Category: Games

Bandai Namco and Limbic Entertainment have announced Park Beyond, a new theme park management game with rides that look far more fantastical than their real-life counterparts.

Revealed at Gamescom 2021’s Opening Night Live, Park Beyond’s trailer introduces the concept of “impossification”. The idea is to transform standard theme park rides into creations that defy the laws of engineering and physics. Introduced in the short trailer is a multi-tiered carousel, a Ferris wheel with multiple interlocked wheels, a rocket-powered roller coaster, and an animatronic kraken ride.

These wonderful and ambitious ride designs look to be Park Beyond’s unique selling point over the ever-popular Planet Coaster, which it will presumably share a lot of DNA with.

Park Beyond is planned to release in 2022, on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X|S.

For more from this week’s huge summer gaming event, check out our Gamescom 2021 schedule. And for more from the world of theme park management, be sure to check out the trailer for Planet Coaster’s console edition, which released last year.

Matt Purslow is IGN’s UK News and Entertainment Writer.

A new look at Jurassic World Evolution 2 has been offered up as part of Opening Night Live, where a release date was also announced.

Revealed as part of the first big event of Gamescom 2021, Jurassic World Evolution will release November 9.

The announce date was accompanied by a pretty trailer that showcased both the dinosaurs and park elements

Jurassic World Evolution 2 was revealed last June, and is the sequel to Frontier’s dinosaur-themed park management game. Very little extra has been revealed since E3 2021, but we have had a trailer dedicated to the Triceratops, and a developer diary all about the game’s evolution beyond its predecessor.

After a very long wait, LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga still doesn’t have a proper release date but is targeting a Spring 2022 release date.

Announced during Gamescom’s Opening Night Live, a new trailer for LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga showed off LEGO-fied events from the entire Skywalker movie saga, including Star Wars Episode 9: The Rise of Skywalker.

The new trailer recreates specific moments from Rise of the Skywalker, including the scene where Rey jumps over Kylo Ren’s TIE Fighter. Check out screenshots of the new trailer below.

We’ve been waiting for a new release date since the game was delayed earlier this year. It’s not the game’s first delay after it was announced during E3 2019. The game is a compilation of all 9 mainline Star Wars movies, and aside from its funny rewrites of classic scenes, it also features a gorgeous new look.

Unfortunately, we still don’t have a proper release date, but Star Wars LEGO fans can look forward to Spring 2022 as a possible release window, barring any further delays.

UFL is a new soccer game aiming to take on the genre’s core games, FIFA and eFootball. It will be available for free on all major gaming consoles.

Announced during Gamescom‘s Opening Night Live, UFL is a football simulation set up as a global online football league in which “players will be able to create their own football clubs made up of more than 5000 licensed footballers and compete with other gamers worldwide to prove their skills and climb to the very top of the league.”

It comes from a new studio, Strikerz Inc., which has been developing the game for five years already. The game was introduced as “Fair to play”, with an emphasis on player skill, and no pay-to-win elements. It is being developed in Unreal Engine, and a release date will be announced “soon”.

“We are football fans and passionate gamers — we have been playing football video games for years and we know exactly what people want to see in a football simulator,” said CEO Eugene Nashilov in a press release. “We want to reinvent football video gaming from the ground up, offering players around the world a revolutionary, exciting and fair to play experience. We can’t wait to share more about the game.”

Players will be rated in-game based on partnerships with sports performance analysis company InStat, and player union FIFPRO is providing player likenesses and licenses.

Ubisoft’s Riders Republic just wrapped up a public beta that was limited to a selection of registered players, but during Gamescom’s Opening Night Live stream, it was revealed that the beta is now open to everyone from now until August 28 on PC and console.

This comes ahead of its release later this year, which was delayed from September to October 28. It was last seen at Ubisoft Forward during E3 2021, where we had a glimpse at trick battles, free-for-all multiplayer, and its sprawling, activity-filled map.

Bo Moore is IGN’s Executive Tech Editor. You can find him on Twitter @Usebomswisely.

A trailer revealed during Gamescom’s Opening Night Live showcase announced that Splitgate’s Season 0 update has gone live today, bringing new content and a new mode to its first official competitive season.

The update adds a new map called Karman Station, a 100 level Battle Pass full of items and currency to earn, new cosmetics, and a brand new mode called Contamination. It also brings season-long challenges to complete, some of which will be available for free and others that will be exclusive to Battle Pass owners

Contamination is a mode that will be familiar to arena shooter fans, and it’s Splitgate’s first asymmetrical mode. Two teams face off, with one being a smaller “contaminated” team that can only use melee weapons. When the contaminated side gets a kill, the dead player will respawn as a member of that team, growing the imbalance toward the other direction.

The Season 0 update comes after Splitgate’s unexpectedly explosive success on console, which came years after a less stellar PC launch. It also follows last week’s news that the console version would stay in open beta indefinitely after a last minute delay of its full release late last month.

April O’Neil is a playable character in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge, it was announced tonight at Gamescom’s Opening Night Live.

The microphone-wielding journalist will kick ass alongside the turtles in the retro throwback TMNT game for PC and Nintendo Switch. Alongside her martial arts moves, she can also revive the turtles through the ‘power of pizza’.

Like the arcade game of yore, Shredder’s Revenge is a 4-player co-op side-scrolling brawler. Developer Tribute Games is bringing back a pixelated look for Shredder’s Revenge and you can expect to fight your way through faithful New York locations while taking on the villainous Foot Clan.

This is just one of the many Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle projects in the works including a new show and movie. Check out IGN’s rundown of every TMNT project currently in development.

What do Sonic the Hedgehog, Beat from Jet Set Radio, Kazuma Kiryu, and now Morgana from Persona 5 have in common, aside from being Sega characters? They’ve all been shrunk down and packed into little balls, with Morgana announced today as joining the crew of Super Monkey Ball Banana Mania.

At Gamescom Opening Night Live, we got a look at the (not a cat) character Morgana bouncing around Monkey Ball stages, collecting treasure chests (not bananas) and finishing levels. A second trailer showed off the full cast and its twelve party games, including Monkey Target and Monkey Soccer.

Though Super Monkey Ball Banana Mania is out on October 5, Morgana will not be in the game at launch. Instead, he will be a part of a post-launch DLC coming to all platforms on November 2 for $4.99. More character additions are planned to be announced in the coming weeks.

Super Monkey Ball Banana Mania is just one of a number of games to get new trailers and announcements at Gamescom Opening Night Live today. You can follow this and IGN’s other Gamescom coverage over the rest of the week right here.

Rebekah Valentine is a news reporter for IGN. You can find her on Twitter @duckvalentine.