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Up until now, folks have been attempting to define Deathloop via comparisons with a fairly broad list of existing games. Previous time loop games, assassination games, and highlights from developer Arkane’s own back catalogue have all come into the crosshairs. After a five-hour hands-on with Deathloop from the beginning of the game it’s certainly true these associations have merit – but it’s equally true they’re not really painting a complete picture of Arkane’s ambitious Groundhog Day murder marathon, as it’s a little different to what I expected.

Deathloop’s grimy, retro-futuristic ’60s espionage aesthetic makes a fabulous first impression, and it’s well-supported by some immediately excellent music and some great voice work from Colt actor Jason E. Kelly. Kelly’s dialogue needs to do a fair bit of heavy-lifting – particularly as Deathloop sets up its main mystery – and imbuing his delivery with a cocktail of indignant confusion mixed with otherwise gung-ho enthusiasm successfully put me in Colt’s corner straight away. I like him, and that’s always a good first step.

Deathloop’s premise is simple: to break out of a 24-hour time loop, main man Colt must kill the eight enigmatic ‘Visionaries’ that run the creepy island of Blackreef in a single day. Die, or fail to get all eight, and the day starts all over again – and everyone you’ve shot, stabbed, or kicked off a cliff is resurrected. IGN’s detailed hands-on preview of this initial slice of Deathloop features a spoiler-free discussion regarding the hunt for one particular target.

Either way, after roughly five hours with the game it’s now very clear that killing all eight targets in one day isn’t going to be quite as straightforward as it sounds. Four times of day and four different environments – but double the targets – means Colt needs to uncover ways to bop off multiple targets in each location on a single visit.

The fact that there’s no way to save your progress while mid-mission is an interesting way to force players to truly lean into the experimentative world of a hypothetical time-loop. Messed up? Deal with it and keep going, or give up and try the day over again. Colt’s special ability to die twice in a level before a third death resets the day for good blunts just enough of the risk to allow me to use a little trial and error, but it only takes two small mistakes to leave Colt skating on very thin ice until I decide to leave a map.

However, it didn’t take long for Deathloop to begin to depart from some of the more common press comparisons I’ve heard to date – especially with Io Interactive’s Hitman series. It’s true that both thrive on repetition within their murder sandboxes; Hitman encourages return visits to its maps via its fun reward system, and Deathloop bakes them into the narrative itself (multiple visits to the maps are required to uncover clues, hidden locations, plus upgrades and other powerful weapons). At the five-hour mark they’re otherwise quite different, especially in terms of their approaches to stealth and the density of NPCs. I’ll stress none of this really seems to reflect poorly on Deathloop, which seems very good so far. Movement and combat in particular feels very refined and I love Colt’s violent kick move. It’s just not as closely aligned with Io’s assassination classics as some of the initial reporting led me to believe.

Of course, another element of Deathloop is the ability to play not only as Colt, but as his rival Julianna. While Colt’s wish is to break the loop by killing the island’s eight Visionaries, Julianna’s role is is to kill Colt.

According to Arkane, choosing to play as Julianna will inject you into someone else’s game, allowing you to hunt down and kill them while they’re busy trying to unravel Deathloop’s central mystery as Colt. For the purposes of this preview, only Colt could be used, and human players were unable to enter our games as Julianna. Only AI-controlled Juliannas invaded my playthrough, and she appeared as a target just twice in the roughly five hours I played. The AI Julianna doesn’t seem too tricky to take down with a potent weapon; she’s a little tougher than standard enemies but not egregiously so.

It is very important to note that Deathloop can be played entirely solo, blocking strangers (or friends) from gategrashing your game and ruining your session. So, yes, you can most definitely play Deathloop and exclusively only ever deal with an AI-controlled Julianna. What’s confounding me a bit, however, is that I can’t really fathom why anybody would choose otherwise. That is, after a decent stint of Deathloop – including a couple of consecutive runs that ended in slightly irritating deaths achingly close to the objective I’d set for myself – it’s entirely beyond me why anyone would ever opt to allow strangers to enter their game.

While I’ve enjoyed picking at the initial threads of Deathloop’s mystery and patiently skulking through the environments, I can just see no joy whatsoever in letting Arkane airdrop a total stranger into my game to potentially wreck everything I’d achieved that day – especially if it meant losing weapons and power-up trinkets I hadn’t yet protected from vanishing when the loop resets. I also can’t see how it would be fun to do it to someone else – especially a friend. Granted, I’m a strict single-player evangelist, but it seems roughly equivalent to bursting into a mate’s house and pulling their PS5’s power plug out of the wall before they have a chance to save their progress. Arkane has established that Deathloop’s PvP wasn’t really conceived with competitive play in mind, so I’ll wait until I’ve seen the PvP in action, but I’m not quite grasping the appeal of this second pillar of Deathloop’s package. Maybe I’m not a big enough jerk.

Fortunately, there isn’t long to wait – Deathloop arrives on PC and PS5 next month, on September 14 – but for now I feel like this may be a mystery I’ll seek to solve solo.

Luke is Games Editor at IGN’s Sydney office. You can find him on Twitter every few days @MrLukeReilly.

Full SPOILERS ahead for Candyman!

Nia DaCosta’s Candyman is both a sequel and a relaunch. While it pays homage to the original films, it also breaks from the trends they established, and builds to a thrilling conclusion that feels both unexpected yet completely fitting.

What happens in the climax might seem complicated at first, given the surprising way it’s set in motion. The film is far from straightforward, but the way its thematic pieces fall in place results not only in a great ending to the movie but a great new beginning for the Candyman series.

Candyman: Why Does Burke Kidnap Anthony?

Slasher movies are no strangers to last-minute villain reveals, and Colman Domingo’s Burke is a sure candidate, between his eerie entrance and his in-depth knowledge of Candyman. Towards the end of the film, he finds Anthony McCoy (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) in a fugue state and decides to turn him into a version of Candyman in full view of his girlfriend Brianna (Teyonah Parris) by sawing off his arm, replacing it with a meat-hook, and dressing him up in a familiar brown coat before calling the police. However, his reasons aren’t as simple as bloodlust or cult-like villain worship.

DaCosta’s soft reboot returns to the setting of the first film — the now condemned Cabrini-Green housing project — whose poor Black community has been forced out so developers can swoop in. Burke is one of its last remaining residents, and framing Anthony is his last-ditch attempt to prevent it from being gentrified. According to Burke’s twisted logic, if there turns out to be another Candyman killer in the project, people might sour on the neighborhood and keep their distance.

Burke is a keeper of myths, and while Candyman has fallen out of the collective memory, he carries the story with him. Before the film cuts to the Church where he holds Anthony and Brianna captive, we’re shown a flashback in which he watches his sister die after summoning the “original” Candyman — Daniel Robitaille (Tony Todd), who was lynched in the 1890s for loving a white woman — by saying his name in a mirror. As a child, Burke also witnessed the police beat an innocent man to death, Sherman Fields, who resembled Candyman and who was accused of putting razor blades in children’s candy. Burke was the only bystander in either case, but as he prepares to mold Anthony in Candyman’s image, he tells Brianna: “Now we have a witness.”

Burke knows both these stories intimately — the supernatural bloodshed and the real violence that permeates his community — though he’s had to shoulder their trauma alone. To him, they’re part of the same legacy, and a story that keeps repeating itself throughout history, with different “Candymen’” becoming victims of racist violence, and that violence returning from beyond the grave to kill innocent people, like his sister. Burke has, in a way, succumbed to this cyclical reality, and to him, perpetuating the urban legend is the only way to shield his neighborhood from a vicious outside world.

Candyman: What Happened to Anthony?

Anthony, upon being framed by Burke, is shot dead by Chicago PD in front of Brianna. As the cops intimidate Brianna into telling their version of the story, she summons Candyman by saying his name five times. When this spirit first appears, he’s surrounded by a swarm of honeybees — the way Robitaille was tortured before being killed — but he looks and sounds like Anthony.

Anthony, who was abducted by Robitaille as a baby in the original Candyman (1992), spends most of the film rediscovering his own history. At first, the myth is just material for his canvas, but it soon begins to consume him, not just artistically, but physically too. As his body starts to rot, he begins to resemble Robitaille’s grotesque, corpse-like appearance in previous films. Whether he likes it or not, he is part of the Candyman story — not just because he appeared in the first film, but because he’s tethered to America’s deep history of racism no matter how much he tries to escape it.

When Anthony returns to Cabrini-Green, where he lived as a baby, Burke considers this to be “perfect symmetry” — an inevitable echo, in which Burke also plays a part by kidnapping Anthony, the way Candyman once did. Burke and Anthony wear similar brown coats, just like several Black characters who made up different “versions” of Candyman over the years, all of whom suffered at the hands of white supremacy. By the end of the film, both Burke and Anthony symbolize the legacy of Candyman, and the pain it represents for the people of Cabrini-Green. Anthony is even absorbed into this history, and he becomes one with Candyman’s vengeful form.

Will There be a Candyman Sequel?

After Candyman kills the officers responsible for Anthony’s death, he briefly reveals his face to Brianna. We then see a returning Tony Todd in all his terrifying splendor, as he instructs her: “Tell everyone.”

The new sequel doesn’t discard any of the series’ mythology, but it builds on it from a new perspective. DaCosta is the first Black filmmaker to helm Candyman, and while previous films all centered on Robitaille haunting white women, the 2021 movie takes closer aim at the story of his murder — and of similar murders over the years — and re-works him into a spirit of vengeance. Candyman still takes innocent lives, but when he flays the police officers in the climax, Anthony’s voice emanates from behind the swarm; “They will say I shed innocent blood,” he whispers. “You are far from innocent.”

These updates to the character don’t retroactively change the previous films — in which white filmmakers told stories of white protagonists, who were outsiders to the racism in Robitaille’s past — however, the new movie captures Candyman’s actions from a brand new perspective. When Robitaille killed a policeman in the second film, Candyman: Farewell to the Flesh (1995), no thematic connections were drawn between white supremacy and structural police violence. However, a story in which Black perspectives are central, and in which white supremacist violence is still alive and well, is a vital realignment of what Candyman is, and perhaps, what he should have always been. When Robitaille tells Brianna to “tell everyone,” he not only wants his legend to live on and for people to summon him as they did in prior films, but he also wants this version of his story told, one that harkens back to his painful origins.

When the film ends, Candyman is neither just Daniel Robitaille nor just Anthony McCoy. He is both of them — and more. He is a symbol of all the Black victims Burke mentions, who died at the hands of white supremacy, and if the series continues under Jordan Peele’s Monkeypaw Productions, this is who Candyman is likely to be. The character was always designed to reflect a violent past, but now, he embodies the full scope of that history as it bleeds into the present and he kills with righteous fury.

What did you think of the new Candyman movie and its ending? Let us know in the comments. And for more on the film, check out our Candyman review and watch the director and cast on the legacy and meaning of Candyman.

Halo Infinite Collector’s Edition SteelBook is now available to preorder for £54.99 (see it at Amazon). This includes a full copy of the game on Xbox Series X/S, and Xbox One, alongside a unique limited edition SteelBook case. Halo Infinite will launch on December 8, 2021.

Not only that, but the Halo Infinite Elite Series 2 Controller (see it at Amazon) is now also available to preorder at Amazon for £179.99. This comes out a little earlier than the game, on November 15.

Halo Infinite SteelBook Collector’s Edition Preorders Now Live

Preorder Halo Infinite Limited Edition Xbox Elite 2 Controller in the UK

Where to Preorder Halo Infinite Xbox Series X in the UK

Extra 30% Off at Checkout on Apple AirPods and More

Fire TV 4K Stick down to £29.99 (was £49.99)

International VPN Awareness Month – NordVPN Deals

Access US Netflix and protect your data with this handy VPN deal.

Robert Anderson is a deals expert and Commerce Editor for IGN. You can follow him @robertliam21 on Twitter.

Survival games are built on the back of risk management. They present you with objectives, and they dare you to overreach in your efforts to achieve them. They cascade their challenges upon one another. You are hungry, and so you need food. But to acquire food, you’ll need a weapon to hunt with. You’ll need a fire to cook the meat with. You’ll need shelter for the fire. You’ll need tools to create shelter with, and a space to put it, and you’ll need water and oxygen and storage and… Before you know it, you’re juggling more elements than a circus performer at a science museum. And in the great survival games, you won’t even realise how many things you’re keeping in the air until hubris kicks in, you overreach and it all comes crashing down.

It’s still early days for Rocketwerkz’ Icarus — it enters public beta this weekend (learn more on the official site) — but the New Zealand-based developer’s survival game already feels like it’s tapping into that intricate balancing act, and its session-based gameplay provides ample opportunity for players to be foiled by their own pride.

Superficially it’s like any other survival game. You land on the planet (Icarus itself), you do survival things, you try to live. But thanks to sessions, Icarus is able to change the parameters of your drop each time you try a new prospect. While early on you might take easy prospects in safe areas, later your drops might involve higher stakes, with tighter timeframes.

“I think that simultaneously the worst and best part of Icarus as a project is its session-based nature,” Dean Hall, founder of Rocketwerkz, says of sessions. “It’s the worst part because it’s difficult to explain. And you should never try and sell something that people need but they don’t want. But it’s the best part because it’s the solution to a lot of problems. So if we can figure out how to actually explain to people succinctly its true value in a way where they understand and they agree with the value proposition of session-based survival in a PvE context, then I think we win, and we are able to solve their problem.

“And I know it can seem a little paradoxical to say, ‘okay, it’s a crafting and building game but in a temporary session.’ But actually, if you look at it, all your game sessions are temporary. When you go in and play Valheim, when you go to kill Bonemass, you build a little base [near the boss fight] and many times you’ll never visit that base again. Or in Ark — you’ll play on the same server for two or three weeks and there’ll be a wipe. Rust regularly wipes. These are games that already do sessions, they’re just not calling them sessions.

“What we’re trying to do is really define what your task is for a session. And by doing that, by having an endpoint, we have a clear failure mode that you can work against. And from there we’re able to build on that a scaffold of progression between those sessions. So I think in reality, we’re just sort of putting a structure around what already exists.”

In the early part of the beta it seems sessions will be long — 21 days is where the countdown currently begins, and it ticks down whether you’re in the game or not. But Rocketwerkz can create different prospects for different skill levels.

“When we started out, we thought that beginner players would want very short drops, and experienced players would be the ones playing the game over weeks and weeks,” Hall explains. “We’ve actually found that it’s probably the inverse. Later on when you have very high level characters, you probably want to go gamble them all. Take on whatever scenarios we could throw at you, maybe focusing on throughput and getting in and out very fast, using vehicles and all these other things like that. But early on, you really want the time to breathe, and explore and develop your character and stuff.”

Short drop or long, when you land, there’s no time to lose. Icarus is a daunting planet, rife with all manner of nasty pitfalls for the unwary. In the case of my recent hands-on, I landed on the planet in the middle of a storm, a raging weather event that wreaks havoc, tearing down trees and lighting spot fires, and whipping players with wind and dust and debris. You take exposure damage just being out in a storm, so I needed to heavily prioritise shelter.

Luckily, two members of the Rocketwerkz team were on the same prospect, and they knew just what to do, carving a hole in a nearby stone outcropping and letting us huddle in place until the storm ended.

Despite battle royale fatigue inching its way into the collective gaming consciousness in recent years, Naraka: Bladepoint is proof that the last-fighter-standing formula still has loads of unexplored potential. This high-flying third-person brawler blends the tight sword clashes of Soul Calibur with the frantic supply gathering and ever-constricting circle of Apex Legends to glorious results. After sinking 35 hours into the full release, its superb melee combat and exhilarating gravity-defying antics are still making me grin, even if irritating network connection issues and lifeless bot matches sometimes hinder the fun. Naraka: Bladepoint isn’t afraid to punish you for not respecting its mountainous skill ceiling, but once you find your footing, putting it down is a challenge in and of itself.

In standard battle royale fashion, Naraka: Bladepoint pits 60 combatants against each other on a war-torn isle, each controlling one of seven unique heroes either in teams of three or solo. Instead of scavenging for assault rifles or bullet-proof kevlar, however, you’ll search for spears, daggers, katanas, and tons more sharp-as-steel lethal instruments along with breastplates and magical trinkets called Souljades that add passive buffs. The loot-and-scoot way of life will be familiar to anyone that’s played Fortnite or Call Of Duty: Warzone before, but the similarities end once the time comes to put up your dukes. Battling other players means engaging in wild, up-close brawls that flow more like a fighting game than any battle royale.

From the instant an opponent parried my first sword swipe, sending me face-down into the dirt, I knew Naraka: Bladepoint took a healthy degree of skill to “get good” at. Charging into battle with no plan in mind against players that know what they’re doing will almost certainly yield similarly humbling results, as frantically swinging melee attacks leaves you open to counter attacks and air juggles. Taking time to learn the differences between standard, special, combo, and charged attacks while keeping an eye on your weapon and armor durability (which depletes quickly) is vital to success. It is equally important to monitor the competition’s body language, waiting for the perfect opening to cut them down. Once I got into Naraka: Bladepoint’s lighting-fast rhythm and strategic duels, though, I started having an absolute ball parrying and dodging with the best of them. Those initial encounters may have been a smidge embarrassing, but it’s all part of the learning process, and sticking with it will yield endless hours of breathless yet rewarding brawls.

There are also ranged weapons like bows, muskets, and hilariously gargantuan flamethrowers to find if popping folks from a safe distance is more your thing. This isn’t a shooter though, and killing enemy players solely through those means is tricky. In my experience, crossbows and the like are better for last hitting someone trying to flee after a close-range tussle rather than an entirely different means of fighting. Still, proficiency with them can come in handy, especially during team fights when you might be able to more safely fire shots while your allies take all the heat.

Practice in all of Naraka: Bladepoint’s various disciplines pays off big time once you hop into trios. Initially, I was skeptical that any 3v3 scenario would devolve into a mess of crane kicks and spear stabs. In practice, however, they’re more akin to the tactical team fights of League Of Legends than a lawless royal rumble. Coordinating your hero’s unique abilities along with those of a teammate can lead to diabolically amusing results. My favorite hero thus far is Matari, a stealthy assassin that can vanish and teleport around the battlefield. In an ideal scenario, I’d get friends to charge right at an opposing team while I skulked around behind them, unleashing vicious combos before they knew what happened. That plan of attack doesn’t always work, of course, and in those moments I could (hopefully) dart away with a blink, or hope my buddy could intervene as Tianhai, a tanky hero able to soak up excess damage once he transforms into a giant beast called the Vajra. The hero toolkits are so diverse and meld together so well that I’m sure we’ll see creative matchups for months to come.

If you’re someone who loves a good backstory to their multiplayer avatar, though, it might be best to look elsewhere. Even after using Matari for hours upon hours, I couldn’t tell you a single thing about her personality. Everyone of her mid-match quips is woefully cliche or lacking any enthusiastic delivery, and none of the other heroes fair much better. Sure, there are little snippets of lore sprinkled throughout the menus, but it’s always dry exposition with almost no flavor. With how enjoyable and expressive heroes are in battle, I wish there was more to their stories.

Despite how joyous Naraka: Bladepoint’s deep melee fights against other players are, however, bots can suck the fun right out of it. For your first few hours of ranked play, you’ll almost exclusively face dullard AI-controlled adversaries that barely put up a fight. They’ll happily eat a katana to the face and often don’t bother putting up a counter-attack of their own. Developer 24 Entertainment insists that bot matches exist to ease new players into Naraka: Bladepoint since the skill ceiling is so high, but you’ll likely learn next to nothing from these insipid encounters. I prefer to get blitzed by an actual person, learning from what I did wrong, then mindlessly wail on idiotic bots – and while other games have been known to use a similar tactic to start, you’ll face bots for much longer here with no warning.

If nothing else, at least bot matches allowed me to gracefully swing about the map without a care in the world thanks to how incredibly scalable Naraka: Bladepoint’s terrain is. It doesn’t matter if you’re marching up tiny hills or leaping up towering cliffsides — if it’s within sight, you can climb it, especially once grappling hooks come into the equation. Like every other item, they’re found throughout the map and are as important as healing herbs or the finest blade. There were several instances where I forgot to fight anyone because hook-shotting from treetop to treetop was so blissful, and as long as your grappling hook reserves are full, you’ll never have to touch the ground. It ends up feeling like if Spider-Man threw in some wonderfully overly dramatic Naruto landing poses every once and a while.

But no matter if you’re swinging across the heavens or locking horns with an enemy, Naraka: Bladepoint can fall apart at the seams if the servers are acting up. Now, while that’s true of almost any online multiplayer romp, it’s especially noticeable here when so much of Naraka: Bladepoint relies on pixel-perfect precision. Frustration sets in fast when a parry maneuver goes unnoticed due to lag, but thankfully connection woes have been a pretty infrequent since its admittedly rocky release day. Hopefully that stability will remain from here on out.

The Skate franchise is officially coming to PC. The next game in the Electronic Arts franchise will launch on PC in addition to consoles.

Electronic Arts and Full Circle developers shared a video on Twitter to accompany the announcement, posting footage of a skateboarder performing a kickflip over a computer monitor. The display turns on to reveal the Skate logo.

PC_confirmation.exe pic.twitter.com/ubLRKoCw9P

— skate. (@skateEA) August 26, 2021

The Skate franchise had been a console-exclusive series until this point. The first three games launched on PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. The series has been dormant since Skate 3’s launch in 2010, though developers shared a behind-the-scenes teaser last month to assure fans that the fourth Skate game is still in development.

Details about the upcoming Skate game are still sparse. An official title hasn’t been revealed yet. However, EA’s trailer from last month teases an open-world design akin to the seamless downhill map of Skate 2.

The new Skate game was announced back at EA Play in June 2020. EA later shared that Full Circle, the new studio behind the game, was launched for the express purpose of continuing the Skate series. For about the next Skate game, read our article explaining how the upcoming sequel could feature an emphasis on user-generated content.

J. Kim Murphy is a freelance entertainment writer.