The first still for the upcoming Hellboy reboot staring David Harbour has officially arrived.
Premiered by Empire, this exclusive first look gives us a glimpse at a hornless Hellboy running down a hallway with his Right Hand of Doom. This image and more will be included in Empire Magazine’s January 2019 issue, complete with an interview with the film’s director, Neil Marshall.
Credit: Empire, Lionsgate.
Rico Rodriguez has got himself an improved grappling hook, able to fire out combos of balloons, rockets and retractors with impunity.
We owed it to him, and ourselves, to try and make something really weird with all that, so allow Rory to take you (and Gav) through his most outlandish creations.
Cyber Monday is turning out to be a good time to stock up on Nintendo Switch consoles and gear, and one of the most popular accessories has gotten its biggest discount yet. The Pro Controller, usually priced at $70, is just over fifty bucks for the retail holiday.
The price applies across both Amazon and Target. Both stores list the controller at $60, but apply an extra discount at checkout bringing it down to $51. The extra Target discount actually applies store-wide, as the store is offering an additional 15% off of everything with some exceptions. One such exception is to Xbox One hardware.
Cyber Monday has also brought good deals on hardware and games. GameStop is offering a Switch with a $50 gift card, while Best Buy is offering a $35 eShop card. Nintendo’s eShop Cyber Monday sale is offering lots of discounts on digital purchases. And to make use of all those digital games, you may want to expand your system’s memory with a cheap MicroSD card. You can check out our full list of Cyber Monday Nintendo Switch deals for more details.
Other notable deals include deep discounts on recent games like Hitman 2 and Fallout 76, as well as discounts across a wide range of games and movies. Read our Cyber Monday 2018 roundups for full details on all the deals you can snag.
Rockstar has finally delivered details on Red Dead Redemption 2‘s online mode, revealing when it’s going to kick off. Shortly after launch, publisher Take-Two confirmed Red Dead Redemption 2 had shipped 17 million copies, which means there’s going to be a fair few people interested in taking their outlaw antics online into a multiplayer environment. To ensure Red Dead Online’s servers don’t completely buckle under the weight of the entire community, access to the beta is being given to gradually.
When you’re able to play the beta depends on the version of the game you have or when you actually started playing the game. The first group of people that will be able to play the game are those that purchased the Ultimate Edition. Anyone who has that version will be able to jump into the beta from November 27 at 8:30 AM ET / 5:30 AM PST / 1:30 PM GMT / 12:30 AM AEDT (November 28).
The next group of people to be given access is anyone who played the game on October 26 (that’s Red Dead Redemption 2’s launch day). If you’re one of those people, you can head online on November 28. If you played the game between October 26 and October 29–according to Rockstar’s data–you’ll be able to join the fun from November 29.
Finally, public access to Red Dead Online will be available to anyone that owns Red Dead Redemption 2 from November 30. This rollout method will help Rockstar “ease into the beta and to mitigate major issues.” The studio is being very candid about potential performance issues, saying that the beta is “the first step in what will be a continually expanding and dynamic world.”
As such, Rockstar is expecting the “inevitable turbulence of launching any online experience of this size and scale” and it is asking the Red Dead Redemption 2 community to report any issues and share their feedback so that Rockstar can shape the experience with them in mind. You can find out more about Red Dead Online here.
Red Dead Redemption 2 earned a 9/10 in GameSpot’s review, with Kallie Plagge saying it “is an excellent prequel, but it’s also an emotional, thought-provoking story in its own right, and it’s a world that is hard to leave when it’s done.”
“While Red Dead Redemption was mostly focused on John Marston’s story, Red Dead 2 is about the entire Van der Linde gang–as a community, as an idea, and as the death rattle of the Wild West. It is about Arthur, too, but as the lens through which you view the gang, his very personal, very messy story supports a larger tale.” Read our full Red Dead Redemption 2 review for a more in-depth analysis of the game.
Red Dead Redemption 2‘s online beta will be available on PS4 and Xbox One from November 27, developer Rockstar Games has announced. As detailed on its website, Rockstar plans to roll out access to the Read Dead Online gradually over the coming week, starting with owners of Red Dead Redemption 2’s Ultimate Edition on November 27 and building up to full public access by November 30.
On November 27, anyone that owns Red Dead Redemption 2’s Ultimate Edition will be able to access the beta from 8:30 AM ET / 5:30 AM PST / 1:30 PM GMT / 12:30 AM AEDT (November 28). Those that played Red Dead Redemption 2 on its launch day–based on Rockstar’s own data–will be given access to the beta from November 28. If you played the game at any point between launch and October 29, you’ll be able to jump into the beta from November 29. Finally, everyone else that owns the game can check out the beta from November 30. This gradual rollout, Rockstar says, will help it “ease into the beta and to mitigate major issues.”
According to Rockstar, Red Dead Online “blends the classic multiplayer of the original Red Dead Redemption with the best of everything we have learned since then about creating deep multiplayer experiences.” The result, it adds, is “something completely new and fun, and an experience that will continue to expand and evolve over time.”
Rockstar continues: “With the gameplay of Red Dead Redemption 2 as its foundation, Red Dead Online transforms the vast and deeply detailed landscapes, cities, towns and habitats of Red Dead Redemption 2 into a new, living online world ready to be shared by multiple players.”
Red Dead Online will allow players to create their own characters and select abilities that are in line with their playstyle. From there, players can choose to venture out into the online world alone or with a Posse of up to seven other players.
Players will be able to engage in a variety of activities in Red Dead Online. They can hang out with their friends around the campfire, do some hunting or fishing, kill a few hours in towns brimming with life, trade steel with rival gangs or plot ambushes of their hideouts. Treasure scattered around the world is available to be found, and there’s also familiar characters waiting with missions for you to undertake. For those that don’t want to be directed to do things, you can start spontaneous skirmishes with either other players, or entire Posses in open world challenges.” And Rockstar says there’s still more to be discovered beyond that.
The beta launch of Red Dead Online is described as “the first step in what will be a continually expanding and dynamic world.” Rockstar notes that the beta period will be used to address the “inevitable turbulence of launching any online experience of this size and scale” and it intends to lean on its community to help it report problems, share ideas, and “assist in shaping the future of the full Online experience.”
Red Dead Redemption 2 has been getting a lot of play among the GameSpot team. If we aren’t putting together guides or getting up to no good as Dirty Arty–the meanest, most uncleanist outlaw in the wild west–we’re thinking about what we’d like to see in the game. With that in mind, we’ve put together a Red Dead Online wishlist with some of our most wanted features.
Red Dead Redemption 2 has been a big success for Rockstar and parent publisher Take-Two. Just over a week after its launched it was announced that Red Dead Redemption 2 had passed 17 million copies shipped worldwide. That means it needed had already passed the lifetime shipment figure of the 2010 original, Red Dead Redemption. Take-Two said that Red Dead Redemption 2 shipped more units over its first eight days than the 2010 title shipped in its first eight years. Given the ongoing popularity of Grand Theft Auto V’s Online mode–which contributes to continuing strong sales of the game–we expect Red Dead Redemption 2 also has a healthy future ahead of itself.
Where is Red Dead Redemption 2‘s online mode? It should launch this week, if past statements hold true. Strauss Zelnick, the CEO of Rockstar Games parent company Take-Two Interactive, confirmed that the mode is launching “toward the end” of November.
Given that there are only five days left in the month, you can expect Red Dead Online to launch this week if Zelnick’s statement holds true. Officially, all Rockstar has said is that Red Dead Online will launch sometime in November, but that window is closing fast.
Red Dead Online will be released initially as a beta. Rockstar Games is expecting some hiccups and other teething problems, so you shouldn’t expect a completely smooth experience. As for what the mode actually entails, we’ve heard very little; you can read about what we hope to see in Red Dead Online. Rockstar summed it up this way:
“Using the gameplay of the upcoming Red Dead Redemption 2 as a foundation, Red Dead Online will be ready to be explored alone or with friends, and will also feature constant updates and adjustments to grow and evolve this experience for all players.”
Ultragamerz noticed that people are starting to unlock Red Dead Online’s Achievements on Xbox One. Many of the Red Dead Online Achievements show a completion rate of 0.01%, which suggests some people–potentially testers–are already playing it.
The achievement “Breakout” is awarded after you complete the introduction of Red Dead Online, and right now, the Achievements list shows that 0.01 percent of players have unlocked it. The image for this Achievement is a ball and chain, couple with the title “Breakout,” suggests it will involve … breaking out of something.
Further to this, RockstarIntel discovered an image reportedly from Red Dead Online that shows the intro sequence for the mode, with characters locked in a jailcage on a wagon. So it appears the first mission in Red Dead Online is to break out, and then presumably all the character creation and other elements will follow. Rockstar has said pretty much nothing specific about Red Dead Online, but many more details should come soon.
Like GTA Online with GTA V, Red Dead Online is a free experience for everyone who buys Red Dead Redemption 2. The mode is expected to feature microtransactions as part of Take-Two’s ambition to put microtransactions in pretty much all of its games. GTA Online was and continues to be a tremendous commercial success, and Red Dead Online looks to continue that.
For more on Red Dead Online, check out GameSpot’s roundup of 12 things we want to see in the multiplayer mode.
The first trailer for Disney’s so-called ““live-action” reboot of The Lion King premiered last week, and it was tremendously successful. According to Disney, the trailer tallied 224.6 million views over its first 24 hours. Inside Disney, that’s second only to Avengers: Infinity War, which picked up 238 million views over its first day across all channels, according to EW.
The stunning trailer showcased the near-photorealistic CGI, which is probably why Disney is calling it live-action. The video featured Mufasa’s “everything the light touches” speech, and shows baby Simba being introduced by Rafiki to the gathering at Pride Rock. You can watch it again in the embed above.
James Earl Jones plays Mufasa, while Donald Glover voices Simba. Singer-actress Beyonce plays Nala, while Chiwetel Ejiofor voices Scar. Comedian John Oliver plays Zazu, while Seth Rogen and Billy Eichner voice Pumbaa and Timon, respectively. John Kani voices Rafiki, while Keegan-Michael Key and Eric Andre are also voicing characters. You can see the full cast in the image below.
The new Lion King‘s story was written by Catch Me If You Can and Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales‘ Jeff Nathanson. It’s directed by Jon Favreau (Iron Man, Jungle Book) and hits theatres in July 2019.
The original Lion King made more than $968 million at the box office and won multiple Academy Awards, in addition to a pair of Grammy Awards for its soundtrack.
We haven’t seen many games like Darksiders III in the past decade or so. It’s a third-person action game that isn’t afraid to grind your progress to a halt for an hour or more until you figure out how to beat a seemingly-impossible boss. It doesn’t seem to aspire to match the visual polish of this year’s biggest blockbusters, and its design philosophy completely disregards all the hand-holding and coddling that has become the norm outside of Dark Souls and its brethren. But the combat is satisfying – and, you know, maybe not every game needs to be a giant open world with a million things to collect and a never-ending supply of side quests. Darksiders III fits comfortably in that spot.
Darksiders 3 has an identity crisis. On the one hand, the stylish, effect-laden combos at your disposal point to a game with combat encounters reminiscent of Devil May Cry’s kinetic action. Yet your fragility and the tough challenge enemies present actively discourage you from approaching combat on the front foot, instead favouring a more methodical approach with an emphasis on tact and evasion. The Darksiders series has always worn its inspirations on its sleeve, but at least there was a sense of focus and consistent design omnipresent in all of its moving parts. Those first two games may have been derivative, but they took concepts and built on them in fun and engaging ways that elevated their strong points. Darksiders 3 is the antithesis of this approach, feeling muddled and unfocused, with an uneven design that trickles down and negatively affects each of its disparate systems.
After both War and Death had their fun in Darksiders 3’s predecessors, it’s now the turn of the perpetually angry Fury, as you take the reins of the third horseman of the apocalypse. Fury wields a bladed whip known as the Barbs of Scorn, which offers both decent range and a satisfying feedback of meaty hits once you’re up close and personal in some demonic entity’s face. Throughout the game you’ll acquire Hollows that grant unique secondary weapons–like a lumbering mallet and rapid-fire chains–and open up your traversal options with different elemental effects. Combos are relatively easy to execute, with one button dedicated to primary attacks and another for those aforementioned secondary strikes. Button mashing is enough to get you through most encounters, but mixing in slight delays between button presses will allow you to pull off air combos and other similarly stylish moves. It certainly looks the part of a flamboyant action game, but these flashy combos are only really feasible against weaker enemies.
Darksiders 3 has taken some clear inspiration from Dark Souls, so Fury’s low survivability forces you to approach combat in a way that belies its exuberant combos. Enemies are fast and hit hard, and are regularly found in groups. With no stamina meter to speak of, there’s an emphasis on dodging and keeping out of danger that does deviate from Dark Souls’ stringent use of energy management. Each perfectly timed dodge is rewarded with a slow-motion flourish and the chance to counter with a powerful arcane attack, and most clashes are built around Fury’s ability to weave out of the way of incoming sword slashes and ravenous claws. There’s a good variety of enemy types, too; reading their attack patterns and knowing when to evade is paramount to defeating almost every enemy you can’t simply banish with a single combo.
This all sounds well and good on paper, and taken at face value there’s nothing inherently wrong with a more considered approach to combat. But Darksiders 3 never leans into this method heavily enough, and out-of-place vestiges of its flashy counterpoint regularly cause frustration as it seems to split between wanting to be two very different types of game.
You may have air juggles and various strings of deadly moves at your disposal, but you’re often forced to settle for safe combos because anything else will leave you wide open to a devastating attack. Then there’s the way you lock on to enemies. This has remained relatively unchanged from Darksiders 2, opting for a 3D targeting system similar to the one used in The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. This was clearly designed with one-on-one battles in mind and certainly doesn’t fit in a game as challenging as this. While there are undoubtedly some tough enemies in Darksiders 3, the real difficulty comes from facing more than one enemy at a time rather than a singular threat. This works twofold: groups of enemies are intrinsically tougher due to their numbers, and the unwieldy lock-on and a terrible camera make these fights a lot more challenging than they would otherwise be. The camera has a tendency to block your view with walls and any objects in the vicinity, which is only exacerbated by the claustrophobic environments that dominate the majority of the game. Dying because you can’t see, or because switching targets is too fiddly, are constant annoyances. Not to mention the number of times you’re hit by attacks from off-screen. There’s an indicator for incoming attacks, but it’s incredibly difficult to discern in the thick of the action, and no such warning exists for projectiles.
Dying because you can’t see, or because switching targets is too fiddly, are constant annoyances. Not to mention the number of times you’re hit by attacks from off-screen.
Darksiders 3 also strips out a lot of the RPG elements from its immediate predecessor. Killing enemies rewards you with souls which can also be found throughout the game world in consumable clusters. Each time you reach a checkpoint you can trade them to a demonic merchant in order to level up three attributes: health, strength, and arcane. It’s a very simplistic progression system, and while you can lose souls by dying and must then retrieve them again, there’s never any tension borne from the threat of perishing and losing them all because you can bank souls even if you don’t have enough to level up.
Weapons can be upgraded to increase their damage output, and enhancements will augment your arsenal with buffs that might give you 4% health back for each successful hit, or add more invincibility frames to your dodge. But there’s no sense of individuality here, and combat never evolves because all you’re doing is boosting your damage output. It doesn’t take too long before repetition settles in.
This is a problem when combat is all-encompassing. There are some rudimentary puzzles sprinkled throughout, but they’re few and far between and generally revolve around hitting a large jellyfish creature into position so you can use its head to reach higher platforms, moving blocks, and using explosive insects to access different areas. None of this is particularly engaging, and that goes for the rare instances of platforming as well. Grabbing onto ledges is too temperamental, and Darksiders 3 lacks a cohesive visual language that makes some platforming sections more convoluted than they should be.
The apocalyptic wasteland of Earth just isn’t that interesting to traverse either. The interconnected world is made up of dilapidated office buildings, grimy subways, and flooded industrial areas. Each of these locales is enveloped in muted colours dominated by beige and grey, with only a couple of areas deviating from this bland design. Your quest might revolve around tracking down and killing The Seven Deadly Sins, but the environments you’re in rarely reflect their diverse personalities, which feels like a squandered opportunity. Sloth is a large grotesque bug, so it makes sense that you’ll find eggs cascading around the walls of his subway lair, and face off against arachnids and four-legged creatures. Yet, bafflingly enough, Gluttony–a vulgar plant-like creature with multiple mouths–also resides in a subway littered with eggs and insectoids to fight.
Verticality plays a substantial role in these environments, but there’s no sense of scale when you’re regularly confined to dank corridors in subways and caves. It’s a shame, too, because while the bulky, comic book art style of Joe Madueria is still reflected in the excellent character designs–even if he’s not directly involved in Darksiders 3–the backdrop for these larger-than-life beings is this generic, insipid world. And while it underwhelms in the visual department, Darksiders 3 is still rife with constant framerate issues–even on a PS4 Pro–on top of crashes, sound glitches, and other technical misgivings.
There are other elements worth mentioning, like the way the game length is padded out by the exclusion of an vague in-game map that makes fast travel worthless since you never know where exactly you’re going, or the counter-intuitive way letting an enemy kill you is the best option when it comes to replenishing your healing items. But saying any more at this point is just too disheartening. Darksiders 3 retrogrades on its predecessors with an unfocused approach that constantly clashes with itself. There are remnants of a good game here, buried within the vivacious combos of a combat style this game doesn’t want to embrace. Unfortunately, it’s buried far too deep to ever salvage.
(Presented by Battlefield V) Which weapons are the best in Battlefield V? Battlefield expert Stodeh chooses his favourite weapons to wield.
Very fast firing sniper rifle. Its bullet is significantly slower than that of the Kar98k, making it preferable for medium range.
A triple barrel combination gun that is more flexible than you would think. Use it as a double barrel shotgun in close quarters or change fire mode to the rifle barrel for medium range shots.
Considered by many to be the first real assault rifle. It combines a high rate of fire with good accuracy and stopping power.
The selective-fire variant of the Gewehr 1-5 semi-automatic rifle.
Very fast firing automatic rifle with a small magazine. Highest damage output weapon on the support kit.
The most common bolt-action rifle in the German army.
Developed in Germany, this submachine gun proved immensely popular across Europe and Asia.
Very hard to control, fast firing SMG. It starts off a bit weak, but benefits more than other SMGs from progression.