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Hollow Knight developer Team Cherry has announced a full sequel that’s planned for release on Nintendo Switch and PC. Hollow Knight: Silksong was originally DLC for the first game funded through a Kickstarter stretch goal. It would allow players to take control of supporting character Hornet.

However, instead of building off the original Hollow Knight to offer a sub-chapter or a character swapping mechanic, Team Cherry has opted to take the character to a new location in her own game. “As we kept going and kicking around ideas, the idea of having Hornet going on an adventure in a whole new kingdom was an interesting idea to us,” co-director William Pellen said in a candid developer diary. “The other part is we have no idea how to make DLC… It seems like a weirdly complicated thing,” added Ari Gibson.

According to the co-directors, Silksong is a “huge game” and it’s still growing. Further information about the sequel’s inception can be found on the developer’s official website: “Almost from the very start, Hornet’s adventure was intended to take place in a new land, but as we dove in, it quickly became too large and too unique to stay a DLC, as initially planned. We do know that makes the wait a little longer, but we think the final, fresh world you’ll get to explore is worth it.

Those that backed the Hollow Knight Kickstarter will be be given a copy of Hollow Knight: Silk Song at no additional cost. “Any backer of the game from the $10AUD and above tiers can choose to receive their copy of Hollow Knight: Silksong free on either PC or Nintendo Switch, at launch,” Team Cherry said. “We’ll shoot out a simple survey as we get closer to release to find out which version you’d like to receive.

“Higher tier backers who received multiple copies of Hollow Knight will also receive multiple copies of Hollow Knight: Silksong, the same rules apply as for Hollow Knight. You can elect for your primary copy on either Nintendo Switch or PC, with all additional copies as PC versions.”

Although Hollow Knight: Silksong has only been announced for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Nintendo Switch, Team Cherry has said “more platforms may happen.” The developer noted, however, that it is still made up of just three people. It has also broken down what players can expect from Silksong in a handy list that you can see below.

• Discover a whole new kingdom: Explore coral forests, mossy grottos, gilded cities and misted moors as you ascend to the shining citadel at the top of the world.
• Engage in lethal acrobatic action: Wield a whole new suite of nimble moves as you dance between foes in deadly, beautiful combat.
• Craft powerful tools: Master an ever-expanding arsenal of weapons, traps and mechanisms to confound your enemies and explore new heights.
• Solve shocking quests: Hunt down rare beasts, unearth ancient mysteries and search for lost treasures to fulfil the wishes of the downtrodden and restore the kingdom’s hope. Prepare for the unexpected!
• Face over 150 all-new foes: Beasts and hunters, assassins and kings, monsters and knights – defeat them all with bravery and skill!
• Experience a stunning orchestral score: Hollow Knight’s award-winning composer, Christopher Larkin, returns to bring melancholy melodies, symphonic strings and heart-thumping, soul strumming boss themes to the adventure.
• Challenge Silk Soul mode: Once you conquer the game, test your skills in an all-new mode that spins the game into a unique, challenging experience.

In GameSpot’s Hollow Knight review, Alessandro Barbosa awarded the game a 9/10. “Hollow Knight feels exceptional because so many of its smaller, expertly designed parts fit so well together over an extraordinarily long adventure that could easily have fallen prey to poor pacing.

“But its expansive enemy roster and routinely surprising areas and platforming challenges ensure that your journey through this fallen bug kingdom is one you’re unlikely to forget. Hollow Knight offers a surprisingly large and harrowing adventure, and it’s a treat that every bit of it is just as divine as that last.”

Editor’s note: This review in progress covers only the campaign portion of Crackdown 3. We will be updating and finalizing the review once we have access to the Wrecking Zone multiplayer mode and have spent sufficient time with it. Keep an eye out for the final review in the coming days.

It’s been a long wait for Crackdown 3. Delays can be a positive thing, offering developers time to refine and polish a game. In other cases, it can result in what feels like a dated experience. At least in terms of its campaign–we don’t have access to the Wrecking Zone multiplayer mode yet–Crackdown 3 firmly falls in the latter category, offering some amusement but little in the way of interesting new ideas or fun things to do. It’s large and bombastic, with plenty of chaos and collateral damage, but few redeeming values–like a video game version of Man of Steel.

You play as a superpowered member of The Agency who is sent into a city to dispense justice as you systematically eliminate the comically evil members of a nefarious evil corporation. You start out relatively weak but progressively grow in power, jumping higher and gaining the ability to perform ground pounds, pick up and throw increasingly heavy objects, and so on. Enemy factions are responsible for certain aspects of the criminal operation, such as manufacturing a sort of poison, and taking them out weakens that area and makes your ultimate goal of taking down the big bad leader more feasible. There will be collateral damage along the way that is frowned upon–kill too many innocents, and a local militia puts up a halfhearted effort to put you down–but is soon forgotten. Yes, I’m describing Crackdown 3, not its 2007 progenitor.

It would be fine for this to feel so familiar if the action itself were more engaging. The core of collecting orbs (to level up your agility and jump height) and wreaking havoc remains enjoyable, but it isn’t strong enough to make up for Crackdown 3’s numerous shortcomings. From the moment you gain control of your character, it’s hard to shake the sense that this doesn’t feel like a game from 2019. Draw distance aside, the visuals are underwhelming, leaning too heavily on recreating the simple cel-shaded look of past Crackdown games. The one technological advancement the game may have to boast about–large-scale destruction, powered by Microsoft’s Azure cloud servers–is reserved entirely for the online Wrecking Zone mode, which we have not yet gotten to try in the full game. There’s no meaningful destruction in the campaign, and the end result is a world that feels lifeless, as if some key element of it is missing.

The game’s opening takes place in a small area of the city and lays out the basic structure of your goals: Take over a particular boss’s various bases to locate him or her and then complete a boss fight, which, in most cases, is a pretty standard encounter where the enemy has more health than usual. This tutorial is somewhat of an off-putting start; for a game about freedom and doing badass superhero things, you’re stuck in a tightly confined area, underpowered, and tasked with a goal that entails killing some enemies and then removing a pair of batteries powering a propaganda station. Before long, the game opens up and you’re given access to the full city and a wider selection of objectives to tackle, at which point there’s some hope that the newfound freedom and variety will provide the excitement that’s lacking in this early area.

The problem is, what you do in that opening section is representative of the entire game; there’s very little variety to speak of. Ostensibly, each of the different factions presents its own unique challenges and objectives for you to complete. Yet it quickly becomes apparent that what distinguishes them are only surface-level details. No matter the faction, you’re always mindlessly shooting an endless wave of foes as you work your way toward objective markers. Once you’re there, you’ll usually hold a button. Sometimes you’ll have glowing targets to shoot. For a certain objective, you have to shoot a piece of machinery or throw a rock underneath it (always two times) to destroy it. After multiple hours of this, the action begins to bleed together. All of these bases you complete are just another box you can check off the to-do list, rather than a satisfying challenge you look forward to dealing with. I suffered a crash midway through the game that might have resulted in me losing some small amount of progress, but with how same-y many of the objectives are, I honestly wasn’t sure if I was repeating one I had already completed. One of the major criticisms of the original Crackdown was a lack of things to do, and while there might be more here on paper, far too much of it feels like filler, rather than worthwhile missions.

Interesting enemies could have made these rote objectives more exciting, but they too suffer from a lack of diversity. There are different archetypes with their own attack patterns, but they do little to shake up the action, even if some do fly, have shields, rush at you, or pilot mechs. Snipers, due to the heavy damage they inflict, were the only enemies that prompted me to break from my otherwise uniform approach of attacking whatever was closest to me. Weapons have certain types of targets they’re more or less effective against, but certain guns are so powerful that I found little need carefully evaluate what I was using. You move from one objective on the map to the next, hold down the trigger to lock on to enemies, hope it picks the target you want (not always a given), and then blast away.

it’s just sort of a constant white noise, like you’re taking a weed wacker at whatever is in front of you

And that’s okay. Crackdown 3 isn’t a game where you should need to carefully consider your loadout and the precise manner in which you need to approach a fight; you’re supposed to be a superhero who can dominate whatever is in front of you. But the combination of stale objectives and cannon-fodder enemies makes combat mindless and, at times, even boring, which is strange for a game filled with explosions and enemies flying off of rooftops. If you were to chart the excitement of playing through the campaign, there would be few peaks or valleys; it’s just sort of a constant white noise, like you’re taking a weed wacker at whatever is in front of you. It’s not until much further into the game that you gain the weapons (like a gun that creates black holes) and high-level abilities (like being able to pick up and throw tanks) that make combat more entertaining. By that point, the repetitive goals and encounters have long since become stale. Making your way up the skyscrapers that serve as headquarters for the final few bosses provides some of the only memorable combat sequences, but these only serve to emphasize how rote so much of the game is otherwise.

Outside of the core objectives, there is some fun to be had. Stunt rings that require you to drive a vehicle through them are an amusing challenge, even if the solution is often to rely on your transforming vehicle’s ability to jump into the air. (Your Agency car can be summoned at almost any time and transforms into various forms, which is a cool concept that’s spoiled by the poor driving controls that make it feel like you’re riding across a sheet of ice.) Rooftop races that have you going from checkpoint to checkpoint on foot, often by leaping from one building to the next, are a thrill. Likewise, climbing puzzles that have you ascend tall structures make for a chest-pounding activity. Just be sure to do those as soon as you meet the recommended agility level designated on the map; wait too long, and the satisfying rush of landing a difficult jump is gone due to your ability to skip obstacles with massive leaps.

Co-op multiplayer improves things across the board, letting you race against a friend and engage in general shenanigans. The old Crackdown standby of picking up someone driving a car and throwing it–whether to help them reach a distant goal or simply to doom them–is a hilarious way to interact with another player, and it’s nice that rooftop races can be a competitive activity. But all of this only masks the underlying problems of the game; the action is just as repetitive, and I found myself wishing my partner and I had something worth doing together. Still, co-op is easily the best way to play the campaign.

Leaping high through the air across rooftops and collecting orbs–which still feature one of the all-time great sound effects–is fun and rewarding, because that pursuit has a direct correlation to further improving your jump height. Lifting large objects and chucking them at foes is likewise an entertaining alternative to typical gunfights. Just like in its predecessors, these two superpowers are the primary source of what entertainment there is to be had in Crackdown 3. But it soon it becomes apparent that the campaign has little new to offer. It certainly delivers on letting you blow things up and jump around the city. However, a dozen years after the first Crackdown offered that same experience but failed to provide you with enough interesting content surrounding that, it’s truly disappointing to see this latest iteration suffer from the very same problems.

We’ll finalize this review once we have access to Wrecking Zone and have had time to put it through its paces.

Fortnite developer Epic Games is getting into the Valentine’s Day spirit with an event called “#ShareTheLove Valentine’s Surprise.” As part of this, it is launching a series of challenges which, if completed, will unlock a free Battle Pass for Season 8 of the game.

“Everyone who completes 13 free Overtime Challenges by February 27 will receive the upcoming Season 8 Battle Pass for free,” Epic explains on the Fortnite website. “If you don’t have an outfit, now is your chance to get several for free. With the Battle Pass, you’ll receive two Season 8 Outfits instantly and you can earn up to five more. Save your V-Bucks, this one’s on us.”

This is quite a big deal, as the Fortnite Battle Pass enables players to unlock a huge variety of cosmetics that can be used to customize their character. Additionally, it grants owners access to an exclusive set of weekly challenges, which are crucial to levelling up the Battle Pass and getting those cosmetics quicker.

The first set of Overtime Challenges that can be be completed to work towards that free Fortnite Season 8 Battle Pass are now available in the game, and will require players to spend some time in the Creative mode, hunt for chests or ammo boxes, and play with a friend in duos. Learn more about them and see the full list of Overtime Challenges here.

Season 7’s challenges may be over, but there’s still time to get any uncompleted ones you have done before Season 8 launches. If you need a helping hand, take a look at our complete Fortnite Season 7 challenges roundup, which compiles all the tips and guides we’ve written for Season 7’s trickier challenges.

A rumor popped up today that claimed Rian Johnson would no longer work on the previously announced new Star Wars trilogy. However, that’s a bunch of baloney.

Johnson himself clarified on Twitter that he’s still working on the new trilogy of Star Wars movies that will follow Episode 9 later this year. “No, it isn’t true,” he said of the rumors.

The rumour seemed to stem from the site SuperBroMovies. Responding to the origin of the rumour, Johnson said he’s shooting down the rumor “with all due respect to the movie bros, who I’m sure are lovely kind bros with good fraternal intentions.”

Discussing the new trilogy last year, Johnson said the films will feature “new characters, new places.” He said Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy responded positively to his ideas. While Johnson will oversee the story for the three films, he may not direct all of them.

Johnson directed 2017’s The Last Jedi, which was the second of three films in the new trilogy that began with 2015’s The Force Awakens and wraps up with this December’s Episode IX. The Last Jedi made more than $1.33 billion at the worldwide box office.

In addition to the new trilogy of Star Wars films, Johnson is writing and directing the mysterious movie Knives Out featuring Daniel Craig, Michael Shannon, Chris Evans, and Toni Collette.

Jump Force is a celebration of 50 years of Weekly Shonen Jump manga, featuring nearly four dozen fighters from 16 of the magazine’s most iconic stories. Bandai Namco’s arena tag-team fighting game borrows plenty of elements from its source materials, for better and worse. Although Jump Force’s campaign story drags on for way too long and ignores what could have been interesting character interactions in favor of repeated excuses for everyone to punch the crap out of each other, its combat is an enjoyable dance between two teams of fighters–thanks to the game’s excellent mechanics and flashy visuals.

In Jump Force, you’re an ordinary human who’s caught up in a warzone when the Dragon Ball, One Piece, and Naruto universes collide into our world and bring their assortment of heroes and villains with them. After being mortally wounded by Frieza, you’re resurrected as a hero capable of learning the powers, skills, and abilities of Shonen Jump’s characters, and you decide to join Goku, Luffy, and Naruto’s Jump Force of allies in order to fix everyone’s broken world. What follows is a fairly stereotypical shonen affair, with your character growing stronger over time, enemies and friends switching sides, and a mysterious evil working behind the scenes. Like most fighting games, there’s not a single problem you don’t ultimately just fix with your fists, from deciding team leader to knocking sense into those who have been corrupted by the same evil forces responsible for everyone’s worlds colliding with one another.

There’s a decent story in Jump Force, but it’s buried beneath a second act that goes on for far too long. After getting acquainted with your new allies, the game tasks you with responding to threats around the globe, as well as the recruitment of any additional heroes who’ve managed to stumble into our world from their respective universes. Character models during cutscenes are all rather cookie-cutter, as everyone stands in the same position throughout the story, only stiffly moving their mouths and occasionally blinking. The actual story moves with the same awkwardly slow pace, and it doesn’t explain what’s going on with everyone’s worlds or what the villains’ motivations are until the third act, so you play through most of the game without any idea as to what you’re really fighting against. Not being able to skip cutscenes is also rather annoying, as exiting out of a mission for any reason–such as buying more items to use in combat–has you watch the same 40- to 90-second scene again.

There are brief snippets where you can see how a side story might have helped flesh out the characters, which in turn could have been a good incentive to keep pushing forward through the campaign. For example, Boruto recognizes a sadness behind the eyes of My Hero Academia’s Midoriya and confides with the young hero that he knows how hard it is to live up to the ideal of father figures. But the game breezes past moments like this in order to get to the next fight.

Thankfully, those fights are a blast to play. Every combatant comes equipped with an assortment of attacks, blocks, grabs, counters, and dodges that operate in a rock-paper-scissors system. Combat is fairly accessible, and it doesn’t take long to understand how the basic mechanics work. However, with over 40 playable fighters, it takes time to get a handle on the entire roster’s assortment of strengths and weaknesses, giving you plenty of reason to keep playing. Each fighter has four distinct and unique special attacks as well. Even though these special moves can be broken down into one of seven different types–short-range, dashing, counter, area-of-effect, long-range, shield, or buff–each fighter handles quite differently. If you’ve read the manga that these characters come from, you already have a fairly good idea as to what most of these iconic moves are and how they behave, but you’ll still have to practice with each fighter to get a grasp of what every move can do.

Every attack, basic or advanced, can be avoided in some way–whether via blocking, dodging, or countering–so most fights are tense, with each side looking for a way to bait their foe into opening themselves up for attack without putting themselves at a disadvantage. I’ve had fights where, after 30 seconds of back-and-forth, both sides are one strike away from defeat, and the battle continues for another full minute of counters, perfect dodges, and last-second blocks. It’s empowering to finish off your foe with a perfectly executed combo or snag a victory when all hope seems lost. Each win feels like it needs to be earned, and this encourages you to explore the varied movesets of each fighter, experiment in how attacks might be chained together, and deduce your go-to characters’ weaknesses in order to avoid defeat.

This is especially true in regards to the campaign, as you’re allowed to customize your character with any four special abilities you want. You can also choose your character’s gender, body type, voice, and skin tone, as well as dress them with an assortment of hairstyles, make-up, jewelry, and clothes, allowing you to build your perfect protagonist. Completing campaign missions earns you in-game currency, which you can use to buy new outfits and items. Cosmetics won’t affect your character, but it’s still fun to put together outfits and it’s a welcome distraction when you need a moment to step away from the steep challenge of the late-game battles.

Once you’re done with Jump Force’s campaign, there’s still plenty to do–even if not all of it is worthwhile. Free Missions are the game’s version of a challenge mode, but it’s not all that different from the handicaps placed on you in late-game story missions. The same can be said for Extra Missions mode, which you can play if you need a little extra in-game cash for that smokin’ pair of black pants you’ve been eyeing for your character or if you want to expand your level cap.

However, a lot of fun can be had in Jump Force’s competitive modes. You can play online or off, with both friendly and ranked matches in the former. Online is where your skills will be put to the test, meaning it’s also where you’ll find the game’s best fights. Jump Force also allows you to practice against a computer while you wait for the game to find you an opponent, so you’re not just waiting on a loading screen, which is a welcome touch. Ranked Play provides the most challenging combat in Jump Force by far, but earning higher titles–and thus bragging rights–by defeating more skilled opponents is a compelling goal to work towards.

Each win feels like it needs to be earned, and this encourages you to explore the varied movesets of each fighter.

It’s awesome to see Jump Force’s roster of playable fighters include so many characters from Shonen Jump’s history, even the ones from manga that aren’t as mainstream but no less important, like JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure and Saint Seiya. That said, there’s a disappointing disparity in the number of male and female characters, especially when Dragon Ball, One Piece, and Naruto contribute to nearly half the roster and only have two women between all three of them. Shonen Jump has always been geared towards young boys, but that doesn’t mean its manga hasn’t had great female fighters. Including Dragon Ball’s Piccolo over Android 18 and Naruto’s Gaara over both Sakura and Hinata is odd, as is leaving out Black Clover’s Noelle, Yu-Gi-Oh’s Anzu, My Hero Academia’s Uraraka, and Boruto’s Sarada.

Jump Force is a worthy celebration of the legacy of Shonen Jump manga, but it honors its source material a little too well with how filler-heavy the middle of its story arc is. However, even if the game rarely provides a clear motivation for stopping evil other than good must always oppose it, the act of stomping out villains in Jump Force’s frantic bouts of tag-team arena combat is an enjoyable test of strategy. And with over 40 characters to master, there’s ample opportunity to develop new strategies and reach greater feats of combat prowess in online multiplayer.