Month: June 2019

My Friend Pedro’s best moment is the first time you get to use a frying pan to kill someone. This is an action game that bends over backwards to make sure you look cool, where every kill is meant to make you feel special, and the frying pan is the best realization of that vision. The bullets in My Friend Pedro will ricochet off certain objects, and if the angles line up just so–as they do the first time you encounter a frying pan–you can kick the kitchen implement into the room ahead of you, and then take out all the enemies in that room by shooting the pan, watching as bullets ping off it and cut through anyone standing nearby. It’s glorious.

In these moments, My Friend Pedro feels like a beautiful, brutal ballet. Indeed, the game is entertaining for most of its runtime precisely because of how over-the-top and theatrical its kills are. Killing enemies by shooting a frying pan, ricocheting your shots off a sign, or kicking an object right into someone’s face is entertaining. However, it’s also a game that has fewer tricks up its sleeve than it initially suggests, and will run through most of its good ideas just past the halfway point. That’s not to say that the game gets bad–it’s fun all the way through–but it starts to feel less inventive and exciting than those pulpy, crazy earlier levels do.

You play as an unnamed, masked protagonist who is accompanied on his violent journey by Pedro, a talking banana who acts as both narrator and instructor throughout the game. It’s clear early on that there’s something a bit off about Pedro, and while there are some eventual “reveals” to contend with, he’s mostly there to lend the game a sense of weirdness and to offer hints and tips as you go. There’s a thin plot, but it’s easily ignored–the only really important information is that you need to run through each level killing all the enemies, and if you kill every enemy quickly without dying, you’ll get a higher score. There’s a score multiplier that allows you to chain kills for more points, and trying to compete for a solid spot on the leaderboards is a good incentive to replay earlier levels on more challenging difficulties.

As you chain together kills through the game’s 40 levels, you have opportunities to shoot enemies while going down zip lines, riding on top of rolling barrels, jumping through windows, skateboarding, and bouncing off of walls. You can activate your focus at any moment to line up your shots and time your bullet-dodging spins perfectly. If you have two guns equipped, you can aim them independently, letting you dive right into the middle of a group of enemies with twin uzis blaring in different directions.

Shooting your enemies is a joy, for the most part, but the combat isn’t without its faults. The game’s default auto-aim assist locks you onto the nearest enemy or potential target if you’re pointing your aiming reticule in their direction, which can sometimes make it more difficult to pull off the stunt you’d envisioned. If an enemy is standing in front of an explosive canister, for instance, aiming past them for that gratifying explosion is difficult because your gun sight won’t pull away from them. Thankfully, you can turn auto-aim down to almost nothing, which gives you more freedom at the cost of making the game a bit more challenging overall.

My Friend Pedro suffers a bit from a lack of enemy variety, and while the style of goon you’re facing changes over time–you fight assassins in the second set of levels, then professional gamers not long after–the main difference is that some of them have more health than others. There are some slight variations, but most enemies can be taken down in the exact same way: by pointing and shooting, with or without theatrics. Your enemies will shoot back with increasingly powerful guns, and while you can feel untouchable when you’re diving into a room in slow motion, they put up enough of a fight, even on “Normal” difficulty, that you need to be careful.

Every now and then you might have to deal with a sentry gun or a minefield, too, but the game is at its best when you’re proving your superiority to organic enemies. Those slow-motion dives into hails of enemy bullets that visibly crawl through the air towards you are obviously inspired by The Matrix, and My Friend Pedro gets closer to capturing the feel of that film’s shootouts than many of the myriad games that have paid homage to it. There are also a few boss levels to contend with, which are brief diversions that make some attempt to mix things up, but even these peak with the first one. The game runs through most of its ideas for creative ways to kill people pretty quickly, and while that sense of wonder never quite dries up, its truly great moments become more spaced out in the second half.

In later stages, the game features numerous platforming sections as a way of keeping things fresh. They’re never complicated enough to require you to really think them through, and several of them suffer from the game’s finicky controls. While the movement controls are fine for combat, they’re often hard to contend with when you’re trying to traverse tricky terrain. When you’re asked to roll and jump and slide down ropes with great precision, as you sometimes are, the game stumbles, as the controls don’t lend themselves well to exact platforming. This only really becomes a major problem right near the end, as the final few levels get extra demanding.

The level designs also grow uglier as you go, too–when Pedro explains that you’re fighting gamers in the sewers because video games tend to feature sewer levels, it’s funny, but not funny enough to justify the drab aesthetics that the sewers display. That’s not to say that these levels are devoid of joy–a late mechanic that gives some enemies shields that need to be deactivated adds some nice strategic depth and most levels serve up at least one or two sections where you can pull off some cool moves–but overall they’re not as free-wheeling and enjoyable as the game is in its early stages.

There’s some padding, and the game suffers whenever there aren’t enemies on screen. It’s also, oddly enough, less entertaining when you start to get access to more powerful weapons–the late addition of a sniper rifle feels fundamentally at odds with the game’s up-close-and-personal action, and while the assault rifle you unlock in the game’s second half is powerful and fun to fire, it’s a shame they didn’t go a step further with its wildness and let you dual-wield the best guns for maximum carnage. My Friend Pedro is greatest when you’re close enough to the bad guys to warrant continual cost-benefit analyses of running up and kicking them to death, but sometimes the best way to progress is to take out your enemies from a distance by pointing and shooting without much flair.

But then you get to leap through a window on a skateboard, jump and spin through the air in slow-motion, firing uzis at two enemies at once; when you kick an explosive canister around a corner and pop out to shoot it just before it hits an enemy in the face; or when you jump between two walls, spring out of a gap, and take out two guys with a shotgun before they even know you’re there. My Friend Pedro might pepper its later stages with fewer exciting moments, but the moments that make the game fun never fully go away. As soon as I finished the game, I restarted at a higher difficulty, keen to test my improved skills on harder enemies.

There are sections in My Friend Pedro that are as satisfying and thrilling as you could hope for in a game like this, where it nails the feeling of being an impossible video game hero who can perform the unimaginable with great style and flair. There’s a lot of appeal in replaying your favorite stages over and over, trying to move up the leaderboard. It isn’t consistently exhilarating throughout the entire campaign, but My Friend Pedro is worth playing because it’s full of moments where you can jump down a shaft and shoot in two directions in slow motion, or kill an enemy by kicking the skateboard you’re riding into their face, or take out a room full of bad guys with the help of a frying pan. When it dedicates itself to letting you be inventive and weird with how you rack up your kills, My Friend Pedro is wildly enjoyable.

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If you didn’t grab a Dreamer Edition of Link’s Awakening, and you really want to (because it’s just ten bucks more and includes a sweet art book), I have great news: it’s not too late.

Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening Dreamer Edition

• Link’s Awakening: Dreamer Edition In-Stock at Walmart
• Link’s Awakening: Dreamer Edition In-Stock at GameStop

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Welcome to IGN’s hub for all things Amazon Prime Day. If you buy something through this post, IGN may get a share of the sale. For more, read our Terms of Use.

Amazon Prime Day 2019, the biggest sale day of the year outside of Black Friday, is happening next month. Amazon hasn’t revealed the exact date, but we can infer from prior years that it will take place sometime in mid July. If you want to be prepared for the thousands of Amazon deals that will be live for a very limited time, then we suggest reading through this article and making sure you have all bases covered.

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It’s a strange thing to knowingly bid farewell to a fictional character you’ve followed for over a decade, and then learn to love their replacement. I teared up a little when longtime protagonist Kazama Kiryu finally exited the Yakuza series (presumably for good) at the end of The Song Of Life. But as we wait for Yakuza to begin anew in earnest, Ryu ga Gotoku Studio has crafted a different opportunity to revisit the staple setting of Kamurocho as newcomer Takayuki Yagami, a disgraced defense attorney turned private investigator. And fortunately, despite some unremarkable additions to the standard RGG template, by the end of Judgment it’s hard not to feel like you want to spend dozens upon dozens more hours with Yagami and friends.

Yagami might not be a yakuza, and Judgment might not be a mainline Yakuza game, but you’d be mistaken for thinking that the overarching narrative of Judgment doesn’t heavily adopt the criminal theatrics that RGG Studio has become known for. While the plot kicks off with a relatively straightforward investigation into a serial killer, Yagami’s investigation into it uncovers a vast, complicated and interweaving conspiracy of secrecy and betrayal that involves the history of the cast, the Japanese legal system, the Tokyo police department, multiple yakuza factions, and higher stakes beyond. It’s an unsurprising escalation, but it’s told in such a way that keeps you glued to the screen–the mystery is gripping, the drama is irresistible, and the performances are excellent.

Yagami and his partner Kaito are the primary emotional conduits, and they remain incredibly empathetic and genuinely likable characters throughout. They have interesting personal dilemmas and arcs of their own, and a warm, convincing dynamic together, regularly joking around and pulling one another’s chains, and sharing determination when they need to. Kaito is a former yakuza who acts as the brawn to Yagami’s brains–though Yagami still manages to be an impossible kung-fu savant, for reasons that are never truly explained in any meaningful way, and in skinny jeans, no less. The two bring a delightful vibe to the otherwise serious nature of the story, and they are treasures.

In some ways, Yagami is more believable and well-defined as a protagonist than Kiryu was in the Yakuza series. Where you were often encouraged to put Kiryu, a typically unwavering deity of honor, through uncharacteristic sojourns into weirdly perverse pursuits, Yagami rarely acts in a way that feels out of character, nor are you allowed to get involved in anything that goes against his demeanor. It’s a notable quality that helps to make him more consistently likable, even if he does do something you think is idiotic.

Judgment’s side activities do their best to reflect Yagami’s nature. Side missions are mostly framed as citizens calling upon Yagami for his private investigator services, though are still a place for RGG Studio’s penchant for absurdism to get a workout. More interesting is the game’s Friend system, which allows you to befriend dozens of unique individuals spread across Kamurocho, whether via side missions or their own discrete activities. Performing a variety of tasks in service of a person will level up your friendship with them, eventually giving you access to perks like secret items on a restaurant menu or a helping hand in combat. It’s a nice thematic element that rounds out Yagami’s character as a good-natured, friendly neighborhood PI.

The uncomfortably debaucherous side of RGG games is still present in Judgment, though it’s mostly left to be associated with the more unsavory characters and aspects of the plot rather than Yagami himself. That means the saucier activities of Kamurocho are gone, including the entertaining cabaret club management minigame. Instead, there’s a dating aspect where you can grow closer to women Yagami has already befriended over the course of the game, which involves regular interactions via in-game text messages, and eventually a series of dates. It feels more wholesome as a result, though only as wholesome as a 35-year-old man dating a 19-year old can be.

Elsewhere in the game’s entertaining array of side distractions, Judgment features an incredibly robust Mario Party-esque board game, a two-player port of Fighting Vipers, an original light-gun shooter called Kamuro Of The Dead, an obviously-made-in-a-different-game-engine version of pinball, and drone racing. That’s on top of a healthy, familiar selection of Virtua Fighter 5: Final Showdown, Puyo Puyo, UFO catchers, darts, batting cages, Mahjong, Shogi, and various casino card games, among other activities, all seen in previous Yakuza titles.

There are plenty of other familiar aspects that return from previous Yakuza games, but not all of them shake out to be in Judgment’s favor. For example, while the game’s major cinematics are lovingly rendered and animated as always, lesser, more stilted character models with cold, dead eyes still dominate a lot of the game’s cutscenes and suck some emotion out of the otherwise excellent drama.

Kamurocho is another weary aspect, which is an admittedly blasphemous notion at first–the district itself still feels lively, bustling, and full of things to do–but this is still very much the Dragon Engine-era Kamurocho from Yakuza 6 and Yakuza Kiwami 2, both of which released a year prior. But it’s not just the fact that Kamurocho is still relatively fresh in your mind if you’ve been following the series closely (there are only a handful of new interiors), it’s Judgment’s lack of a meaty palette cleanser–nearly all Yakuza games since the 2005 original have featured an additional city to free-roam in, or at least additional protagonists to help add a bit of excitement to the series’ familiar formula. Judgment has a tiny additional interior location situated outside of Kamurocho, but it’s purely a story setpiece.

Conversely, many of Judgment’s attempts to add to the core Ryu ga Gotoku template wear out their welcome almost immediately. Yagami’s position as a lawyer-turned-private-eye means there are a lot of segments that involve tailing and chasing people, getting into places he isn’t supposed to, searching for clues, and making deductions. The prospect of performing all of these thematically appropriate activities would be attractive were they not all mechanically boring in practice.

Tailing and chasing people are the biggest offenders, made worse by the Judgment’s heavy reliance on them. Slowly following targets through the city while trying not to let the targets spot you (they’re all very on edge) is a dull, slow, and arduous process which is often made more frustrating by the infamous RGG Studio movement system, which is clunky at the best of times. A reliance on predetermined hiding spots strips the act of any dynamics and creativity. Chases are faster but equally monotonous auto-running sequences where you need to steer Yagami left and right within a set path, avoid any obstacles, and perform the regular quicktime event to keep up with a target. With the exception of one amusing sequence on a skateboard, the game’s numerous chases are all ultimately stale, when they should get your heart pumping.

Searching for clues and making deductions are poised to be the more attractive mechanics due to the game’s legal bent–Yagami will sometimes need to search an area in first-person for clues or explain a hypothesis or contradiction. But these moments are let down by being incredibly straightforward, and expecting something that sits anywhere near to what you might find in a Danganronpa or Ace Attorney game would be misguided. You’re provided with a checklist of things to find during search scenes, meaning the discoveries don’t feel revelatory–but finding the hidden cats is the real treat here. Deduction segments feel more like opportunities for the game to make sure you’ve been paying attention to the story so far, rather than a chance for you to join the dots and stumble upon the discovery for yourself.

While the mystery in Judgment is certainly a journey that you’re merely accompanying Yagami on, the lack of player agency in the detective segments makes them feel like a useless chore. There are two different types of lockpicking minigames–which are fine, if uninspiring–and there’s also a bizarrely unexciting mechanic where you have to choose which key on Yagami’s keyring to use when entering certain doors. The most interesting new idea is the addition of a couple of brief sequences where you play as one of Yagami’s co-workers and go undercover, which only left me wanting to see that idea explored even further.

Ultimately, most of Yagami’s progress is made by doing what all good protagonists in RGG games do best–kicking the shit out of people. Yagami has two different kung-fu influenced fighting styles: Crane style is designed to deal with groups of enemies, whereas Tiger style focuses on single-target damage. Fighting starts off feeling a bit clunky and limiting–especially the flashier Crane style, whose moves come with long recoveries and see Yagami spend more time doing flips than landing hits–but this changes over time as you upgrade Yagami’s combo speeds and attack damage, making the risk of opening yourself up more viable. Tiger style is more intricate and versatile, however, with a much larger and more powerful variety of moves to unlock and use–including an exploding palm technique that’s a blast to use again and again.

Additional fighting techniques are introduced to flesh out Yagami’s flashy, acrobatic style and include the ability to leapfrog enemies, wall jump, and link attacks off those maneuvers. The Yakuza series’ explosive “Heat” moves appear as “EX” moves, allowing you to execute devastating cinematic special attacks, reliant on specific environmental and combat situations. Despite not being a Yakuza game, combat is your primary interaction with the world in Judgment. Fighting all sorts of delinquents, gangsters, and at one point, a group of academic researchers is still very entertaining, though, and it’s great that there are abundant opportunities for you to lay down some street justice.

It’s disappointing to realize that Judgment is at its best when it veers closer to the mold that it came from. Even though the game’s familiar fighting and side activities will happily keep you occupied, it’s a shame that the most intriguing and unique additions are also the dullest things about Judgment, because the new roster of characters have been wonderfully crafted otherwise. Yagami, Kaito, and the supporting cast are incredibly endearing, and following their every move as they unravel the sinister machinations looming under the surface of Kamurocho is a sensational journey. I can’t wait to return to these characters, but I’m hoping we can all do something different next time.

Fortnite Season 9 is now in its seventh week, which means there are new Battle Stars to be earned. To do this you’ll need to complete the latest set of weekly challenges, which will score you those precious stars, level up your Battle Pass, and unlock some new cosmetic rewards. As always, challenges are split into two categories: free and paid Battle Pass-exclusive.

For the most part, the week’s challenges shouldn’t prove to be difficult, though they might take a bit of time to complete. The free set tasks players with searching chests at specific locations, finding ammo boxes in a bunch of different names locations, and scoring eliminations using suppressed weapons.

For those with a paid Battle Pass there are a few more challenges to undertake. These include doing damage while riding a vehicle, visiting a number of locations as part of a multi-stage challenge, using a chest, a vending machine, and a campfire, and then nailing some enemy eliminations from a certain range. Take a look below for the full list.

Free

• Search chests at Junk Junction or Neo Tilted (7) — 5 Battle Star
• Search ammo boxes in different named locations (7) — 5 Battle Stars
• Suppressed weapon eliminations (3) — 10 Battle Stars

Premium

• Deal damage to opponents while riding a vehicle (200) — 10 Battle Star
• Stage 1: Visit The Block and Loot Lake in a single match (1) — 5 Battle Stars
  • Stage 2: Visit Fatal Fields and Neo Tilted in a single match (3) — 2 Battle Stars
  • Visit Snobby Shores and Mega Mall in a single match (4) — 2 Battle Stars
• Search a chest, use a vending machine, and a campfire in a single match (1) — 10 Battle Stars
• Eliminations from 5m or less (3) — 10 Battle Stars

Fortnite’s new update, 9.30, added a new item called the Chug Splash, which is a throwable that lets you heal yourself and other players. Anyone in range of the explosion will have 20 points of health or shield returned to them. The patch also vaulted the Boom Bow, Dual Pistols, and Dynamite. You can read the full Fortnite update 9.30 patch notes to get a complete overview of what’s been tweaked, changed, or added.

Since it was rumored back in the heyday of Pokemon Go shortly after its release, Harry Potter: Wizards Unite has piqued interest. Developer Niantic’s monster-catching offering became a huge phenomenon, and the franchise power of the Wizarding World suggests a similar game could be just as significant. After spending a little time playing the augmented reality mobile game in Universal Studios Hollywood’s The Wizarding World of Harry Potter, what’s clear is that a lot of what works about Pokemon Go is also at the heart of Wizards Unite. But Niantic’s new offering is leap-frogging Pokemon Go’s early struggles to offer a lot more content at launch.

As we saw in an earlier preview of Wizards Unite, the game’s big focus, like Pokemon Go, is on collecting stuff. An event called the “Calamity” has filled the Muggle World with people, creatures, and artifacts from the Wizarding World, and they’re all in danger of being discovered by the magic-less population. That’d be a violation of the Statute of Secrecy, an old Wizard law that dictates poor Muggles aren’t allowed to become aware of magic stuff, so as a member of the Wizarding World by way of your smartphone, your job is to collect all the magic junk (“Foundables”) and keep it away from the prying eyes of normies. You do that by physically wandering around, tapping on objects on a colorful Google Maps-like layouts of real-life locations, and attempting to break the spells (“Confoundables”) that contain Foundables.

Breaking spells requires spells of your own that you learn as you encounter Confoundables, and cast through tracing shapes on your screen with your finger–so the Foundables can be safely transported back to wherever (and whenever, in the history of the Wizarding World) they belong.

From the outset, Wizards Unite engages players in the form of an unfolding story. Nobody is quite sure how or why this Calamity situation has sprung up, but they have some ideas as to who and what might be responsible. The story has you interacting with Ministry of Magic characters who are trying to solve the mystery of what’s going on, including familiar faces, like the current, adult versions Harry and Hermione, as well as a few new folks. In the meantime, you go about collecting familiar magic objects like the Monster Book of Monsters, creatures like Harry Potter’s owl Hedwig, and people like Sirius Black and Hagrid (both unstuck from where they belong in time in the Harry Potter universe).

Most of what we did in our brief time playing Wizards Unite was collect things, and that looks to be the main hook of the game. You have a book called the Registry that functions just like Pokemon Go’s Pokedex, and every time you collect a new person or object from the Wizarding World, the game catalogs it. Filling out the Registry earns you experience points for your profile, which allow you to go after tougher, rarer Confoundables and take part in other more advanced content like battles, while scratching the completionist itch that has kept Pokemon Go installed on so many phones for the last three years.

What’s evident about Wizards Unite, though, is how much Niantic has learned from its early struggles with the game’s predecessor. Pokemon Go was famously short on content; there were plenty of Pokemon to find in the world, but in its early days, expected elements of the Pokemon experience like trading and raids were missing. It would be months or years before quality-of-life improvements and additional content made it into the game, but today, Pokemon Go includes features like story quests and increased social support that make it feel more complete.

Wizards Unite, by comparison, is launching with what feels like a more robust content package. For starters, there’s a smattering of quest objectives to complete right out of the gate that boost your experience gains and dish out rewards like potion-brewing materials. You can immediately start adding people to your friend list, and playing along with them in some activities also offers greater in-game rewards. There are multiplayer “Wizarding Challenges” found at specific locations called Fortresses, battles to fight against dark wizards and other creatures by casting spells and using potions, and a Profession system that lets you unlock abilities in RPG-like skill trees, which can make you more effective against certain types of enemies.

All in all, there’s just a lot more in Wizards Unite than there was in Pokemon Go, while maintaining many of the aspects that made the latter such a compelling AR experience. The bones of Niantic’s two games are pretty much the same–join up with other people to walk around the real world, zapping things you only see on your phone–but even after playing for just a short period, it’s clear there’s a whole lot of depth in Wizards Unite.

The question that remains after our short time with the game is how well having much more stuff to do in a mobile AR game will hold players’ attention. There are several limitations on what you can do while playing. You have a limited amount of “spell energy” that runs out as you cast spells on Confoundables, for instance, and while you can recharge it a bit by visiting “inns” (the Wizards Unite’s version of Pokestops), it’s not clear just how much your energy level might stall you out as you play. And it seems like you need to continually earn a lot of special items at all times to keep making progress. You need Gold and Silver Keys to unlock Portkeys, the Wizards Unite take on Pokemon eggs; potion ingredients to brew power-ups that’ll help you beat tougher enemies and Confoundables; scrolls to advance your professions; spell energy to keep plugging away at capturing Foundables; Dark Detectors to find and unlock the rarest Foundables; and Runes to access fortress battles. That’s a whole lot of stuff to manage, and while the early going of the game inundates you with everything you need to help you get moving, it’s tough to tell how steady the flow of rewards will be after a month, a week, or even a couple of days.

That said, for fans of Harry Potter and Pokemon Go, there’s plenty of promise in Harry Potter: Wizards Unite. This is obviously a much bigger, better thought-out AR game than Pokemon Go was at its launch, with impressive production values that include its slowly unfolding story, a voice cast peppered with soundalikes of the well-known Harry Potter cast, and detailed characters and animations you interact with that capture the look and feel of the movies and books. Harry Potter: Wizards Unite might not be able to usher in the same kind of surprisingly sweeping cultural moment its predecessor did, but it should at least be the kind of complete, robust mobile game that moment deserved.