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GameSpot •

Winter Burrow Is Like A Cozy Take On Don't Starve

After years of refinement, crafting and survival games have developed a pretty effective formula: You're dropped into a place where you gather sticks, you use the sticks to make an axe, the axe lets you cut down trees, and before long, you're making a whole shelter and advancing up a tech tree and making more and more complex gear, mastering the wilderness around you.Winter Burrow doesn't stray from that formula--at least, not in its first 20 minutes. But while it feels very similar to other sur...
GameSpot •

Funko Fusion Puts Funko Pop Haters' Voices In The Mouth Of Its Villain

For years, the Lego franchise has dominated a specific space for licensed action-platformers, taking the essence of properties ranging from Star Wars to Harry Potter and transposing them into a goofy video game setting. What makes the Lego games fun, apart from their players' affinity for colorful blocks, is the lighthearted tone inherent in translating the stories of various movies into toy form.Funko Fusion has a lot of surface similarities with Lego's takes on video games, and the main one is...
GameSpot •

Towerborne Uses Deep Combat To Modernize The Side-Scrolling Brawler

Towerborne is a pretty drastic departure from the Banner Saga series, developer Stoic Studio's impressive set of story-driven strategy games. But even with just a short look at it, it's easy to see some of the familiar Stoic DNA in Towerborne. It carries a beautiful art style that recalls a hand-drawn aesthetic, similar to Banner Saga, and that gives it a powerful vibrancy.I played a short demo of Towerborne at Xbox's recent Gamescom event in Los Angeles, which gave a very quick look at its mome...
GameSpot •

Ara: History Untold Combines Civilization With An Unexpected Dash Of Battle Royale

Grand strategy games are a bit too big to demo. Building from a single settlement and a couple of farms into a vast nation is a time-consuming process, and even playing tens of early game turns can only show you so much. Even with that being the case, though, a little time with the opening of 4X game Ara: History Untold suggests a sprawling entry into the genre that brings along some new ideas that focus on offering lots of different paths for creating a thriving civilization.I played about an h...
GameSpot •

Xbox-Exclusive Avowed Is Like Skyrim Plus One Of The Last Decade's Best Sci-Fi Movies

A giant beetle charged toward me, and as it stepped into a big puddle in the center of the room, I snagged it with a burst of magical vines that appeared beneath its feet. Then I blasted the creature with one of my dual flintlock pistols--this one charged with electricity--which sent arcs down through the water, shocking a few skeletons that were joining the fray behind it. As they looked to overwhelm me, I unloaded with both my pistols, zipped a little sideways with a dodge, and clambered away...
GameSpot •

Sorry, Alien: Romulus, The Best Alien Sequel Is Still Alien: Isolation

There's something specific about Ridley Scott's 1979 movie Alien that makes it such an enduring classic. With the combination of its heavy focus on relatable, blue-collar characters, its dingy, lived-in capitalist version of space travel, and its stalking, unknowably malevolent creature, it creates a feeling that other horror movies have chased and tried to replicate again and again across the decades since its release.The latest attempt to recapture what made Alien so viscerally, singularly fri...
GameSpot •

Splitgate 2 Excels At Feeling Like Its Own Thing | GameSpot Hands-On Preview

It's still a Halo-style arena shooter with portals, but what has surprised me most about Splitgate 2 is how much more there is to go with that idea. With its new iteration of the game, developer 1047 Games has dialed in elements that help build its identity, complementing what was already there with some new additions that help Splitgate 2 feel different from other shooters on the market.

Ahead of its closed alpha, I played Splitgate 2 for about four hours. As mentioned, the underlying idea is...
GameSpot •

Alien: Romulus Shows It's Time For Alien To Abandon Its Canon

Warning: This article contains some light spoilers for Alien: Romulus.Alien: Romulus starts with something of a goofy premise. For 20 years after the events of the original Alien, apparently, the xenomorph-obsessed Weyland-Yutani Corporation has been searching for the Nostromo and the monster its crew brought aboard. When they finally find it, they discover the original alien that Ellen Ripley blew out an airlock at the end of that movie. Somehow, the creature survives, allowing the scientists t...
GameSpot •

Who Is Maya Sundaresh In Destiny 2?

The end of Destiny 2's Episode: Echoes Act 2 finally reveals the identity of the Conductor, a new threat on Nessus who has taken control of the Vex on the planetoid for spooky and nefarious reasons. The community has long suspected exactly who the Conductor might be, and with the cutscene that played at the end of this week's story mission, we have our confirmation.Spoilers for the Echoes Act 2 story mission to follow, so stop reading now if you still haven't run through the mission.



A...
GameSpot •

Splitgate 2 Excels At Feeling Like Its Own Thing

It's still a Halo-style arena shooter with portals, but what has surprised me most about Splitgate 2 is how much more there is to go with that idea. With its new iteration of the game, developer 1047 Games has dialed in elements that help build out the game's identity, complementing what was already there with some new additions that help Splitgate 2 feel different from most other shooters on the market.Ahead of its closed alpha, I played Splitgate 2 for about four hours, some of that with other...
GameSpot •

If Destiny 2 Is To Survive, It Needs A Real New Player Experience

Bungie CEO Pete Parsons's statement explaining the reasoning behind laying off 220 employees, some 17% of Bungie's staff, is illuminating. In it, Parsons describes a company that overextended, expanding into too many projects as it tried to incubate multiple games while making Destiny 2, the studio's successful live-service game, and Marathon, a revival of a storied Bungie franchise. "We were overly ambitious, our financial safety margins were subsequently exceeded, and we began running in the r...
GameSpot •

Call Of Duty: Black Ops 6 Zombies Reanimates Ideas From Black Ops 3 And Cold War With New Mutations

With the return of the Black Ops series with Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 comes a fateful resurrection--Treyarch's signature round-based Zombies mode. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III took a more Warzone approach with Zombies, but with Black Ops 6, the mode is returning to its more familiar form, albeit with some significant mutations.I recently played about an hour of Black Ops 6's Zombies mode during a preview event at Treyarch's studios. Alongside a massive information dump about what the develo...
GameSpot •

Star Wars Outlaws Expands The Galaxy By Letting You Play A (Kind Of) Normal Person

In a pretty fundamental way, Star Wars Outlaws has a different feel from most every other Star Wars game I've ever played. More than any other Star Wars game, it puts its focus on what it might be like to live in that universe, struggling to eke out a living while constantly navigating around people who are more powerful, better connected, and more dangerous than you are.I recently played around four hours of Star Wars Outlaws during a preview event that put a lot of focus on exploring its open...
GameSpot •

Star Wars Outlaws Hands-On Preview: Hey Kid, You Wanna Do Space Crimes?

The main thing I took away from an extended play session with Star Wars Outlaws was a new understanding of its focus. Most Star Wars games are action titles, where you fight knock-down, drag-out fights against scores of enemies using blasters, lightsabers, thermal detonators, and any number of vehicles. Star Wars Outlaws, on the other hand, is a stealth game, where combat is best avoided and shooting your way out of a situation is a scrambling, desperate affair that doesn't often end well.I rece...
GameSpot •

Shadow Of The Erdtree Turns Elden Ring's Greatest Hero Into A Monster

Warning: This article contains spoilers for the story of Shadow of the Erdtree, so if you haven't finished the expansion or at least made it to the final boss, you might want to do so before reading on.When it comes to the story told in Elden Ring, Shadow of the Erdtree is a bombshell. It focuses on one major character who wasn't actually included in the base game--Miquella, one of the demigod children of the goddess Queen Marika--but whose presence cast a long shadow on events. Of all the demig...
GameSpot •

Haters Be Damned: Elden Ring Summoning Leads To Shadow Of The Erdtree's Best Moment

Igon is the best character in Shadow of the Erdtree. He's the best character in all of Elden Ring, in fact. He might be the best character in any From Software game. And if you're the kind of person who makes "git gud" a cornerstone of your personality, you probably missed out on him.You find Igon at the base of the Jagged Peak, and at first, he's kind of a pathetic figure. He's already injured when you discover him, and from his wailing laments, you learn that he's trying to kill a huge and hor...
GameSpot •

A New Horror Game Corrects Something So Many Others Get Wrong

Putting players in the shoes of an engineer tasked with heading alone into a dark basement to restart an ailing generator is a tried-and-true trope in horror video games. While Still Wakes the Deep has a lot that's very familiar to horror fans, it's what it does with this trope of making you the poor lone sucker who needs to flip all the switches and face all the danger to do it, that sets it apart from a field of horror titles. Other games could learn from what developer The Chinese Room does w
Epic Games •

The Casting of Frank Stone is poised to bring a new audience to the Dead By Daylight world

With The Casting of Frank Stone, developers Behaviour Interactive and Supermassive Games are opening up the world of Behaviour's multiplayer horror game Dead By Daylight with a totally new story. The two development studios are also hoping the story will reach a new audience—one that might be interested in the frightening horror universe of Dead By Daylight but hasn’t yet experienced it.

Dead By Daylight pits a team of four players, the survivors, against a fifth player in the role of a vicious...
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Iron Banter Column

A weekly column covering all aspects of Destiny 2, published at GameSpot.

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