Author: trafficblast

New Releases highlights some of the hottest video games launching each week, and this episode as a double-dose of trilogies: Torchlight 3 and Cook Serve Delicious 3 both launch soon. You can also drive a mini RC car in Mario Kart Live: Home Circuit or pilot a hover car in Cloudpunk. Finally, hockey fans can get their fix with NHL 21.

Torchlight 3 — October 13

Available on: PS4, Xbox One, PC

Once called Torchlight Frontiers, Torchlight 3 is leaving early access for its full release. You can choose from four different classes and explore randomly generated dungeons, where you’ll battle bad guys and collect all sorts of loot. Look for a Switch version later this year, too.

Continue Reading at GameSpot

Microsoft has shared another very cool behind-the-scenes video for Halo Infinite that shows how the audio team captured sounds for the sci-fi shooter. This new video shows off how the developers recorded the game’s various explosion sounds, of which we expect there to be many in Halo Infinite.

A warning first: this video contains very loud sounds, and you’ll probably also want to listen with headphones or through a dedicated speaker to appreciate them better. The video runs for about 2 minutes and it showcases a multitude of different explosion sounds. They’re all a treat to watch, but my favorite is probably the underwater explosions that create a very unique sound with the initial bang and the ensuing waterfall cascade. Check it out below.

Halo Infinite was originally set to release in November as a launch title for the Xbox Series X/S. However, Microsoft delayed the game due in part to complications related to COVID-19.

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Amazon’s big-budget Lord of the Rings TV has resumed production in New Zealand, and the team is making good progress, it seems. Director JA Bayona posted to his Instagram story recently, sharing a photo of himself and various emojis pertaining to a fantasy show like Lord of the Rings. The news here is Bayona has now completed “more than half” of the weeks of shooting on the show.

“This is my face of having completed more than half the weeks of shooting. More tomorrow!” he said.

Bayona, who previously directed Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, was announced as the director of the first two episodes in the series, but whether or not his role has expanded due to COVID-19 is unclear. Whatever the case, the production is surely behind schedule given the impact of the virus. That being said, New Zealand just recently lifted all restrictions for Auckland, which is one of the sites where the Lord of the Rings show is being filmed.

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Another year off for Forza while it retools and reboots for next-gen means that Dirt 5 will now play the role of the Xbox Series X’s obligatory racing game at launch. And racing games, of course, traditionally act as graphical showcases for your new console. You show them to your friends so they can see what your $500 got you. Well, after playing a couple hours of the off-road-focused Dirt 5 on the Series X, my eyeballs are disappointingly un-melted. That’s not to say Dirt 5 looks bad – that’s not the case at all – but I don’t even think it outclasses 2018’s Forza Horizon 4 in the graphics department. That said, I am thoroughly impressed by the sheer amount of and variety of content on offer.

Let’s get right to the next-gen question for those of you who are only here for that: Dirt 5 looks nice, but not amazing. Yes, it’s got a 120hz mode for Series X (which I can’t show you properly in the videos on this page thanks to the limitations of my gameplay capture equipment, the video player you’re watching the videos on, and/or your screen’s maximum refresh rate). In fact, it’s got three display options total: besides 120hz Mode, there’s Image Quality and Framerate. Image Quality seems to suffer a bit more pop-in, and Framerate indeed is a bit smoother, but 120hz Mode isn’t quite the jaw-dropping upgrade I was hoping for.

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Where Dirt 5’s visuals deserve the most kudos, though, is with their variety. You’ll see snow, ice, dust, the Golden Hour, pitch darkness, a Gymkhana arena, and more as you race through track after track in the Career Mode, with all of that environmental grime kicking its way up onto the body of your car as well. Rounding out the presentation is narration from Troy Baker (who can now check off “racing game” on his “Video Game Genres I’ve Done VO For” BINGO card) as well as two guys who sound like they’re on a 24/7 Extreme Bro Sports radio station.

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When you begin Dirt 5’s career mode, it feels a bit plain. You start with a simple race, but the longer you play the more you realize how many different kinds of off-road races there are on a huge number of tracks. You’ll jump in the driver’s seat of everything from rally racers to Sprint cars while going everywhere from the iced-over streets of New York City to the side of a mountain in Morocco. This doesn’t even account for various sponsorship goals in your career, multiplayer options, the free play area, and more.

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After a couple of hours with the controller in-hand, Dirt 5 seems to be an absolute buffet of off-road racing flavors, even if there’s not as much of a next-gen sheen to it as I was hoping for.

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Ryan McCaffrey is IGN’s Executive Editor of Previews. Follow him on Twitter at @DMC_Ryan, catch him on Unlocked, and drop-ship him Taylor Ham sandwiches from New Jersey whenever possible.

The rally racing series hits the Xbox Series X on console launch day, and you can see next-gen gameplay of Dirt 5 here.

Warning: Full spoilers for the episode follow…

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With its second episode, The Walking Dead: World Beyond ticked up, delivering an initial leg of the teens’ journey that was far more interesting than the premiere’s heavy focus on the safe, walled-up world they were leaving behind. A world that would be wiped out by the end of said premiere.

Also, instead of focusing almost solely on the Bennett sisters, as the first episode did, “The Blaze of Gory” helped establish Elton and Silas more as characters and better defined their reasons for wanting to be on this arduous, near-impossible trek in the first place. The first episode touched on the boys’ motivations a tiny bit, but this chapter really helped shape those two a lot more while also creating a very believable, and likable, quartet.

Now that these teens are out in the “real” world of The Walking Dead universe, amongst the destruction, ruin, and walkers (called “empties” here), their saga feels more tethered to the other two shows in ways that just having the CRM around couldn’t produce. These are the badlands. This is the terrain we’ve watched our other heroes traverse for years now. And so “The Blaze of Gory” threw these kids out into the thick of it.  Sure, this could have easily made the series become a bit more generic, but, crazily, it helped the show find a bit of uniqueness. It wasn’t going to let these four off the hook. They weren’t going to just be “moderately okay” at killing empties. They were going to straight-up suck. They were going to be clumsy. They were going to hesitate. They were going to be so bad at it that their best recourse, at this point in the show, is to run away. Just like Felix taught them.

You’d think that’d be boring, but there’s nothing really boring about characters thinking themselves out of situations they can’t handle. If they’re mostly retreating after the sixth episode, then we’ll talk.

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Hope and Iris continued grow as individuals, with Hope being the one leaving breadcrumbs for Felix to find (and ultimately being the most vulnerable and fearful of all the teens) and Iris quickly realizing that she might have gotten everyone too far in over their heads with her headstrong approach to the mission. Hope and Elton’s conversation about their generation being special because they not only represent the end of a species line (an “Endling”) but because they know they’re the last was great. Elton, as someone who grew up with no family (thanks to Hope), finds solace in this while the very idea fills Hope with dread. These two make a good duo, not just as friends but as opposite sides of a coin. He wants to absorb all the sights, smells, and information he can while she wants to ostrich and shirk.

Of course, Elton isn’t haunted with every step he takes out into the hellscape either. Hope is still living with the secret of murdering the pregnant woman as a child (which at some point will get back to Elton) so the first part of this adventure is mental agony for her. Both she and Felix have to sort through some painful recollections while making their way through Omaha. For Felix, though, it was the him remembering how monstrous his parents were when he came out, and then making the choice, while traveling with Huck, to go back to his home and drop them as zombies.

Of the teens, Silas is obviously different egg to crack. But in this episode, even as the quiet one, you felt why he wanted to be there. We don’t know his past, we only know that he’s lonely and that he actively does not want to go back to what was a supposedly a choice, comfy environment. As the largest of the four, he’s also not automatically the brute. While Iris hacked away at an empty (eventually vomiting on the ghoul and then giving up, which was pretty funny) Silas won’t even take a swing at one (with his big-ass wrench).

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The idea of a permanent-structure/phenomenon like the Blaze of Gory itself — aka the B.O.G. — made this midwestern area of the zompocalypse feel sinisterly special. The idea that there’s this massive eternal flame, just lighting up the area, cloaking the sky in smoke, attracting empties, is a fun first obstacle for these four to face. It takes a lot of guts to run into a zone swarming with undead, with low-to-zilch visibility, knowing that your strategy is to bob and weave and avoid them. Notably, as viewers, we have to buy these kids wanting to do that. Fortunately the episode worked well enough to make it believable, and a lot of that had to do with the four bonding over silly things, like a bowling ball named “Big Moe” and a board game that’s totally unrelatable in this new world, Monopoly. Once you know they have each others’ backs, you can buy into a ton of dangerous decisions.

Warning: Full spoilers for Fear the Walking Dead’s Season 6 premiere follow…

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Fear the Walking Dead opened its sixth season strong with a violent, hyper-focused Morgan “rebirth” story that got our crossover champ back in the (literal) saddle – and with a whole new look, purpose, and weapon.

Fear’s Season 5 experiment with mostly keeping its large ragtag ensemble apart (for narrative, but maybe also budgetary, reasons) and delivering character-specific episodes had both its ups and downs. The episodes were usually pretty good due to the spotlight, but the season, as a whole, suffered under the fragmentation.

Of course, story-wise, ensemble-wise, Fear is a far cry from what it was when it started. Heck, it even feels distant from what it was two years ago. Maybe that’s this show’s ultimate trick: to constantly shift and morph while The Walking Dead stays resolute in its stasis. Regardless, when talking about either show, we know Morgan Jones has been through it. The guy has experienced everything. He lost his family, he went full-blown mad, he tried to be a pacifist, he tried to be a terminator, and then he literally Forest Gump-ran from Virginia to Texas to start over with a new batch of bozos. My point is, it takes some special care to give us a Morgan adventure we kind of haven’t seen already.

“The End Is the Beginning” — where the title comes from some suspicious dudes tagging a large nuclear sub (and who are possibly after its payload key) — has its flaws, in that it only answers one of the character cliffhangers from the Season 5 finale (though, admittedly, the most important one), but it winds up putting Morgan through a solid pressure-cooker adventure that heals him, refreshes him, and sets him out as sort of a ghost of his previous identity. He’s finally found a place where he can bring everyone. One that’s safe and off the (and every) map. Now he just has to go rescue them all, while also handling Ginny. “Morgan Jones is dead,” he eerily tells her over the radio, “and you’re dealing with someone else now.”

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The bulk of “The End Is the Beginning” was about getting Morgan’s head right after failing fairly hard at the end of last season. How do you get this guy back on the “we’re not doing careful, we’re doing right” track that was the crux of the videos he and his team sent out all across Texas. Well, you do it by showing him how that message affected other people. One person, who we never even see (which is sort of cool), saves Morgan’s life after Ginny shoots him. Of course, the now-bearded Mr. Jones is still very much at death’s door, some time later, when the episode starts and walkers barely give him a second glance, but the point is that some altruistic citizen saved his bacon.

Then there’s Isaac, played by Michael Abbott Jr, who’s a former ranger in Ginny’s outfit who Morgan meets out on the road. Yup, he’s a previous villain whose heart opened wide after watching one of Morgan’s VHS tapes. Isaac, who’s oh-so-briefly an antagonist here, just wants to get back to his pregnant wife and sees Morgan, with his gangrene smell, as way past some walkers. And it turns out, the very sweaty Isaac is very sweaty for a good reason. He’s already been bit by the time he finds Morgan and just wants to be there for his wife. He’s a good single-episode character to have, as his story gives Morgan hope, perspective, and the motivation to “power up” and fight off walkers with one good arm. Also, Morgan made the decision to fight through those walkers so that Isaac didn’t have to take two more days to go around them before he knew Isaac was dying, so that was a nice touch.

Oh, but Isaac wasn’t the only new face this episode. Demetrius Grosse (The Rookie, Westworld) infused this premiere with some delicious villain vibes as a bounty hunter named Emile. Using a dog that can apparently track someone’s scent for an unheard of distance, Emile, like the It in It Follows, is guaranteed to find whoever he’s after. With a cowboy hat, an appreciation of beans, a vicious axe, and a love collecting dead heads we haven’t seen since The Governor, Emile was a pure pleasure to watch. Plus, mini arc-wise, Morgan went from willfully sparing Emile (by shooting him in the arm) to willfully ending him (with the swing of an axe). Now we’ve got a Morgan (donning Emile’s hat and trading in his staff for the axe) dead set on rescuing his friends and a pregnant Grace.

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When Lennie James’ character Morgan moved from The Walking Dead to Fear the Walking Dead, it essentially rebooted the show. Most of what was left of the Clarke family was dispatched of, and a slew of new characters to support Morgan were introduced. Whether or not you enjoy this new version of Fear the Walking Dead, it’s hard to ignore the fact that it’s a 100% different series.

Warning: The following contains spoilers for the Season 6 premiere episode of Fear the Walking Dead, titled “The End is the Beginning.” If you haven’t watched it yet, stop reading now.

Unfortunately for that show, this new series is far less interesting than what came before it. There’s no disputing the fact that Season 1 of Fear the Walking Dead was a very rough start. The show hadn’t figured out what it was going to be at that point and was on rocky ground, following a family from Los Angeles as the world crumbled around them. However, in the two seasons that followed, Fear became the better of the (at the time) two The Walking Dead shows. While the mothership series became less and less interesting–and continues to do so–Fear felt like a breath of fresh air.

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The Outer Worlds is finally coming to Steam. The game, which launched on PC through the Epic Games Store and Xbox Game Pass in October 2019, will soon be available through Valve’s storefront–it will release for Steam on October 24.

(This is the Obsidian-developed RPG, not the space-faring Outer Wilds; you’d be forgiven for confusing the two, especially since both launched on Epic rather than Steam.)

The game, which recently released its first expansion, is available through Xbox Game Pass for Xbox One too, and can be purchased on PS4 and Switch. Developer Obsidian has since been bought by Microsoft, so future installments in the series could be Xbox and PC exclusive.

Continue Reading at GameSpot