Darksiders III is coming to Nintendo Switch, and it’ll be here in September. THQ Nordic has announced that the action game will launch on September 30, both digitally and in stores.
The Switch edition includes the base game and two expansion packs, Keepers of the Void and The Crucible. The game will retail for $40/£35/€40. The existence of Darksiders III for Switch is not a total surprise, as it was leaked on a Russian store in July.
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Darksiders III was originally released in 2018, so Switch fans have been waiting for a while. The PS4/Xbox One edition of the game that launched in 2018 was developed by Gunfire Games, but it’s not immediately clear if that studio or another one is responsible for the Switch version.
It’s not the first Darksiders game on Switch, however, as the top-down action RPG Darksiders Genesis was released in 2020 for Switch (as well as PS4 and Xbox One). Before that, Darksiders Warmastered Edition and Darksiders II Deathinitive Edition were released on Switch in 2019.
“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,” critic Richard Wakeling said.
PS5 and PS4 owners will definitely want to check out Amazon’s latest game promotion, which discounts select PlayStation exclusives to Prime Day-level prices. You’ll also want to take a look at PS Direct’s August Savings sale for even more PlayStation game deals. A number of PS5 exclusives are featured in the sales, including a trio of great games for $50 each: Returnal, Demon’s Souls, and The Nioh Collection. We’ve rounded up the best PlayStation game deals at Amazon and PS Direct below:
The first trailer for Midnight Mass has been released. The new horror show from Haunting of Bly Manor and Doctor Sleep director Mike Flanagan hits Netflix on September 24.
Midnight Mass is set in an isolated island community, known as Crockett Island, to which a disgraced local played by Friday Night Lights star Zach Gilford returns. When a mysterious priest named Father Paul also arrives, strange supernatural phenomena start to happen, further disrupting the community. The trailer doesn’t give much more away than that, but it looks likes an eerie and atmospheric show that will hopefully deliver the same mix of drama and horror that made Bly Manor and its predecessor, The Haunting of Hill House, so effective. Check it below:
The show also stars Kate Siegel (Bly Manor), Hamish Linklater (The New Adventures of Old Christine), Annabeth Gish (Halt and Catch Fire), Michael Trucco (The Bye Bye Man), Samantha Sloyan (Hush), and Henry Thomas (Hill House). It’s a seven-episode series.
Flanagan has also released a statement about Midnight Mass. It reads, “I’m just going to admit it… Midnight Mass is my favorite project so far. As a former altar boy, about to celebrate 3 years of sobriety, it’s not had to see what makes this so personal. The ideas at the root of this show scare me to my core.
“There is darkness at work on Crockett Island. Some of it is supernatural, but the scariest is born of human nature. The darkness that animates this story isn’t hard to see in our own world, unfortunately. But this show is about something else as well… faith itself. One of the great mysteries of human nature. How even in the darkness, in the worst of it, in the absence of light–and hope–we sing. I hope you enjoy our song.”
Flanagan is also producing a new anthology series for Netflix titled The Midnight Club, based on Christopher Pike’s 1994 novel of the same title. The show is set in a hospice for terminally ill young adults and will focus on a group of patients who form a club to tell each other spooky stories at night. The Midnight Club doesn’t have a confirmed release date yet.
For cosplayers looking to show off their latest creations in 2021, this year’s World Cosplay Summit was as good a chance as any to do so provided that they could make the cut. With the finals now over, the top three teams have emerged, each one bringing to life a video game that earned them top marks with the judges.
While previous WCS events had been held in-person in Nagoya, Japan, this year adopted a safer method as participants were required to film video segments that showed off their costumes. 30 countries and one observer nation took part, and the event culminated with Elffi Cosplay and Calssara being declared the grand winners of the World Cosplay Summit 2021 Video Division.
Conventions have been hard-hit by the Covid-19 pandemic, but with vaccination drives taking place globally, a small number of them have been held. For the most part though, large in-person events like Dragon Con, Emerald City Comic-Con, and Los Angeles Comic-Con have shifted dates to later in the year, while other shows have opted to go online instead with a weekend of livestreams.
Fortnite and Marvel are teaming up once again. This time it’s another member of the Guardians of the Galaxy, Gamora, who will be joining the ever-expanding roster of Fortnite crossover outfits, or “skins” as fans tend to call them. Here’s what you need to know about when Gamora is coming to Fortnite and how to unlock her early.
Fortnite Gamora Skin
Gamora’s arrival means nearly the full Guardians of the Galaxy team is in Fortnite.
Gamora will debut in the Fortnite Item Shop on August 14 at 5 PM PT / 8 PM ET. Though a price hasn’t yet been revealed, we expect her complete bundle of in-game cosmetics to go for about 2400 V-Bucks, or about $20. Gamora will be sold alongside Star-Lord, who makes his long-awaited return to the game after previously debuting in 2019.
Players who leveled up their Season 4 battle passes enough also previously unlocked Groot with a Rocket Racoon Back Bling, meaning nearly the entire Guardians squad from the James Gunn era have come to Fortnite. (Just waiting on you, Drax.) Gamora’s full set will also include back bling, a pickaxe, and a glider.
It’s appropriate that Gamora arrives in Fortnite this season, since Doctor Slone and the Imagined Order are having such a tough time expelling the alien trespassers. Gamora knows a thing or two about fending off aliens.
Fortnite Gamora Cup: How To Unlock Gamora Early
If you’re really good at Fortnite, you could earn Gamora for free this week.
As usual, Epic is giving players the chance to earn a major new in-game skin before it’s on sale. On August 11, a few days before Gamora’s proper debut, players can jump into the Gamora Cup from the in-game menu labeled Competitive.
In Duos, players will have three hours to complete 10 rounds of Fortnite battle royale and accumulate points. The winners within each region will earn the Gamora outfit and the Gamora Cloak back bling. While few will be so lucky (and skilled), the bar to leave with something in hand is much lower. Any teams that amass eight or more points in the allotted time will receive the Daughter of Thanos spray.
You can find the full rulebook and scoring system breakdown on the official Fortnite site, but suffice it to say scoring eight points in 10 rounds should be quite doable for even many casual Fortnite players, so if you’re a Guardians fan, it may be worth it to try your hand at Fortnite’s competitive scene.
It’s a well-known story at this point that, for many fans, No Man’s Sky has gone from somewhat disappointing to resurgent success, largely through frequent free updates from developer Hello Games. It looks like those content drops aren’t done yet, either: Hello Games just teased another one coming that’s called Frontiers.
In a Twitter post, Hello Games included Frontiers at the end of a list of every update to come to the game so far. The post is accompanied by a sizzle reel of many of the past updates, with a title card at the end for Frontiers that confirms that it, too, will be free for all players. This is about the smallest tease possible, so we have no idea what it’s going to entail yet. But if it follows past named updates, it should contain a substantial amount of new content.
In addition, seeing all of the updates listed out in one tweet puts in context just how much work Hello Games has done on No Man’s Sky since its original launch. The game was originally released way back in 2016, but it has gained a devoted following by essentially becoming a live game.
Best Buy’s latest video game promotion is one of its more interesting events in recent memory. For each of the next 10 days, Best Buy will offer one game for $10. The promotion will feature Xbox, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation, and PC games. Each game will only be on sale for one day before a new deal takes its place. Day one’s deal is Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle, one of the Nintendo Switch’s best strategy games.
While Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle is almost always on sale, we very rarely see it for less than $15, especially physical copies. Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle is a tactics game that plays a lot like XCOM, but it’s far more lighthearted. Kingdom Battle pairs Mario and pals with Ubisoft’s zany Rabbids to create a wild and genuinely funny collaboration. A sequel, Mario + Rabbids: Sparks of Hope, is set to release in 2022 for Nintendo Switch.
Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle is only available for $10 until tonight at 10 PM PT / 1 AM ET. We’ll update this article each day as new $10 game deals become available.
Among the Fortnite Week 10 challenges, you’ll need to place video cameras at different ship landing locations. This is another story-driven quest that paints a fuller picture of Slone’s relentless efforts to gather data on the aliens. She’s been obsessed with driving them back all season, and though her efforts have not totally been in vain, she’s losing the battle. Still, she can’t stop now, and she’s enlisting your help when this challenge goes live on August 11 at 7 AM PT / 10 AM ET. Here’s where to place video cameras in Fortnite.
Fortnite Video Camera Locations – Week 10
There are three different locations you’ll need to travel to this week to complete this challenge, and unlike some other quests, you must visit all three at least once to complete the challenge. Thankfully, you don’t have to do it in one round, though it’s fine if you do, of course. You’ll first want to head to Retail Row and place a video camera on the southern hillside looking down into town.
Once you’ve done so, head west to the next town over. At Lazy Lake, the same logic applies. Slone is running a covert operation, so the camera will be on the northeastern hillside looking down into the town to capture the best evidence.
From there head southwest to Misty Meadows and look for the camera interaction location at the far east end, once more atop a northeastern hill, within this lakeside town. Placing a camera at all three spots in any order will complete this challenge for you and get you one step closer to finishing off the Week 10 challenges.
Fortnite video camera locations are spread across three locations.
Doctor Slone is hellbent on stopping the alien “trespassers,” but with Slurpy Swamp being abducted last week and more abductions likely on their way, it seems the Imagined Order’s boss is struggling to stay a step ahead of the invaders.
We’ve got about another month of Fortnite Season 7 to unravel before Season 8 premieres in September. Look to the skies this week not just for aliens, but for Superman too. Don’t forget to finish off the Rift Tour Quests while you’re at it.
As a whole, Fortnite Chapter 2 has thus far been defined by its massive crossovers and frequent in-game events, but the more recent trajectory for the game was pointing downward. Sure, engagement remained high and the game is reliably at or near the top of all platforms’ most-played games lists week in and week out, but consecutive swings-and-misses from Epic Games dating back to a few months ago had left me and some other fans wishing things were different.
Now, two-thirds of the way through a season that has done well to earn back some of that wavering fan trust, it was Ariana Grande who played the part of unlikely hero in rescuing Fortnite from its slow but noticeable decline.
In my mind, Fortnite’s losing streak started with Season 5. Following the immensely popular and Marvel-heavy Season 4, perhaps expectations were always going to be unfairly high, but Season 5 is widely considered a bad season even without the shadow of Iron Man and friends looming over it. While the inclusion of The Mandolorian as the Tier 1 battle pass skin made waves, the bright spots of the season really start and end there.
The center of the map was strangely barren, with the too-large Colossal Coliseum surrounded by hundreds of meters of sand and little else. It was surprisingly boring for a game that has for so long dazzled players time and time again with new, inventive locations each season. Making it worse, a new traversal system that sought to have players burrowing through the sand like a sandworm was broken a few times during the season for extended periods of time, leaving players vulnerable in this central wasteland of the Season 5 map. If you’re not one to build efficiently, this flaw in map design was unkind to you for days or weeks at a time.
The long-absent Butter Barn is missed by fans.
The season was light on exciting events and was the first in many months to end without the bang of an in-game event, though players did get their cinematic fix with the start of Season 6 and the Zero Point Finale, but the game felt like it was at its lowest point of Chapter 2.
Season 6 didn’t do a lot to course-correct either. The hunting-focused season brought some interesting new crafting and survival elements to the game, which exist in a limited form even today in Season 7, but map changes were once again lackluster, mostly removing places like Hunter’s Haven and the fan-favorite Butter Barn, but not replacing them with anything.
To its credit, Season 6 did remove the dry desert taking up much of the center portion of the map, but once more, the season as a whole felt like Fortnite was spinning its wheels. The most exciting parts of Seasons 5 and 6 were their numerous crossovers with characters like Kratos, Master Chief, and Lara Croft, but Fortnite’s best moments are when the community can come together and enjoy the game, not just its Item Shop. Personally, I didn’t miss a single weekly challenge or even most dailies during either season, but they became rote parts of my day. Looking back, I was completing challenges for the same reason I brush my teeth: because I was compelled to do so, not because I was excited
The slump continued with the springtime NBA crossover event, which saw fans team up to take on in-game challenges and represent their favorite NBA squads. But predictably, the event was won easily by the Lakers contingent, blowing out the competition with a final in-game score greater than the sum of the next four best-ranked teams. The event was flawed from the start and marked the first time I consciously dwelled on the slump the game was in.
Epic then followed that with the Cosmic Summer event, which doled out free cosmetics to players who participated in fan-made limited-time modes (LTMs). Frustratingly, these LTMs were all extremely tedious, in such a way that I was genuinely stunned to see the developer highlight them so prominently. Before Cosmic Summer, there wasn’t a Fortnite event I ever ignored, no matter how much I didn’t like its content, simply because I love completing challenges and earning free cosmetics.
But after dragging my feet through two of the game’s four LTMs during Cosmic Summer, I threw in the towel. I couldn’t bear to engage with the modes anymore–ice cream truck emote be damned. It seems silly to accuse Fortnite of a “slump” given its perpetually high engagement, but it’s all relative. Compared to where the game was a year ago, it felt like Fortnite was cooling off and ever so slowly losing its place in the zeitgeist.
The Cosmic Summer event locked cool, free cosmetics behind frustratingly bad LTMs.
The first half of Fortnite in 2021 left a hole in the hearts of players like me who adored Seasons 2-4 and today consider them the strongest run the game has ever seen, introducing adored characters like Meowscles, delivering incredible finales like the fight with Galactus, and displaying some of the biggest map overhauls to date like the Season 3 flood.
It was the longest drought of awesome new content the game had ever seen since its rise to dominance over three years ago. Then the Rift Tour happened.
Following weeks of rumors, Epic confirmed that popstar Ariana Grande would headline an in-game concert similar to last summer’s Travis Scott show. To be honest, I’d never heard an Ariana Grande song before, but knowing what Fortnite’s past in-game concerts looked like, I was hopeful that the Rift Tour would revitalize the game’s community-at-large, as well as my own love for everything Fortnite. I was not disappointed.
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Fortnite X Ariana Grande Rift Tour Concert Gameplay
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The visual spectacle on display was unique, exciting, and above all, enchanting. I shared the moment with my wife and son and all three of us were blown away. We ended up playing it multiple times across the weekend’s five showings. It stylishly transitioned from competitive surfing to floating among Seussian pink trees to an aerial battle with the Storm King himself, all before the headliner took the stage and impressed with a digital showcase featuring several of her songs. On some level, I became an Ariana Grande fan that day, just as the year prior gave me a newfound appreciation for Travis Scott.
Epic’s chief creative officer Donald Mustard often talks about the “blue ocean,” the limitless potential of a metaverse where people convene in real-time, digital spaces and live extensions of their lives in fantastical worlds. He says these concerts are just the start of the future of entertainment. I tend to believe we’ll get to such a place, but even if you think the metaverse is just the latest Silicon Valley pipe-dream, the Rift Tour itself can’t be overlooked as a marvel at the center of contemporary audiovisual pageantry.
It’s not like anything else you could see this year, not in-person or online, and most absurd of all: it was totally free. You didn’t need to own the battle pass to gain access, you didn’t need to buy the Ariana Grande skin to reserve a seat. You just had to download the game for free and join millions of others while the show unfolded live for the whole world. It’s these communal events that lift Fortnite to new heights, and the game was lacking in them for the whole year to date–and not for lack of trying.
While the bigwigs at virtually any other brand, perhaps even Netflix, would trade places with the Fortnite braintrust in a heartbeat, the game itself had suffered subtle but cascading whiffs for the majority of the year to date. But Ariana Grande smashed that narrative to pieces with the same diamond-encrusted mallet she used to warp players to new realities a half-dozen times during the Rift Tour.
Season 7, to its own credit, has been widely regarded as the fans’ most enjoyed season since Season 4–some would say even longer–and though we still have another month before Season 8 kicks off, the Rift Tour feels like the perfect way for Epic to regain its foothold on the live-service landscape and once again find itself as the topic of every lunch table when schools reconvene in a few weeks.
Epic makes headlines with each new season, but sometimes the excitement is proven to be more of a honeymoon period for fans, as it did in Seasons 5 and 6. If we’re to make way for the metaverse, its promise has to be one of more than just compulsory boxes being checked, logging on for in-game challenges, then moving on with our day. Season 7 and especially the Rift Tour are, in my opinion, the game’s proper return to form and set one of my favorite games back on course to keep players not just engaged, but excited.
Ahead of its release later this month, Netflix has launched the newest trailer for The Witcher: Nightmare of the Wolf. The animated series focuses on the journey of Vesemir, and this trailer is the biggest and best one yet in terms of getting a proper look at the series.
“Escaping from poverty to become a witcher, Vesemir slays monsters for coin and glory, but when a new menace rises, he must face the demons of his past,” reads a line from the show’s description.
Vesemir is voiced by Theo James, who voiced Hector in Netflix’s Castlevania series and played the character Four in the Divergent movie series.
In other news, Netflix just recently announced that The Witcher Season 2 will begin with an adaptation of the short story, A Grain of Truth, with Game of Thrones actor Kristofer Hivju playing Nivellen.
