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Journey to the Savage Planet is a fantastic name for a pulpy sci-fi game, but is a bit of a misdirect when taken at face value. A “savage planet” conjures up thoughts of hostility and survival, tapping into the inherent dangers of life on the frontiers of space. Sure, there are things that want to kill you in Journey to the Savage Planet, but they’re only a minor inconvenience rather than the main focus. Instead, developer Typhoon Studios places the emphasis on exploration, coupling this with genuine humour and a charming tone to present a lighthearted and singularly focused chunk of sci-fi adventuring.

The entire game takes place on a single planet located deep in uncharted space. You’re strapped into the space boots of an employee of Kindred Aerospace–a rinky-dink outfit that’s so proud of its standing as the fourth-best interstellar exploration company, it’ll make you shudder to think of how bad the fifth-best must be. Once your feet touch the planet’s surface, you’ll begin to catalog the flora, fauna, and life located across the various biomes of planet AR-Y 26 to determine if it’s fit for human habitation, what with the whole climate change thing ruining Earth.

Journey to the Savage Planet excels when it comes to the assortment of tools and equipment you can gradually craft and use to reach every nook and cranny of the planet’s surface. You’re immediately free to explore as you see fit, but it doesn’t take long to discover plenty of inaccessible areas. As such, much of the game is spent scanning the flora and fauna to reveal whether they have gameplay benefits or are just there to contribute to the planet’s vibrant and colorful aesthetic. Some plants may contain seeds that restore your health or produce projectile explosives, while most of the planet’s hodgepodge glossary of alien critters are filled with resources you can gather if you’re heartless enough to put a laser blast between their eyes. Gathering these resources and locating items that can be reverse-engineered using your ship’s 3D printer allows you to craft equipment like grappling hooks, double-jump upgrades for your jetpack, and other tools that make traversal and deeper exploration possible.

The whole game latches onto this palpable sense of momentum, as each new upgrade opens up more of the planet for you to probe. Your feet may be firmly planted on the ground in its opening stages, but by the end of the 10-hour adventure you’ll be gliding across natural ziplines hundreds of feet in the air, propelling across perilous chasms with a triple jump, and using a powerful ground pound to unearth new passages. Journey to the Savage Planet adopts the classic Metroidvania formula and executes it wonderfully, presenting you with an ever-growing arsenal of tools that are satisfying to use and feed into the game’s inherent focus on exploration.

Of course, the other side of this equation is the planet itself, which is well worth turning inside out. AR-Y 26 is split into three distinct biomes. Each one is moderately sized, resulting in the planet’s scale feeling manageable and allowing you to explore freely without fear of getting lost. When presented with multiple paths, it’s easy to choose one over the other because you know getting back to that initial fork in the road is going to be relatively easy. This encourages you to poke your nose in every crevice, travel to every far-away cave, and check behind every waterfall. You’re often rewarded for doing so, with extra resources or important upgrade items hidden throughout the planet–not to mention the visual treats that are on offer in each disparate biome, whether you’re navigating through the craggy icy caves and glaciers your ship landed on, walking amongst the overgrown pink and turquoise mushrooms of the Fungi of Si’ned VII, or jumping between the floating islands of The Elevated Realm.

Journey to the Savage Planet isn’t a completely leisurely tour, though. Your first order of business is to develop a futuristic blaster pistol, but combat is a means to an end rather than a major part of the game, and it ends up being a drag. While most of the planet’s creatures are docile, there are outliers that become hostile as soon as they spot you. Defeating these aggressive predators involves a rinse and repeat pattern whereby you use a nifty sidestep or jump to avoid an attack before following up by shooting one or multiple weak points. There are only slight deviations on this back-and-forth that require you to lob an explosive or poison cloud at the enemy before you can pepper its weak spot. The pistol never feels quite accurate enough for the job, especially because you’re usually being asked to hit small targets, and each of the combat’s faults comes to a head during the game’s closing moments as you’re thrown into one fight after another before facing off against the final boss.

You can play the whole game cooperatively with a friend, which does make combat slightly more bearable, but co-op doesn’t alter the moment-to-moment gameplay in any significant way. Conflicts are easier with two people, sure, but there’s nothing about the co-op experience that’s intrinsically built for more than a single player. You can explore the planet together or opt to split up and cover different ground, but that’s about it.

Playing with a friend can result in moments of emergent humour, but Journey to the Savage Planet is also genuinely funny due to the abundance of FMVs located on your ship. These short and incredibly eccentric videos mock and parody everything from exploitative corporate practises to the video game industry. There’s a commercial for a new game elegantly titled MOBA MOBA MOBA Mobile VR V.17 Golden Fleece; its main selling point is having more microtransactions than any other game, with one of its features being an in-game “Custo-mi$er” for your created character. The humour is somewhat frontloaded, but this does help the game’s irreverent charm establish itself early.

Journey to the Savage Planet borrows plenty of familiar elements from other games, yet it does so in a carefree way that sets it apart from other sci-fi exploration games, settling on a relaxing playstyle that’s informed by its single, vivid planet and tightly focused design. It only takes a couple of hours to reveal its humdrum combat, but this is the only significant damper on what is an entertaining slice of lighthearted planetary exploration.

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Journey to the Savage Planet is a fantastic name for a pulpy sci-fi game, but is a bit of a misdirect when taken at face value. A “savage planet” conjures up thoughts of hostility and survival, tapping into the inherent dangers of life on the frontiers of space. Sure, there are things that want to kill you in Journey to the Savage Planet, but they’re only a minor inconvenience rather than the main focus. Instead, developer Typhoon Studios places the emphasis on exploration, coupling this with genuine humour and a charming tone to present a lighthearted and singularly focused chunk of sci-fi adventuring.

The entire game takes place on a single planet located deep in uncharted space. You’re strapped into the space boots of an employee of Kindred Aerospace–a rinky-dink outfit that’s so proud of its standing as the fourth-best interstellar exploration company, it’ll make you shudder to think of how bad the fifth-best must be. Once your feet touch the planet’s surface, you’ll begin to catalog the flora, fauna, and life located across the various biomes of planet AR-Y 26 to determine if it’s fit for human habitation, what with the whole climate change thing ruining Earth.

Journey to the Savage Planet excels when it comes to the assortment of tools and equipment you can gradually craft and use to reach every nook and cranny of the planet’s surface. You’re immediately free to explore as you see fit, but it doesn’t take long to discover plenty of inaccessible areas. As such, much of the game is spent scanning the flora and fauna to reveal whether they have gameplay benefits or are just there to contribute to the planet’s vibrant and colorful aesthetic. Some plants may contain seeds that restore your health or produce projectile explosives, while most of the planet’s hodgepodge glossary of alien critters are filled with resources you can gather if you’re heartless enough to put a laser blast between their eyes. Gathering these resources and locating items that can be reverse-engineered using your ship’s 3D printer allows you to craft equipment like grappling hooks, double-jump upgrades for your jetpack, and other tools that make traversal and deeper exploration possible.

The whole game latches onto this palpable sense of momentum, as each new upgrade opens up more of the planet for you to probe. Your feet may be firmly planted on the ground in its opening stages, but by the end of the 10-hour adventure you’ll be gliding across natural ziplines hundreds of feet in the air, propelling across perilous chasms with a triple jump, and using a powerful ground pound to unearth new passages. Journey to the Savage Planet adopts the classic Metroidvania formula and executes it wonderfully, presenting you with an ever-growing arsenal of tools that are satisfying to use and feed into the game’s inherent focus on exploration.

Of course, the other side of this equation is the planet itself, which is well worth turning inside out. AR-Y 26 is split into three distinct biomes. Each one is moderately sized, resulting in the planet’s scale feeling manageable and allowing you to explore freely without fear of getting lost. When presented with multiple paths, it’s easy to choose one over the other because you know getting back to that initial fork in the road is going to be relatively easy. This encourages you to poke your nose in every crevice, travel to every far-away cave, and check behind every waterfall. You’re often rewarded for doing so, with extra resources or important upgrade items hidden throughout the planet–not to mention the visual treats that are on offer in each disparate biome, whether you’re navigating through the craggy icy caves and glaciers your ship landed on, walking amongst the overgrown pink and turquoise mushrooms of the Fungi of Si’ned VII, or jumping between the floating islands of The Elevated Realm.

Journey to the Savage Planet isn’t a completely leisurely tour, though. Your first order of business is to develop a futuristic blaster pistol, but combat is a means to an end rather than a major part of the game, and it ends up being a drag. While most of the planet’s creatures are docile, there are outliers that become hostile as soon as they spot you. Defeating these aggressive predators involves a rinse and repeat pattern whereby you use a nifty sidestep or jump to avoid an attack before following up by shooting one or multiple weak points. There are only slight deviations on this back-and-forth that require you to lob an explosive or poison cloud at the enemy before you can pepper its weak spot. The pistol never feels quite accurate enough for the job, especially because you’re usually being asked to hit small targets, and each of the combat’s faults comes to a head during the game’s closing moments as you’re thrown into one fight after another before facing off against the final boss.

You can play the whole game cooperatively with a friend, which does make combat slightly more bearable, but co-op doesn’t alter the moment-to-moment gameplay in any significant way. Conflicts are easier with two people, sure, but there’s nothing about the co-op experience that’s intrinsically built for more than a single player. You can explore the planet together or opt to split up and cover different ground, but that’s about it.

Playing with a friend can result in moments of emergent humour, but Journey to the Savage Planet is also genuinely funny due to the abundance of FMVs located on your ship. These short and incredibly eccentric videos mock and parody everything from exploitative corporate practises to the video game industry. There’s a commercial for a new game elegantly titled MOBA MOBA MOBA Mobile VR V.17 Golden Fleece; its main selling point is having more microtransactions than any other game, with one of its features being an in-game “Custo-mi$er” for your created character. The humour is somewhat frontloaded, but this does help the game’s irreverent charm establish itself early.

Journey to the Savage Planet borrows plenty of familiar elements from other games, yet it does so in a carefree way that sets it apart from other sci-fi exploration games, settling on a relaxing playstyle that’s informed by its single, vivid planet and tightly focused design. It only takes a couple of hours to reveal its humdrum combat, but this is the only significant damper on what is an entertaining slice of lighthearted planetary exploration.

One Punch Man: A Hero Nobody Knows is expanding its roster out further, with three new fighters having just been announced for the game. Child Emperor, Spring Mustachio, and Handsome Ikemen have been confirmed for the anime brawler, and you’ll be able to add them to your team in fights.

Child Emperor, a young fighter who uses mechanical arms to battle, is an S-Class Rank 5 professional hero in the anime. Spring Mustachio is a gentlemanly rapier user, and Handsome Ikemen–also known as Sweet Mask–is, well, very handsome.

They’ll join the other previously announced characters when the game launches on February 28, 2020. And, of course, Saitama will be able to take them down with one punch (although, cleverly, it takes him a little while to arrive and do so–meaning that if you pick him, your other two team members will have to survive longer against your opponent’s team of three.)

The second season of the One Punch Man anime aired in early 2019.

From the outset, Respawn showed it would be doing things a little differently with Apex Legends just by how it released the game. Unlike other triple-A games that launch after weeks or months of preview events and trailers, Apex Legends was announced and released on the same day. It was a bold strategy–one that could have doomed the Titanfall spin-off from the start given that fans were clamoring for Titanfall 3, not another battle royale game. But the game didn’t die out, and Respawn’s willingness to continually advertise Apex Legends with unorthodox methods has allowed the battle royale to thrive in an industry that is, now more than ever, always battling for your time.

In preparation for Season 4: Assimilation and the one-year anniversary of Apex Legends, Respawn utilized another risky strategy: killing off a character before he even had a chance to appear in the game. The move concludes a months-long cat-and-mouse game between Respawn and the Apex Legends’ community, one that has ultimately done a stellar job at selling the story behind the game.

If you haven’t been keeping up with Apex Legends over the past few months, here’s a refresher. Revenant has been a name that’s been circulating in the community since 2019 when dataminers discovered the name in the game’s files. It’s been theorized for a while that the character would be added as a playable legend–something that seemed all but confirmed when an Apex Legends developer released, seemingly on accident, an image that featured the character in an early concept of Octane’s Gauntlet on Kings Canyon. When pressed by news outlets for further details or confirmation on Revenant’s existence, Respawn remained coy on the matter.

Revenant’s inclusion in the game seemed even more certain during Season 3: Meltdown, though, specifically during the Halloween-themed Fight or Fright event, which saw Pathfinder accidentally wandering into a different dimension, the setting of the Shadowfall mode. The announcer and host of the mode was a robotic entity whose overall shape and voice lines matched that of the datamined Revenant files. Given Respawn’s track record of teasing legends ahead of their release through in-game hints, it seemed likely Revenant would be Season 4’s new character.

Then Respawn dropped a bombshell during its Season 4 Reveal Devstream: the season would add ex-MMA fighter Forge to Apex Legends, not Revenant. To lend credence to the reveal, dataminers found files for Forge in Apex Legends long before the announcement–some dating back nearly as far as the ones for Revenant. For all intents and purposes, it seemed like fans had just gotten the prediction wrong. Several members of the community then assumed that Forge would come to Apex Legends first, to be followed by Revenant later–maybe within the same season or perhaps at the start of Season 5. The game itself seemed to further support this theory, with in-game assets changing to reflect the arrival of Forge and only minor details hinting at Revenant’s further involvement. Respawn followed-up these map changes with the announcement that an interview featuring Forge would debut on January 27. The interview would be held in the Sorting Factory on World’s Edge, and a news station set even appeared in the in-game location ahead of the video.

This was all revealed to be a smokescreen, however. During the interview, Revenant appeared and stabbed Forge in the back. In the game, the interview set was trashed and Forge’s chair was replaced by a death box that contains his medallion (which is unlocked as a gun charm if you loot it). After promoting Forge for nearly a week, Respawn just killed the character off–his reveal and inclusion in Apex Legends designed for a plot twist and shocking reveal of a completely different character.

Telling their dedicated playerbase that they’re going to do one thing when they actually plan on flipping the script is not a normal strategy for video game developers to take. Blizzard and Ubisoft do not announce new Overwatch Heroes or Rainbow Six Siege Operators only to then turn around and kill said characters before players even have a chance to try them. Tricking your playerbase and getting them hyped for something that never actually arrives in hopes the surprise twist will draw even greater interest can backfire if players think that you’re now delivering something that’s less than what you originally announced.

But it’s because this strategy is so unorthodox that I believe it’s going to work out for Respawn and Apex Legends. Apex Legends launched into a battle royale genre that was already beginning to feel a little stale and a games-as-a-service market that’s been feeling overstuffed. However, Respawn’s game stands out because of how it’s structured around its narrative and not the other way around. Even without a single-player campaign, Apex Legends has a story, and Respawn is willing to subvert the expectations of how to market a games-as-a-service title in order to tell it. The developer has a narrative vision, and it’s sticking to it.

In a traditional single-player game, Forge’s story would likely transpire over several cutscenes and in-game conversations, only for his murder to catch players by surprise. Respawn has managed to capture this shock value by selling this narrative through a created Twitter account that acts as a news station for events that occur in the Titanfall and Apex Legends universe. So, of course, Forge would be announced as the new character with no mention of Revenant–news reporters don’t know athletes are going to be murdered ahead of time, they report the news as it happens. This means Respawn (which, again, is roleplaying as a news station entity) is as surprised as the rest of us when it comes to the narrative it’s building. Respawn is acting as if it’s not an all-knowing overseer of its world, allowing the developer to have a bit more fun with us, its audience, by leading us in one direction before surprising us with something else entirely. It’s a nice bit of meta storytelling in a genre that traditionally hasn’t told stories outside of cinematic trailers.

And all that being said, it’s still not a foregone conclusion that Respawn has finished tricking us yet and that Forge is definitely out for good. The gun charm in Forge’s death box describes the man as “often imitated but never defeated,” and the Forge in the interview has a scar on his eyebrow while all previous images have had no scar–which could imply that the Forge that Revenant killed is just a body double. There is still no definitive proof that Forge is dead and that Revenant will be the new playable legend. With the style of storytelling it’s using for Apex Legends, Respawn has put its fans into a position where we’ll be guessing right up until Season 4 begins to see which character actually gets added.

And ya know what? That’s kind of exciting.

The 2011 Steven Soderbergh movie Contagion has surged in popularity following the emergence of the real-life Coronovirus that has killed more than 100 people around the world.

You may recall that Contagion–featuring Gwyneth Paltrow, Matt Damon, Marion Cotillard, and other stars–told a story about a fictional deadly virus that originated in China before spreading around the world, leading to chaos and scientists scrambling to find a cure. Some part of that storyline is now happening in real life.

The Hollywood Reporter noticed that Contagion climbed up to No. 10 on the US iTunes movie rental chart. It’s the oldest movie on the charts by far, and it’s recent climb can surely be attributed to the real-world outbreak of the Coronavirus.

The majority of the deaths from the pneumonia-like illness have occurred in mainland China where the virus originated, according to the state-run China Global Television Network. China has quarantined entire cities as it tries to prevent the spread of the disease.

The Coronavirus outbreak also caused a huge surge in popularity of the video game Plague Inc., which is a real-time strategy game related to how diseases spread around the world. James Vaughn, the creator of Plague Inc., has advised people to seek out local and global health authorities for information on the Coronavirus, rather than relying on Plague Inc. as a learning tool.

Shanghai Disneyland has temporarily closed down amid concerns over the virus, while McDonald’s has closed thousands of locations in the country.

Go to GameSpot sister site CNET to see a detailed breakdown of the latest in the Coronavirus health crisis.