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Rebel Galaxy Outlaw sits at a crossroads somewhere between American Truck Simulator’s slice of trucking Americana and the iconic combat of Freespace 2. It’s a highly competent, single-player space combat sim complete with warring factions, pirates, corrupt cops, and dubious sectors filled with all manner of undesirables, a nicely detailed trading system, and stellar combat. While intense difficulty spikes and lacking mission information leaves some scarring on the hull, Rebel Galaxy Outlaw delivers a worthy payload.

You play as Juno Markev, a pilot stuck between the search for her husband’s killer, her need to make cash to cover the debt of replacing her recently junked ship, and her shady past. Told largely through comms messages and cutscenes between missions, many of the characters you meet are fairly archetypal, but share a sense of relatability and groundedness that lends them a lot of their charm. Character animation in story cutscenes can feel quite stiff, lending them an uncanny valley vibe, but these moments are short and don’t distract from the wider storytelling. Juno herself is a big highlight; her endearingly grounded sense of self-belief and her inability to suffer the fools she finds herself constantly dealing with always makes for fiery dialogue.

Story threads are easy to lose track of due to the sheer number of things to do. When it’s just you and your ship, it’s all about surviving the hustle of being a space trucker; trading and smuggling goods, taking mercenary jobs, mining and selling resources–anything you can do to keep those credits rolling in so you can upgrade or outright replace the colossal junker of a ship you’re given at the game’s outset. In the opening hours, your travel is limited to one system and a handful of local missions, but once you get your hands on a jump drive you can start making your way across the galaxy, and things start to open up some more.

There are five ships you can purchase from various stations, each with traits that make them suitable as freighters or as fighters. While some ships are better suited for certain tasks than others, you’re not locked into a playstyle because of your choice. Fighters can add cargo bays to move more items, and you can take a freighter fully kitted out with advanced weapons pirate-hunting and it’ll still feel pretty good.

The beautifully detailed cockpit is the default view, and it is daunting at first–though you can also play in third-person–which seems weird given that you play an experienced pilot; the numerous switches, lights and dials each flicker away, and you’re not really sure what they do at first. There’s no tutorial to help with this, so it can feel like you’re being thrown in the deep end. But while it takes some time to understand what the ship systems are telling you, it’s not long before you’re fluent in reading the controls and gaining a better grasp on any given situation. There is support for a flight stick and a HOTAS, but I found it best with a gamepad as everything you need is right at your fingertips.

Stations are where everything outside of combat happens, although you don’t hop out of your ship and wander around. Instead you browse a handful of menus to get what you need before setting off on your next journey. This is where you make repairs or ship upgrades, handle commodities trading, sign up to one of the guilds that offer side missions, or browse the standard side missions for that station. It’s an elegant way of handling station traversal, and the nice visual shots and animations of the station internals give you a sense of what type of station you’re in and the kinds of things you might find there. You can bother the local bartender for helpful gameplay tips, sector news, or other information or play one of the handful of trite but fun mini-games like slots, 8-ball, or Star-Venger, a simple take on an Asteroids-based sprite shooter.

Missions are either picked up from stations or, in the case of story missions, given through dialogue. They generally amount to going to a waypoint and finding or killing something for varying factions. Some of these have an effect on your standing with different factions, which can change who treats you as hostile when out amongst the stars as well as the stations you can land at. Missions also show a level of risk from mild to extreme, but these aren’t a great benchmark, as countless times I warped into a mission zone of mild-to-low risk only to be completely overwhelmed within 10 seconds of my arrival. At least a reload after death is super fast, returning you to the last jumpgate you took or station you’d left and allowing you to do something else for a while before coming back to try again. But this is also a huge source of frustration as the only way to push through these difficulty spikes is to grind for credits and ship upgrades.

The tension in a good firefight is wonderful. When you’re not tuned in to one of the seven different radio stations that broadcast throughout the galaxy, the game’s southern hard rock soundtrack kicks into overdrive as the lasers start flying. Firefights will sometimes offer up instant rewards, either as bounty credits or loose cargo that’s been freed from the breached hull, and you can freely engage the tractor beam to suck these up in order to sell on yourself and reap the benefits. In some cases you may also find an ejected pilot who you can haul in for detention, or you can enslave them and sell them on the black market, though doing so will put you on the wrong side of the space cops, which can make life in the outer rims much harder than it needs to be.

The cockpit views on each of the game’s crafts are tight, and there’s no option to move your head around, so you rely heavily on your radar to know where to go and what’s around you. It’s invaluable when in the thick of the action, which can very quickly get overwhelming unless you act decisively. Power management is a big part of this, and it’s a system that adds a nice slice of tactical thinking to the visual feast of the combat. Weapons fire has two modes, linked and staggered, and while linked fire will unleash the full power of your hardpoints, it’ll drain your available power quickly and severely limit your ship’s capabilities. Staggered fire only fires one hardpoint at a time, meaning it uses less power overall, but can be sustained for longer. You can also quickly reroute power between the engines, weapons and your shields, but as there’s only so much to go around you’re always settling on a compromise between offense and defense, so the system as a whole works wonderfully well as a test of situational awareness.

Rebel Galaxy Outlaw’s gorgeous visual design is one of its biggest strengths. There’s a huge assortment of stations, ships, planets and other things to see while out in the vastness of space. From the huge casinos of the Nevada sector to the glass-capped atriums of Hobbes Station, there are postcard moments to be found almost everywhere in the galaxy. There’s also a wildly in-depth and excellent ship painter that lets you completely redesign the paint job of your ship, so you can customize to your craft’s look down to minute details. That extends to the combat, too, with under fire shields flashing in protest and hull plating falling apart as its struck by cannon fire before bursting into a flaming wreck in front of you. Distant firefights look like a laser light show.

There is a lot to do in Rebel Galaxy Outlaw, so much so that it’s easy to lose yourself among the myriad of activities beyond flying around and shooting things. Juno is a great character despite her sometimes jarring movements, as are much of the rest of the charming cast. The combat is fast, frenetic and consistently challenging, although that challenge can sometimes feel impossible without stepping back and grinding out some progress elsewhere, which quickly gets frustrating. Thankfully the core of the game–its combat, trading, and space flight–are all superb and had me launching into the stars for many hours of galactic trading and explosive firefights.

Destiny 2 director Luke Smith wrote an incredibly in-depth and detailed blog post today in which he covered numerous hot-button issues about Bungie’s sci-fi space game. One of the topics that he touched on was microtransactions. Smith started off by stating that microtransactions are important for live-service games like Destiny, in that the money derived from microtransactions helps fund other parts of the game.

“MTX is a big part of our business being a live game,” Smith said. “I’m not going to say ‘MTX funds the studio’ or ‘pays for projects like Shadowkeep’– it doesn’t wholly fund either of those things. But it does help fund ongoing development of Destiny 2, and allows us to fund creative efforts we otherwise couldn’t afford. For example: Whisper of the Worm’s ornaments were successful enough that it paid [dev cost-wise] for the Zero Hour mission/rewards to be constructed (this sh** matters!).”

Destiny 2’s microtransaction store, Eververse, lets you spend real money to acquire Silver, which you can then spend to buy things like shaders and bright engrams, as well as emotes and various other extras. Looking ahead, Eververse will move to the Director, which means players will no longer need to visit the Tower to access it.

Additionally, new class-specific content is coming to Eververse; one example provided was a store sub-page for Titan armor. Another consumer-friendly change is that gear sets will have a reduced Silver cost when a player already has some of the items included in the set.

Smith also talked about how Bungie plans to separate cosmetics from gameplay where possible. Players can still earn things like weapons and perks from gameplay, while Eververse will be the place to go to buy cosmetics.

You can read Smith’s full blog post to learn more.

In other Destiny news, the game is migrating from Battle.net to Steam after Bungie and Activision ended their partnership, while cross-save functionality goes live on August 21. Destiny 2’s next expansion, Shadowkeep, and the new free-to-play version of Destiny 2 are due to launch in October.

For more on what’s happening in Destiny 2 right now, have a look at the story below.

There’s nothing worse than taking your Nintendo Switch on a long plane ride or some other extended outing, only to have the battery die after a couple hours (depending on how much battery the game uses). Luckily, Nintendo has finally answered this problem with a newer Switch model that extends the console’s battery life, upgrading it from roughly 2.5-6.5 hours of playtime to 4.5-9 hours of charge. The new model is available at some retailers now, and if you were hesitant about shelling out another $300 USD just to improve your battery life, GameStop’s latest trade-in offer could make you reconsider.

Assuming you no longer need your original Switch, you can trade in the launch model for $225, up from the usual $200, as part of a limited-time deal at GameStop stores. Of course, that trade value is for a Switch in “full working condition.” This brings the $300 Switch revision to $75, though you don’t have to use the trade value exclusively towards it. This trade-in offer is valid until September 15.

The Switch revision’s upgraded battery life may be the star of the show, but the Tegra X1 processor also runs cooler, which in turn keeps your Switch from heating up as much. However, it’s important to note that this is not a Switch Pro or equivalent to the upgraded consoles that the PS4 and Xbox One got. You won’t see any increases in performance or loading time.

Of course, if you’d rather trade your old Switch in for a Nintendo Switch Lite, then you can use your $225 trade credit towards a pre-order for that instead. The Switch Lite costs $200 and releases on September 20, five days after this trade-in promotion ends, so you will need to live without your console for a little bit. You can pre-order the Switch Lite here. However, if you’d prefer to not trade in your Switch at all, or just don’t own one yet, you can purchase the new Switch through the links below.

Best Buy

Amazon

Not much is known about Halo Infinite. At Microsoft’s E3 2019 press conference earlier this year, the company revealed that Master Chief’s latest adventure would be an Xbox Scarlett launch title–in addition to releasing on Xbox One and PC–sometime during holiday 2020.

Now, corporate vice president of Xbox Games Studios, Matt Booty, has revealed some more details on the upcoming title during a recent interview with Game Informer.

“The first thing that is really cool and where that game is headed, is how they’re [343 Industries] thinking about expanding the world,” Booty explained. “I won’t go so far to say ‘sandbox’ because we bring up sandbox and people seem to overload that term with a lot of other things. But what the team is doing to build a bigger universe and a bigger set of gameplay scenarios, and sort of more things to explore is awesome.”

Halo Infinite runs on 343 Industries’ brand-new Slipspace game engine, which studio director Chris Lee said is aimed at supporting Halo titles for 10 years to come. “The things they’re working on are really cool. As they bring the Slipspace Engine up to date with where we’re at in terms of graphics these days, there’s just some cool stuff,” Booty went on the say. “Design-wise, it’s been really cool to see them get back to some of the shape-language and design-language of some of the earlier Halos. It could be said that, Halo, when you get into Halo 5, maybe it was getting a little ‘busy’ design-wise. [For Halo Infinite] it feels more modern and more clean, but also there are stronger echoes back to the roots of Halo. I would say visually impressive and more expansive.”

Getting back to the roots of Halo has been a common thread amongst the drip-feed of information regarding Halo Infinite. Earlier this year, Brian Jarrard, community director at 343, shared a blog post revealing the long-awaited return of split-screen support to the series in Infinite. The studio also announced that it would support LAN multiplayer, and confirmed that characters in Infinite will have black undersuits–a small detail, but one that harkens back to Halo’s beginnings.

During the interview, Booty also revealed that Microsoft sees The Outer Worlds as an exclusive franchise.

For more on Halo Infinite, check out the stories below.

Dicey Dungeons, from Terry Cavanagh of VVVVVV and Super Hexagon fame, is a roguelike deck-building dungeon crawler framed as a game show presented by host Lady Luck. You play as one of the show’s six adorable contestants, all of whom are anthropomorphic dice, because this game really is all-in on loving dice. But while the game’s clever combination of cards and dice make for an entertaining gameplay system, it can’t escape the occasional frustration that is inherent to rolling a die.

In each episode your chosen die heads into a six-level dungeon to defeat enemies, opening chests and visiting stores while building up a deck of cards capable of defeating an end boss. The dungeons are presented as a series of nodes you can move between, with shops, health-restoring apples, and enemies placed on several of them, and to progress you need to fight enemies and reach the node that features the trap door to the next floor.

Each character can equip between three and six cards (you have six slots on your inventory screen, and some cards take up two of them), all of which are powered by dice. Each card requires something different; some are affected by how high the number on the die is, or have maximum or minimum numbers, or will only take odds or evens. Still others might introduce effects or buffs. A card might “shock” your opponent, for instance, meaning that one of their cards will be locked next turn unless they spend a die to unlock it, or induce a “freeze” effect that reduces their highest dice roll down to a 1. A good deck will let you be adaptable depending on what you roll, but there’s not a huge number of cards and enemies in the game, meaning that the same ones will pop up frequently–10 hours in I would still occasionally encounter something new, but not as often as I would have liked.

A charming art style works wonders in glossing over this sense of repetition, however, with each character having a distinctive personality despite the game being light on dialogue. And although their animations are limited, the enemies are charming, too. The character designs and poses are consistently delightful, so you’ll always feel a little bad taking down a direwolf puppy because of the huge grin on their face. The gameshow motif doesn’t stretch that far, but the upbeat soundtrack and the little check-in scenes with Lady Luck before each adventure is an effective way of giving you a sense of purpose.

The six characters each have a unique playstyle, which helps to give the game some sense of variety. The thief copies one of its opponents’ cards in each match, for instance, and the inventor will always sacrifice one of their cards at the end of each fight in favor of a new ability for the next round, which can be activated just by clicking on it without needing to worry about dice. Some get more radical still, like the witch, who attacks using a “spell book”–when you roll a die you can either spend it on one of the four spells you have selected on your screen, or you can throw it at the spell book in lieu of using an ability and get whichever spell is assigned to that dice number. It’s a great system because each character feels completely different, and while the central combat system of laying dice onto cards doesn’t change, the mechanics by which you acquire those dice and cards do.

For the first few hours, as you’re moving through the initial dungeons for each character and getting to grips with how they play, Dicey Dungeons is a delight, albeit one that’s light on challenge. But once you’ve played a round as each of the first five characters and unlock each character’s more difficult episodes, there’s a steep difficulty curve to overcome. Each one introduces modifiers that make the game more challenging–you might lose health instead of gaining it every time you level up, duplicate dice might immediately disappear, or you’ll only roll 1s on your first roll of a fight, 2s on the second, and so on.

These episodes are where you’ll really start to learn the different strategies and combos that are essential to mastering Dicey Dungeons. Using your Limit Break ability (a character-and-episode specific ability that is usable only after you’ve taken a certain level of damage) and making sure that you’re making good use of buffs and/or debuffs are vital to success. After a while, you start to figure out which abilities work best against which enemies–freeze is particularly useful against creatures that can only roll a single die, for instance, whereas shock is useful if an opponent has few cards. Some enemies are also weak to particular elements, so if you see an enemy on your level who you know is weak to shock attacks, you can plan accordingly. You’ll need to remember these details yourself, though, as the game will not remind you of an enemies’ abilities and weaknesses until you’re actually in the battle.

Whether or not Dicey Dungeons becomes too difficult after the initial episodes will depend on your patience and your willingness to play through the same scenarios repeatedly. It can feel like butting your head against a wall at times, though, because if a single episode takes you multiple attempts to beat (and many of them will), you’re going to end up rolling through the same enemies several times. You might try out different card combinations, but it’s going to be from the same small pool of potential cards and facing off mostly against the same enemies that got the better of you last time. A loss can sometimes feel out of your hands, too, if an early enemy just rolls too many sixes or the final boss just happens to be immune to the debuff you built your deck around.

But this also means that figuring out and implementing a winning strategy can be very satisfying. It took me six attempts to beat the second episode for the Warrior (the easiest character), but once I built a deck that was high on freeze cards I was able to deal with the later enemies easily enough, even if the end boss who was immune to freezing almost tripped me up (ultimately I got lucky on dice rolls). In a game so heavily themed around dice there’s always going to be an element of luck, which can be gratifying or exhausting depending on whether it goes your way or not.

The charm of Dicey Dungeons can start to wear thin when you’re stuck, but when you bypass an episode that was giving you grief, it feels great. I found myself frequently quitting out of the game, pacing around my house, and returning to it again 10 minutes later for another go. No matter how annoyed I might get, it’s never difficult to come back to Dicey Dungeons, and the challenges never feel insurmountable–it’s always plausible that your next attempt could be the one where you crack it. Dicey Dungeons is a charming and often rewarding game, as long as you learn to accept that sometimes the dice won’t roll your way.

A new FCC filing has revealed an upcoming wireless SNES controller for Nintendo Switch.

Resetera user Link83 discovered the new filing (which is required for the controller’s release in the US) after setting up an alert for any Nintendo FCC ID filings. Much of the documentation is confidential, but the accompanying image matches the SNES controller’s iconic shape, while the appearance of the “HAC” model number notates its potential as a Switch peripheral, since all other Switch hardware and accessories use the same model number.

Nintendo released a similar NES controller for the Switch 12 months ago when NES games started appearing for subscribers to Nintendo Online. This new controller might signal the arrival of SNES games to the Switch’s virtual library, with an accompanying controller letting you relive the days of playing Super Mario World, A Link to the Past, and Super Metroid with a familiar peripheral in-hand.

Nintendo hasn’t officially announced the controller in any capacity yet, but we’ll keep you updated on when they do. In the meantime, you can keep up to date on all Nintendo Switch news right here: