deep sea treasure trawler, with Dreamer Orbs earned by frantically jumping off of it to scavenge gold objects and bring them back to the ship in time.
Some levels will also introduce cool little power-ups that can alter the way you move or fight. Those include a boomerang, a set of hoverboots with a laser gun, and a grappling hook you can use to swing. My personal favorite was actually simpler than all those, though: just some yellow gunk that would get on your feet and let you walk on walls – not so flashy, but the way certain levels use that mechanic to hide collectibles or change how you interact with obstacles is very cool. None of these powers outright fix that fuzzy, imprecise feeling I got at times, but they make stages clever enough that I generally didn’t mind it (apart from during some of the harder stuff late in the campaign).
Sackboy’s levels are made even better when played co-op, and that’s not just because playing games with friends is fun – co-op can make a lot of games “better” without actually doing much, but these stages have been intentionally designed to be more enjoyable with more people. Apart from a few optional, co-op only levels, the entire campaign can be played solo and still be a fun time (and you’ll probably want to play the time trials that way), but adding in others lets you take advantage of each stage’s multiple paths full of collectibles. While slowing down and retracing your steps to nab them all alone can be tedious, they ensure everyone has more exciting stuff to collect when on a team. There’s also a bit of co-opetition for who can get the highest score, and of course there’s real value in the joy of hitching a ride on top of a rolling friend only to then pick them up and mercilessly throw them off a cliff for no reason.
On that note, it’s a real shame that Sackboy doesn’t support online co-op at launch. That’s reportedly coming before the end of the year in a free patch (and I was able to at least simulate online co-op using the PS5’s limited but fairly impressive Share Play option), but it still feels like a crucial missing feature for a game this inherently about playing with others. Thankfully, the local co-op that is here at least works great, allowing players to drop in or out even mid-level and giving each profile their own inventory of costumes to collect and customize.
