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GameSpot •

10 Years Later, I Think I Finally Understand Alien: Isolation Hate--But It's Still A Masterpiece

Alien: Isolation celebrated its 10-year anniversary on October 6, 2024. Below, we reexamine how the despite its great ideas, the game may not have communicated its expectations clearly enough. This piece was written before the announcement of a sequel, with the original director returning.It's been a decade and I'm still mad about Alien: Isolation.I'm mad that one of the best horror games that exists, if not one of the finest video games ever, has been met with relative obscurity rather than acc...
GameSpot •

Pop Culture Crossovers Are Everywhere, But They're Costing Us The Weirder Games We Deserve

Jumping into a Fortnite match is always a surreal experience, because any round of the battle royale juggernaut might include Lando Calrissian, Spider-Man, Tom Hardy as Eddie Brock from the movie Venom, RoboCop, Ellen Ripley from the 1979 horror film Alien, the Joker, wrestler John Cena, and pop star Lady Gaga. And those are just the skins my friends and I use.In this way, Fortnite is as close to the online world imagined in Ready Player One as we have in real life. There's definitely something...
GameSpot •

Destiny 2's Anniversary Update Is A Depressing Cap To 10 Years

I'm standing in the Skywatch area of the Cosmodrome, Old Russia, in Destiny 2, with a few other random players, and we're waiting for enemies to spawn. A Hive Tomb ship appears in the sky right over my head and drops off exactly two enemies, and I blast away at them with a machine gun. The other players sprint over, swooping in like hawks, but I manage to snag the two kills before they can, so they jump back onto rooftops and boulders to wait for the next batch of baddies and try again. A lot of...
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...
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Iron Banter Column

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

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