Month: April 2020

Helping friends move house is widely regarded as one of the worst ways you can spend a Saturday, but somehow developer SMG Studio has taken that most dreaded of friendly favours and transformed it into fantastically frantic fun. Moving Out is a couch co-op game about cooperatively moving couches, successfully expanding Overcooked’s brand of coordinated chaos from the kitchen into every other room in the house. Often tense and frequently hysterical, Moving Out is a must-play for fans of same-screen multiplayer games.

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Casting up to four players as employees of the Smooth Moves company, Moving Out features 30 main levels across its small-town setting. Each location has gold, silver, and bronze-tiered time limits to target as you scramble to gather up all of the boxes, appliances, and stubbornly shaped pieces of furniture scattered about each level and ferry them to the back of the removalist truck. It’s a fairly straightforward task to bungle your way to a bronze like a bull in a china shop, but grabbing a gold requires a strategic approach to room order, considered job delegation, and precise pathfinding to ensure maximum efficiency.

[poilib element=”quoteBox” parameters=”excerpt=Precious%20seconds%20tick%20away%20on%20the%20clock%20and%20the%20language%20between%20you%20and%20your%20frazzled%20team%20of%20moving%20mates%20grows%20increasingly%20more%20colourful.”]The controls are simple, with buttons for grabbing, throwing, and jumping, but the challenge is presented by the unique properties of the objects themselves. Television sets are typically tethered to walls by their power cords, which stretch and snap as you carry the TV out and lurch you into a spin; large L-shaped lounges slow you and your moving partner down to a sluggish waltz as you inch your way through narrow doorways; and upright pianos flip over on their side if you try to take a corner too quickly, all while precious seconds tick away on the clock and the language between you and your frazzled team of moving mates grows increasingly more colourful.

Moving the Goalposts

Just when you think you’ve wrangled your inept assembly line into order, Moving Out drops new elements into the mix to add game-changing wrinkles. A farmyard level means your cargo isn’t just bulky, but mobile, leaving you to chase chickens and push pigs that seemingly want to be anywhere but the back of your truck. Elsewhere, a large factory requires you to navigate a series of conveyor belts through interconnected rooms, while a set of door switches in another facility forces you to open and close different paths and strategise your way to your objectives on the fly.

It’s absolutely manic, but successfully executing a plan is utterly exhilarating. Corners can be cut if you’re willing to take risks by throwing and catching fragile items from one player to another, or heaving a refrigerator out of a second-storey window instead of dragging it down the stairs. Even the order in which you load the truck is an art unto itself. Use up all the flatbed floorspace with smaller items first, and you won’t know whether to laugh or cry as the double bed you hurl onto the top of the pile to finish the job tumbles right back out of the truck, further delaying your exit. Moving Out seems shambolic at its start, but demands real thought, coordination, and planning by its end.

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In addition to the reward of getting gold-medal times, I also enjoyed returning to each level for the bonus objectives. Each one has three optional tasks – some of which are clear, such as completing a job without breaking any windows – while others are more cryptic, not unlike those found in Untitled Goose Game. Those require you to experiment with the various objects and contraptions found within each setting, for example the objective may be to ‘Give the bird a bath’ and to achieve it you need to find a decorative pink flamingo somewhere in the level and hurl it into the bathtub. Successfully completing these 90 objectives unlocks 10 extra mini-games in the arcade menu, which is a series of timed gauntlet runs that provide some of the most fiercely challenging cargo-shunting stretches in Moving Out.

Bust a Move

Yet even during its most patience-testing moments, it’s impossible to stay mad at Moving Out because its ‘80s-influenced style is so endearing. Its characters and settings are vibrant, its soundtrack is relentlessly upbeat, and it features levels that pay clever homage to the likes of Frogger, Pac-Man, and Bowser’s castle from Super Mario Bros. There’s a certain goofball charm that pervades Moving Out, from the shifty-eyed cat clocks that seem to adorn the walls of every house to the way the characters occasionally fart from the exertion of lifting particularly heavy loads.

[poilib element=”quoteBox” parameters=”excerpt=There%E2%80%99s%20a%20certain%20goofball%20charm%20that%20pervades%20Moving%20Out.”]Moving Out is undoubtedly at its best with buddies. It’s technically playable in single-player, with the number of items in each level reduced and the heavier objects made lighter in order to better suit solo play. However, packing the contents of a house into a truck with your own two hands is about as much fun as it sounds, and it’s only now after finishing the game’s story as a quartet (which took about eight hours) am I playing on my lonesome purely to try and grab any remaining golds for the sake of completion. Additionally, while my preference would be to play Moving Out with friends locally anyway, it’s worth pointing out that there’s no online functionality — so those hoping for the option of playing with friends remotely (which is kind of important right now) are likely to be disappointed.

Bethesda is investigating a bug reported by players where Fallout 76’s new NPCs are looting items from their corpses and keeping them.

The strange glitch has been noted by several users on the Fallout 76 Reddit, with posters claiming that they’ve lost hordes of ammo and expensive weapons. Upon death, players are waking up to find the guns they were using and the ammo attached missing from their inventory. Later, they’ve noticed that the same gun they were using in combat is now in the hands of a nearby NPC, suggesting that it had been looted from the player’s corpse upon death. Those NPCs can’t be looted back.

This is a major problem, as it means expensive and rare weapons that players have worked hard to purchase or unlock are being lost, with no clear means to recover them. One particular post mentions that a player lost an explosive machine gun that they spent “15k caps” on. A few posters have singled out the event missions Radiation Rumble and Riding Shotgun as being a particular source for the bug, so you may want to avoid them for the time being. This video from Dani Garcia gives us our best glimpse at the glitch in action (thanks, PC Gamer!)

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A Bethesda Community Manager has responded to the strange phenomenon, writing that they will “investigate this immediately” under one of the offending Reddit posts. NPCs arrived in Fallout 76 as part of the Wastelanders update, a free overhaul anticipated by the fans who stuck with Fallout 76 after its troublesome launch. Wastelanders adds new questlines and infrastructure, as well as an improved reputation system.

If you’re thinking of jumping back into the apocalyptic fray, check out our article on whether you should return to Fallout 76 for Wastelanders.

And if you’ve already made the leap, you may want to check out our walkthrough which will guide you through the new quests in Wastelanders. Just watch out for those event missions if you’re fixing to keep your hard-earned loot!

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Jordan Oloman is a freelance writer for IGN. Follow him on Twitter.

A Crash Bandicoot mobile game has unexpectedly soft launched on Android in select regions.

An endless runner, Crash Bandicoot Mobile comes from Candy Crush creators King and was teased earlier this week via a set of leaked Facebook ads. Soft launches allow developers to release the game in certain areas, allowing them to fix bugs and test server capacity before a full rollout.

As of right now, there hasn’t been any official word from King or the Crash Bandicoot Twitter account about the game, which means we don’t have a full set of regions the game can be downloaded in, but you can see if the game’s available in your area on the Google Play Store right now.

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The listing describes the gameplay, which will see Crash complete “awesome battle runs” to defeat Dr. Cortex’s minions, a series of “mutagen henchmen” who are trying to “enslave all dimensions.” It’s set on Wumpa Island and will feature a number of fan-favourite characters like Coco Bandicoot, Uka Uka and Dingodile.

There’s also a persistent metagame beyond the endless runner gameplay where Crash can perform “collection runs” to scavenge for ingredients. These items allow the player to upgrade and expand Coco’s base by unlocking buildings to “create an arsenal of weapons: serums, bombs and even rayguns!”

In other Crash Bandicoot news, Activision noted in their Q4 2019 investor call that they plan to release “several remastered and reimagined experiences” in 2020, suggesting Crash could make another appearance following the popularity of Activision’s remaster of the original trilogy. We reviewed another Crash spin-off, Crash Team Racing Nitro-Fueled back in 2019, which we called a “kart racer worth playing.”

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Jordan Oloman is a freelance writer for IGN. Follow him on Twitter. 

XCOM: Chimera Squad is nearly here, just weeks after it was revealed. This experimental, budget-priced XCOM game makes some big changes to the series’ standard formula, including a preset team and straying from the usual permadeath element. It’s clear that Firaxis wants to expand the definition of an XCOM game, so GameSpot picked the brain of lead designer Mark Nauta on how it all came together.

What was the genesis for the idea of Chimera Squad? How long has it been in development?

As game developers, we’re always interested in ways that we can change or iterate on the way a game is structured and plays. After we released XCOM 2 and the War of the Chosen expansion, we felt there were still opportunities that had yet to be explored in the XCOM system. XCOM: Chimera Squad gives us a chance to revisit some core ideas of XCOM without having to rebalance all of XCOM 2 and War of the Chosen. This means we can try out ideas like Interleaved Turns and Breach mode, and use agents as characters instead of traditional XCOM soldiers and their classes. I started design work on Chimera Squad after War of the Chosen.

Continue Reading at GameSpot

Battlefield 5 is preparing to wrap up the Into the Jungle event near the end of April, and preparing for the next set of updates. Senior producer Ryan McArthur outlined the upcoming roadmap in a post on the EA Blog.

For starters, McArthur says “one more standalone update” is planned for this summer, which could signify that this is the last major update planned for Battlefield 5. It will add “new content, weapons, and game tweaks,” but the blog notably doesn’t mention if it will include new maps. Sometime after the summer update, Battlefield currency and Company Coin will be offered as weekly rewards to unlock gear.

DICE is also planning community events like weekly community games on Fridays and Throwback Thursdays featuring previous Battlefield games. It’s also continuing work on the community games updates, and is still working to root out cheaters. It recommends using the community tools walkthrough to report cheaters.

Continue Reading at GameSpot

With tax refunds and stimulus money showing up in people’s accounts, plus the new-found free time many of us have, 4K TVs are a hot commodity. Whether you picked up one of our picks for the best 4K TVs for gaming or went all-out and grabbed one of the best high-end 4K TVs, your new investment needs a place to sit.

TV Stand Deals

Don’t see the deals below? Click here.

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One really nice thing about these TV stands is they all have free shipping. That means you don’t need to leave your house, which is pretty ideal right now. If you do want to leave, or you’re making a trip out to get groceries anyway, you can opt to have one of these TV stand deals delivered to your nearest store. Personally, I’d just have it delivered, but that’s just me not wanting to throw a big box into the back of my car.

If you’re in the market for a new set, check out our guide to the best 4K TV deals right now.

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Seth Macy is IGN’s tech and commerce editor and just wants to be your friend. Find him on Twitter @sethmacy.

Gears 5 loads 4 times quicker on Xbox Series X than on Xbox One – without a single change to the game’s code.

Speaking to Windows Central about the benefits of the new hardware, The Coalition’s technical director Mike Rayner quantified just how much the studio is already getting out of the upcoming console: “With the Xbox Series X, out of the gate, we reduced our load-times by more than 4x without any code changes.”

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Rayner explained that, “With the new DirectStorage APIs and new hardware decompression, we can further improve I/O performance and reduce CPU overhead, both of which are essential to achieve fast loading.”

The gist of Rayner’s comments – and the article as a whole – is that Microsoft’s work on improved I/O performance, and how it affects loading times, is among the most important additions.

“We have come to expect generational leaps in CPU, GPU, and memory performance with each generation”, says Rayner. “Xbox Series X more than delivers against these expectations. As a game developer, one of the most exciting improvements that far exceeds expectations is the massive I/O improvements on Xbox Series X. ”

The next-gen version of Gears 5 Rayner mentions isn’t just a tech test – it will be a launch game for Series X, and will be available as a free upgrade to those that already own it.

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We’ve already seen a demonstration of the base improvement on loading times from Xbox Series X (above), and that’s one of several tech upgrades that Microsoft is touting for its next machine.

Xbox Series X is scheduled to be released during Holiday 2020. Right now we know the Xbox Series X specs, we have an educated guess on its price based on those specs, and a full comparison with PS5. What we know far less about is Xbox Series X games, but we have a list of confirmed and rumoured titles for the next-gen console.

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