Ever wondered exactly how many hours you ploughed into Donkey Kong Bananza on a specific day this summer? The new Nintendo Store app will let you find out.

Now available worldwide, the Nintendo Store app is primarily a way to browse and buy Switch games and Nintendo merchandise. You can download demos, acquire amiibo, and even purchase new consoles or retro controllers.

But the app's most unique feature is a little more hidden. Head to your profile and scroll down to find your Play Activity, which lists all Switch 1, Switch 2, 3DS and Wii U games you've played over the last couple of years. Selecting a particular title then lets you see a range of previously unseen data — including playtime by day.

For example, let's look at my save file for Animal Crossing: New Horizons, which I played a lot back in early 2020. My playtime is listed as the rather vague "200 hours or more," but I can also see when I first played the game (March 3, 2020) and when I last played (July 8 the same year — when I quit Animal Crossing games, I tend to go cold turkey).

During those dates I played across more than 106 days, and scrolling down I can see, by date, how much I played on each. Amid a string of sessions where I played more than five hours per day, I can see a 6 hour 15 minute session I logged back in early April. To be fair, there wasn't much else to do at the time.

Your play history can be ordered via longest played (Animal Crossing is my longest, closely followed by Zelda: Breath of the Wild), the date you first played a game, and via system — giving you a couple of options to look back at what you were playing several generations ago. (My most played Wii U game? Zelda: Twilight Princess HD.)

Or, of course, you could just use the app to shop. If you fancy trying it yourself, Nintendo Store is now available via the App Store and Google Play.

Tom Phillips is IGN's News Editor. You can reach Tom at tom_phillips@ign.com or find him on Bluesky @tomphillipseg.bsky.social

Valor Mortis, the first-person action game set in an alt-history version of the Napoleonic wars, was announced earlier this year at Gamescom Opening Night Live. In its announcement and subsequent marketing, the developers have been clear about one big element of Valor Mortis: it’s a soulslike.

Sure, it’s a first-person game, which automatically makes it look radically different from any FromSoftware game or even the 2D soulslikes such as Hollow Knight, Nine Sols, and Blasphemous. But speaking to me at the Game Industry Conference in Poznań, Wielkopolska, game director Radosław Ratusznik was hyperaware of the expectations that such a bold declaration would immediately attach to Valor Mortis. And he’s determined to do right by players while remaining committed to the perspective shift.

Valor Mortis is being developed by One More Level, the studio behind 2020’s Ghostrunner. Ratusznik tells me that the studio is largely made up of Souls game fans who badly wanted to tackle the genre, but knew they needed more development experience as a group first. This, he says, is what led to Ghostrunner, which is a first-person action game that, at least by our own estimation, was pretty great.

With one success under their belt, One More Level turned to Valor Mortis. Ratusznik says that the idea for gameplay came before the game’s setting – the team wanted something that would let them mix melee combat and firearms with the more magical mutant abilities. It just so happened that the game’s lead concept artist was also an historian with a lot of knowledge on Napoleonic Europe.

Which is how Valor Mortis ended up set during the Napoleonic Wars, featuring a monstrous Napoleon raising an army of undead mutants to rampage across Europe.

“I think, for many players, the Napoleonic era sounds really to be like... I don't want to say unattractive, but with this silly uniform, something like that, they're not treating it like something that is maybe attractive for them, and we wanted to change that a little bit,” Ratusznik says. “We think that this is a significant part of our history here in Europe, Napoleon as the emperor, and we want to tell the story, our own version about it. It's not historically accurate. So we don't want to educate players, of course, about the history, but we think that it's something unique, something new for the players to play, to explore.”

You play as William, a British soldier who initially joined Napoleon’s army wooed by promises of a free Europe, but who is gradually coming to the realization that war is far from rosy. Unlike his fellow soldiers, William can control the nephtoglobin, the substance that prompts the undead mutation, and is able to retain his sanity while making use of its powers and fighting his way through the gruesome, warped battlefields left in Napoleon’s wake.

“The theme of horror is very important for us,” Ratusznik explains. “So it's not even just these monsters that you are fighting. We are also telling the story about the war and how there are no winners, no true winners at war. That we are in the middle of this conflict, we will learn about each side of the conflict. So this is a story about the foreign soldier in the foreign army, in the foreign land, because we are exploring the eastern parts of Europe. We are not telling if it's Poland or is it some other country. So it's more like a universal story about soldiers in the war.”

Having played quite a bit of Valor Mortis at GIC, I can confirm that despite how silly the premise seemed to me initially, One More Level has indeed made something pretty unsettling. An image permanently burned into my memory is of a soldier in uniform, on all fours, leaping out at me like a dog from behind a pile of bodies. But instead of looking at me with his face, his head was contorted downward to put his large, ridiculous, fuzzy wig-hat out front, which had opened down the middle into a mouth full of teeth and was snarling at me as it attacked. Weird, startling, and very effective.

But whatever you think of the setting, the gameplay is fundamentally very souls. There’s a stamina meter to manage, poise meters on enemies to break with attacks and well-timed parries. When you die, you of course drop all the currency you’ve collected from enemies as you go and have to fetch it back, or lose it forever. And there are bonfires (in this case, lanterns) that serve as safe spots and checkpoints to restart from with each death. Valor Mortis is also quite difficult. I won’t pretend to be the best Souls player around (I’m decidedly middling) but I spent a good long while running up against the game’s first (I think) boss, which had two phases, summoned smaller enemies, and had an enormous attack radius. I died. A lot.

And yet, Ratusznik is on the defensive about whether his game qualifies as a Soulslike or not, in part because of the first-person perspective, but also because of the high expectations put on any game that purports to hail from that tradition by its many fans.

“I think that the genre is such a demanding thing that if you want to create a good thing for this demanding community, you need to be very well prepared,” Ratusznik says. “And we wanted to communicate it this way. We are telling people, ‘We are a Soulslike. And If you are not sure about it, you can challenge us. You can ask us why we think it's Soulslike.’ And we are perfectly fine with that. And we know that players after the playtest, after showing the game at Gamescom, at TGS, we were also on PAX in Seattle, and all the players who are playing, they are telling us, ‘I was doubtful about it that you can manage to make a Soulslike in first-person, but after playing it, I believe you. It's true. It's a Soulslike in first-person.’ So that's what's very cool for me. I mean, personally, as a fan of the genre, that we managed to deliver the game in the genre, it's something amazing.”

So I ask Ratusznik, what does it mean to be a Soulslike? What are the defining characteristics, to him, that Valor Mortis just had to embody?

“Well there is always a debate, how many features from the FromSoft games should game have to be a Soulslike?” he says. “So in our example is, of course, a stamina-based combat system. So that's the first thing. Then we have the checkpoints that are kind of similar to the bonfires in Soulslike. In our game this is a lantern. So you have to reach the lantern to save, make your checkpoints. When you die, you will start from this place. You can then rest, the enemies will come back to life. So this kind of thing is present. But also the exploration is very important, I think, for the Soulslike in this kind of Metroidvania approach in the level structure.

“In our game we even push it further. So we also have these elements of Metroidvania, such as abilities that you are gathering that you can use on previously visited levels to unlock some alternative paths. Also the shortcuts are very important, so you need to explore to find the shortcuts to get faster to the safe point, to these checkpoints or something. So there is a lot of that. And also, the boss fights as the true challenges, very demanding. So I think, yeah, I mean these elements are there for sure, but it's not like we are taking all of it blindly. We are thinking about each of this and how it'll fit our vision for this game and also the first-person perspective, which is kind of tricky.”

The perspective switch really is a difference maker for Valor Mortis, as it transforms how combat plays out, how parries and dodges and swings need to be timed and directed, and how boss mechanics can be tuned for challenge. But given the popularity of the Soulslike genre, I’m surprised that there aren’t more first-person Souls games out there – most people just follow in either the Dark Souls tradition or the Hollow Knight one. Why is that?

“I think it's not easy to make it happen, to be honest,” Ratusznik says. “I mean we did Ghostrunner, so we learned how to make first-person melee combat. And even for us, it was not easy to make the melee combat in first-person satisfying and not confusing. But in Poland we can do it because we have Dying Light, Cyberpunk is also with first-person combat. And we have our games, so Ghostrunner and now Valor Mortis. So it's a bit tricky.

“You need to make at least a few tricks to somehow help players to get better feedback from each of the actions that they are taking. So for example, when we attack the enemies, we have some kind of a system that is in the action fighting games where you are snapped to the enemy, pulled to the enemy somehow. So we are attacking and the system is assisting you in getting closer to the enemies. Because it's hard to tell the distance. Both the collider of your weapon is a little bit bigger than you expect just to feel that you hit it. So we need to set it up properly. There are a lot of small things that you have to add to make this combat feel juicy but also satisfying for the players. Of course on top of that there are proper animations, proper animation of the enemies, of the reactions of the enemies. Sound design is very important. Also…there needs to be some additional assets, like some arrows, some indicators that are telling you that if someone is behind you, these kinds of things.”

Valor Mortis is planned for a 2026 release on PC, PS5, and Xbox. I ask Ratusznik how it’s been developing for consoles this generation, and he gives me a rather surprising take: he really likes the Xbox Series S.

“Each generation is easier, the certification process is easier and also the knowledge of the hardware is bigger among the developers,” he says. “So I think also the fact that you have to optimize for all consoles is beneficial for all the players, right? So when we need to optimize our game for Xbox Series S, then the PC players also get a more optimized game, right?

“I know a lot of players who really love, for example, one genre or one type of game. They are only playing, I don’t know, Call Duty or Gears of War, so they don't have to buy the newest stuff to play their games. So they have the Series S. And if you try to make a PC for the same cost, for example, it won't be possible, right? So if we manage to optimize the game for the S, I know that a lot of developers are struggling with it, but I think it's more like a challenge that you should handle to make the game optimized for players.”

But there is one console conspicuously missing from the lineup. Where’s the Nintendo Switch 2?

“I mean I would love that one day,” Ratusznik says. “So we are considering it. It's not like that we are announcing anything, but personally I would love to bring this game to Switch 2. I think that it would be nice to see this type of game on this console.”

We also spoke to Ratusznik at GIC about Soulslike difficulty, and why the game might have an easy mode, but won't have a bunch of other difficulty settings. You can read our conversation right here.

Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. You can find her posting on BlueSky @duckvalentine.bsky.social. Got a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.

Valor Mortis, the first-person soulslike action game set in an alt-history Napoleonic era, is out next year. And with developer One More Level especially pushing the “Soulslike”-ness of the whole thing, it seems only natural that at some point before or after launch there’s going to be a discussion about the game’s difficulty - is it too hard? Is it hard enough? Should it have an easy mode, or something else?

The difficulty discussion, of course, is one that crops up every time a new Souls game is released. What makes difficulty fun, and what makes it obnoxious? Should games have easy modes? What sorts of accessibility features are helpful to ensure everyone can play the game and experience its design friction as intended, without experiencing other, undesirable friction due to controls or other functions?

I played Valor Mortis at the Game Industry Conference in Poznań, Wielkopolska, and while I’m only of middling Soulslike skills, I can confirm it’s pretty tough! I also spoke with game director Radosław Ratusznik, who says that the team is still in discussions as to how they will approach all this. For now, he says, Valor Mortis just has one difficulty setting. But that may change in the future.

“If we decide at one point to change it, I think we will change it for easy mode and normal mode, just two of them. Because I think that players should have similar experiences when they're playing these kinds of games. So personally, I'm fine with the easy mode, if someone wants to just experience the story, learn a little bit about how the game works. But if we have a lot of options, like there are like tens of difficulty options, then each person can play a totally different game. I think what connects Soulslike players is that they are all struggling in these games. If they manage to succeed in this game, they can share this experience with other players. And this is something that has a huge value I think for them, for this community.”

But there’s nuance here, because while Ratusznik may be against having ten difficulty options ranging from Story Mode to Ultra Hard Giga Death Difficulty, he agrees that discussions around difficulty often don’t take into account the nuance of accessibility. He’s not a fan, for instance, of games that let you turn on and off certain mechanics (such as parries), because he thinks that players “lose something from this experience.” But he also adds that, as far as accessibility goes, “we can have a lot of things that can assist you without lowering the difficulty of the game.” Accessibility isn’t solved with an easy mode.

Ratusznik isn’t alone in this belief. FromSoftware’s Hidetaka Miyazaki has said similar of Elden Ring, “We are always looking to improve, but, in our games specifically, hardship is what gives meaning to the experience. So it’s not something we’re willing to abandon at the moment. It’s our identity.” But also notably, Elden Ring was far more flexible than FromSoftware’s past games in the ways in which it allowed players to eventually conquer challenges. You could outlevel bosses to make them trivially easy if you wandered off and defeated enough weaker enemies, there are some builds that turn certain bosses into jokes, and there’s so much to do in the game and so many paths to victory that if you’re struggling with something, Elden Ring encourages you to leave and do something else. Another recent Soulslike, Hollow Knight: Silksong, is similar in this structure.

How Valor Mortis will ultimately handle its difficulty remains to be seen, as Ratusznik himself says that the team is still working out what they want to do. We won’t know til next year when the game launches on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series.

We also spoke to Ratusznik at GIC about Valor Mortis’ soulslike credentials, and why it’s challenging to make a game in that tradition in the first-person. You can read our conversation right here.

Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. You can find her posting on BlueSky @duckvalentine.bsky.social. Got a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.

Epic Games has celebrated the launch of Fortnite's new The Simpsons mini-season, which it says has welcomed "the biggest number of new and returning Fortnite players since last holiday season."

Public player data tracked by Fortnite.gg shows that a peak of 2.6 million players logged on both Saturday and Sunday, firstly to watch the live event that introduced The Simpsons aliens Kang and Kodos to Fortnite's battle royale Island, and secondly to then play on the game's new Springfield map when it came online.

The live event saw Fortnite's heroes scooped up in a UFO and transported to Springfield Island, a mash-up of Fortnite and The Simpsons filled with familiar locations and Easter eggs from the long-running animated series. Fan response to the new season and its highly-detailed map has been positive, and Epic Games seems pleased with player numbers.

"In 48 hours, we welcomed the biggest number of new and returning Fortnite players since last holiday season," the developer wrote in a social media post. "The first Fortnite | The Simpsons short popped to #1 on Disney+ today in the US. Move over Shelbyville..."

Fortnite's player numbers have dipped somewhat this year, amid tough competition from Roblox and a string of battle royale seasons that feel like they haven't landed with fans quite as expected. In September, during the game's alien bug season, the game's average daily numbers briefly sagged to around half a million players, though player counts then rallied as Fortnite began its annual Halloween celebrations.

While 2.6 million players this past weekend is impressive, Fortnite has recorded several higher player spikes this year for other events. A peak of 5.7 million players logged in on June 7 for Death Star Sabotage, the game's live event that served as the finale of its Star Wars mini-season. Fortnite also saw a spike to 3.9 million players on August 2 for its superhero season finale, and 3.3 million players for the launch of its Daft Punk Experience.

What remains to be seen is how many of those new and returning players stick around over the rest of this month, as Fortnite's The Simpsons season culminates in a big live event on November 29. This is expected to usher in the game's next big era — Chapter Seven — that looks set to feature a crossover with Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill and, potentially, the return of Fortnite's heroic Seven faction.

Tom Phillips is IGN's News Editor. You can reach Tom at tom_phillips@ign.com or find him on Bluesky @tomphillipseg.bsky.social

With Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 just around the corner, Activision has laid out exactly when players will be able to jump into the action, and has confirmed everything players need to know about the official PC system requirements and pre-load times.

While pre-load goes live at the same time across all platforms on November 10 — 9am PT (scroll down to see when that'll be in your part of the world), launch times vary depending upon where you are, and what platform you're playing on. It's a bit confusing, so we've outlined the release times across key territories below.

We also have confirmed PC specs for Black Ops 7, so you can check to see if your PC is up to the task.

Confirmed Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 PC specs:

Predator: Badlands is unlike any Predator movie before it. Without spoiling the story, I’ll report that it is an all-out action adventure more along the lines of Disney's The Mandalorian than the sci-fi horror exploits of Dutch and co in the jungles of Mexico. It is a film in which the Predator is the protagonist, not the stalking, gore-obsessed antagonist we’re used to seeing. The whole premise of the Predator is flipped upside down here. Rather than hunt hapless humans, Dek, the Yautja runt out to prove himself, finds himself the hunted one on a death planet that’s out to get him.

But it’s more different, still. The tone, the pacing, the whole vibe of Predator: Badlands is… different. Not unfamiliar, of course; I’ve seen a hundred action adventure movies in the Star Wars style. But this is different for Predator. There are jokes (the Predator makes one — deliberately — himself!), there are moments of slapstick comedy, and there is a cute alien sidekick called Bud who I’ve already seen compared to Baby Yoda (Bud is a bit like Baby Yoda, I suppose, but a lot more rippy and shreddy).

There will be some Predator fans who will not like this one bit. I suppose I’m one of them. I suppose I’m a Predator purist, someone old enough to have seen Predator on VHS, a few years — probably — before I should have. It’s a formative film for so many… for me. And when it came to subsequent Predator films, it was all downhill from there.

And then Dan Trachtenberg turned up and he did something super interesting: Prey. I love Prey. It’s a back to basics Predator movie that takes what was great about the first film and builds something fresh and exciting around it. It rejuvinated the franchise, and I love — love! — that it did well enough for Dan Trachtenberg to be awarded the keys to the franchise, to be named the Predator showrunner (movierunner?), a fan and a hugely talented director who just gets Predator and wants to take it forward with critical and commercial acclaim.

His animated anthology go-between, Killer of Killers, continued the impressive run, although I still have my doubts about Trachtenberg's idea that the Yautja kidnap those who have bested them in the hunt, and — all off-screen — put them on ice only to defrost them later for another go. Sorry lads, that’s your ego getting the better of you, there. Aren’t you Yautja supposed to be super honorable? Take the L and leave Dutch, Harrigan, and Naru to live out their days in peace (well, relative peace given the persistent night terrors I'm sure they suffer over what you put them through). If you're bored, there has to be a Xenomorph out there who's desperate for a scrap?

And so we come to Predator: Badlands. I was in the rather fortunate position of being able to interview Dan Trachtenberg the day after I saw his film, with it fresh in my memory but also having slept on it. I should say this: I enjoyed the movie for what it is. When the Predators fight each other, it’s genuinely superb. Like, top-class action superb. At times it looks amazing. It always sounds amazing. I laughed at the bits I was supposed to. Elle Fanning as Weyland-Yutani synth Thia (and more) is superb. Dimitrius Koloamatangi delivers a truly impactful performance as Dek himself; you really feel the weight of the Predator as he leaps about the death planet. I was invested in this buddie movie, this Frodo and Sam road trip to a far future Mount Doom (owned and operated by Weyland-Yutani, of course). Predator: Badlands is a fun ride. But is that really what I want to be saying about Predator: Badlands after leaving the theater?

Whatever your answer to that question, it cannot be denied that Predator: Badlands is a fascinating project. It’s a movie I suspect will split the fanbase down the middle, like Dek tearing through a tentacled alien monster. Some people will hate it. They will accuse Predator of having succumbed to the ‘Disney effect’ in the pursuit of a larger PG-13 audience and, theoretically at least, box office. Some people will love it. They will take it for what it is: a rip-roaring sci-fi romp in which a Predator is the surprise main character, standing on his own two (very large) feet. I suspect few will sit on the fence with this one.

And so it was with all this in mind that I virtually sat down with Dan Trachtenberg to squeeze just a handful of questions into our painfully brief interview time. Such is the junket way! So, like Dek would, I jumped straight into the thorny question: why, Dan, have you done this?

IGN: It's obviously a very different tone and feel to what's gone before. I'm not going to get into spoiler territory or anything. There are jokes. I think the Predator even makes a joke at one point, there's slapstick comedy, there's a cutesy sidekick. It is a big swing for the Predator franchise. I'm sure you'll be asked about this a lot, but why did you decide to go in this direction for Badlands?

Dan Trachtenberg: Because it's a movie that does not exist. Prey was very much a back to basics exercise and Killer of Killers really doubled down on that traditional Predator story where you meet human characters and they're hunted one by one. You've now got five new movies... Killer of Killers is like four movies in one. And then with Prey as well, it really felt like, man, I don't think people really need another version of just that movie, that story, that structure as it was. It really felt like, boy, it'd be nice to have something refreshing and new in the franchise, but then also in science fiction movies in general.

We've always fallen in love with the sidekick, walking carpet Chewbacca, or the villainous monster, and they've never been the main character of the movie. So really loved the idea of being like, yeah, we're going to make a movie where the Predator is the main character and he's going to be ferocious and badass, and then he's going to meet this other cast of characters and there's going to be a soul to the movie.

A day after revealing its latest stellar sales figures, Nintendo has confirmed it will now "shift" its development focus to Switch 2 — and revealed that 84% of the console's early adoptees were players who owned Switch 1.

"Going forward, we will shift our primary development focus to Nintendo Switch 2 and expand our business around this new platform," Nintendo wrote in a freshly-published sales presentation.

Switch 2's first six months have been marked by a smattering of exclusives such as Mario Kart World and Donkey Kong Bananza, but also a series of paid upgrades to existing Switch 1 games (like Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Mario Party Bonanza) and cross-gen titles (like Pokémon Legends Z-A and the upcoming Metroid Prime 4: Beyond). Nintendo now appears to be suggesting that its future release slate will likely be more orientated to Switch 2 exclusives, likely buoyed by the huge success of its new machine.

Perhaps it's not a surprise to see such a huge percentage of Switch 2 players upgrading from Nintendo's prior console (which, after almost a decade on sale, is now near ubiquitous). But what's interesting here is a breakdown provided by Nintendo showing how smoothly the company has picked up its early Switch 2 adoptees over the Switch generation — relatively evenly, year by year.

The largest group of Switch 2 players are those who bought the Switch 1 back at its launch in 2017, but the groups of those who acquired Switch 1 in the following few years are not too different.

Bethesda has outlined the patch notes for Fallout 4 ahead of the release of the Creations Menu update and Anniversary Edition.

During the recent Fallout Day broadcast, Bethesda announced Fallout 4 Anniversary Edition, due out across PC, PlayStation, and Xbox on November 10, 2025.

Fallout 4 Anniversary Edition — designed to coincide with the post-apocalyptic role-playing game’s 10th anniversary — contains the six official add-ons and over 150 pieces of Creation Club content. Creations (user created content) arrive in Fallout 4 via a brand new in-game Creations menu, which will make it easy for players to find and download the new content on PC and console.

Now, Bethesda has detailed Fallout 4’s Creation Menu update, due out on November 10 alongside the release of the Anniversary Edition, and it includes more than expected. However, Bethesda issued a warning to mod users. Fallout 4 mods will undergo maintenance November 6-10, and during this time, Fallout 4 mods and Creation Club will be offline. This means you won’t be able to download or upload any new content (you’ll still have access to change your mod load order and play the game).

Bethesda asked players to disable any mods that change the main menu before the November 10 update (which requires changes to the main menu screen). If you don’t, the mods may break with the patch.

“Thank you for your patience as we work to roll these changes out and lay the groundwork for things like additional storage for Creations,” Bethesda said in a post on Steam.

Meanwhile, the Fallout 4 patch notes reveal some surprising but welcome gameplay and performance improvements. VATS Accuracy should now be fixed so hit chances are consistent across platforms and no longer drop to 0% or show incorrect values (this has been a problem for some time). Targeting enemies through walls without the Penetrator perk is no longer possible, too. There’s also improved Ultrawide and Super Ultrawide Support, and Resolution Detection (Autodetect now sets supported display resolutions, preventing crashes on launch).

Fallout 4 Anniversary Edition Creation Club content includes unique weapons, power armor, Pip Boy paint jobs, and more. During Fallout Day, Bethesda teased some of the Creations in the works, including one that will bring a "slice of the Mojave Desert" to the Commonwealth, an escape room experience, and even a mind's eye version of your spouse voiced by the original actors you can interact with. The six official expansions included are the Far Harbor, Automatron, and Nuka-World story add-ons, and the Contraptions, Vault-Tec, and Wasteland Workshop add-ons.

Fallout 4 Anniversary Edition will be available on Xbox Series X and S, Xbox One, PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Steam and PC. It’s coming to Nintendo Switch 2 at some point in 2026, marking the first time Fallout 4 will be available on a Nintendo console. Patch notes are below.

Fallout 4 - Creations Menu Update November 10 patch notes:

• Creations Menu: A new in-game Creations menu has been added, making it easier than ever to discover, download and enjoy content from professional developers and passionate enthusiasts alike.

Gameplay & Performance

• VATS Accuracy: VATS hit chances are now consistent across platforms and no longer drop to 0% or show incorrect values. Targeting enemies through walls without the Penetrator perk is no longer possible.
• NPC Visual Creations: Fixed stuttering and hitching caused by Creations that edit NPC visuals. Performance is improved when using such Creations.

Stability & Crashes

• BNET Connectivity: Better handling when there is a  Bethesda.net outage
• Crafting Station Crash: Interacting with crafting stations or the workshop on ultrawide monitors no longer causes crashes.

Ultrawide & Super Ultrawide Support

• UI & HUD Scaling: UI elements, HUD backgrounds, and item previews now scale correctly for 21:9 and 32:9 aspect ratios. Menus, quest updates, tutorials, workshops, and inspected objects are no longer stretched or squished.
• Pip-Boy Map: Players can now place markers, fast travel, and pan the map to the right side in the Pip-Boy when using ultrawide resolutions.
• Save Preview Images: Save preview images are now letterboxed to avoid looking squished on ultrawide monitors.

Miscellaneous

• Resolution Detection: Autodetect now sets supported display resolutions, preventing crashes on launch.

Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.

It’s been 6,496 days since the original release of Burnout Paradise, not that I’m counting. With the Burnout series clearly consigned to the same storage cupboard EA has been hiding the corpses of Westwood, Black Box, Pandemic, and all the other studios it shut down over the years, I completely understand the motivation for developer Three Fields Entertainment to craft Wreckreation. It’s an unapologetic Burnout Paradise clone in a stack of very clear ways, built for a ravenous audience that's been starved of one of arcade racing’s heaviest hitters for too long. After all, if you want something done, sometimes you need to do it yourself. Unfortunately, the one core component of its spiritual ancestor that Wreckreation couldn’t recapture was its overall quality, and the result is a janky, unrefined, and often unsatisfying racer that I don’t have much desire to keep playing.

Wreckreation’s resemblance to Burnout Paradise runs surprisingly deep, even for an independent studio that’s spearheaded by former Criterion Games bigwigs – the home of the Burnout series. In fact, there are times when it borders on self-plagiarism, such are the similarities – from the digital information ticker at the base of the screen to the familiar tone of a successful takedown. As such, Wreckreation often seems more concerned with recreating entire segments of Burnout Paradise’s identity than establishing its own unique one. I’m conscious it’s trying to do this with a fraction of the budget and a sliver of the staff of Criterion’s classic, and that’s admirable in its own way, but comparisons are unavoidable when the parallels are this blatant.

Crashing Out

From the opening race it was evident things were awry, from the framerate stutters when I hooked into a drift to the actual sliding itself – which feels a little more cumbersome than I typically like. Arcade racers live and die on their handling, and Wreckreation’s driving dynamics aren’t the best by any stretch. Its brake-to-drift brand of handling is straightforward enough, but it’s not the type of drifting that lets you effectively alter your angle throughout a powerslide. It’s almost as if the throttle has no real impact on your drift angle once you’re sideways. I became accustomed to the handling, but I certainly can’t say I ever warmed to it. I especially dislike its idiosyncrasies, like the fact that cars will screech to a quick halt when braking in a straight line, but stomp on the brakes mid-drift and your car will simply continue to hurtle onwards – even if you’re completely off the accelerator. There are also occasional moments of severe understeer, but I can’t figure out what’s triggering it. It may well be a combination of road surface and car type, but there were times when I just craved more responsiveness and needed my cars to snap back into a drift, and they wouldn’t. There's definitely a lag to the steering that blunts that zippy, arcade feel.

After a brief race across Wreckreation’s elevated stunt tracks, the next event was a stunt challenge, where I was required to accumulate a certain amount of points within a very basic arena of jumps and loops. Unfortunately, while my car could easily make it around the skinny loops during free roam, the moment I tried to take them on during the stunt challenge my car was instantly wrecked for no apparent reason. This wasn’t a one-off thing; it was consistently repeatable and happened every time I tried to drive the loops during the challenge. That’s a bad bug to hit five minutes in.

Pivoting my approach, I stuck to the jumps in order to build up the points I needed to progress. It wasn’t particularly challenging – and the simplistic approach to auto-leveling cars in the air means the stunting is all rather superficial and shallow compared to something like Wreckfest or Hot Wheels Unleashed – but nonetheless I’d earnt more than six times the necessary score when the time limit expired. At this point I… failed the challenge. I had, in fact, scored zero points – because points don’t automatically bank at the end of the session if you’re still accumulating them in a combo. They just vanish.

This sort of thing leaves a terrible first impression, and nothing I subsequently encountered was strong enough to affect a course correction.

Wreck Yourself Before You Check Yourself

After the stunt-centric opening minutes, Wreckreation quickly settles down into its largely Burnout-inspired groove. The bulk of what’s on offer here are standard races (where the goal is to finish first), ‘Takedown’ races (where the goal is to wreck a set number of vehicles), plus the occasional time trial and ‘Shutdown’ event (where you must perform a takedown on a special, marked car while exploring the open world, in order to add it to your garage – sound familiar?). You can progress through all this content however you see fit, hitting events in any order as you uncover new ones around the huge map. Unfortunately, this flexibility doesn’t disguise how familiar every race rapidly becomes.

The size of Wreckreation’s massive map is almost certainly a major culprit in this. At a reported 450 square kilometres, it’s an environment larger than a lot of contemporary open-world racing games. It makes for a great bullet point, but the reality is that this huge size brings with it major caveats. Its primary problem is that it’s extremely generic. It’s a large, square island, with no towns or cities. It’s just ribbons of tarmac and dirt draped over vanilla countryside, where one side of the map feels no different than the other. There are no obstacle-filled alleys or bustling urban centres; it’s just a big green slab with a lot of trees and rocks. I haven’t encountered any memorable races, because there are no memorable areas. There’s very little to distinguish one race from another, so ticking them off became tedious pretty quickly. There’s also a bug I encountered semi-regularly when selecting “restart race” from the pause menu that removed most of the HUD and made it impossible to open the map. The only fix was to restart the game, which was equally tiresome.

Races occur against just five other opponents, which is low by modern standards, and rely on some pretty egregious catch-up AI to stay tense – but they’re better than the Takedown races and Shutdowns. Takedown races began as a major frustration, with awful AI spawns that placed fresh takedown victims too far ahead. Unlike Burnout’s Road Rage events, which effectively inject opposition around you at all times to smash and bash, Wreckreation messed up massively by making other cars a total chore to catch within the slim time limits. Hell, sometimes they were impossible to catch because they spawned on an adjacent road you couldn’t reach thanks to the guardrails.

A patch released this week addressed this, and now opponents quickly streak into the picture from behind – just as they do in Burnout (although they still occasionally spawn on nearby roads you can’t get to). But I have to wonder how it was released in its previous state at all? How thoroughly was this game tested? At any rate, I’ve always maintained that the Burnout series fumbled when it added time limits for Road Rage events in Burnout Revenge. Burnout 3: Takedown was better without them, with the limiting factor simply being how much damage your car could take. I wish Wreckreation had cribbed from the latter in this instance.

Wreckreation also introduces a new spin on its off-brand Road Rage mode, which adds cars you’re not supposed to take down, lest you receive a time penalty. I don’t find this is a fun twist, and I actively dislike competing in these. The penalty cars don’t just chop precious seconds off your time limit – they don’t even count as takedowns if you shunt one off the road accidentally. The worst penalty takedown events have two marked penalty cars you can’t crash into, meaning every batch of opponents will only have two cars to take down. It makes chasing some of the high takedown totals extremely frustrating, and doubly so when it’s being stingy with attributing them to you in the first place. I lost track of the times multiple AI cars crashed out during a slo-mo takedown clip, but I was only rewarded for one of them.

Chasing the unfairly overpowered AI during Shutdown attempts is also extremely frustrating. That is, being barely able to catch a pickup that was supernaturally staying out of my grasp by perfectly matching my top speed is a cheap trick. I know speed stats are a bit of a meaningless metric in arcade racers with rubberband AI, but discovering this truck was actually doing at least 40km/h more than what it’s literally listed as being capable of was pretty annoying after chasing it across the map for 10 minutes.

Temu Trackmania

As close as Wreckreation sticks to its Burnout family roots, it admittedly does bring a whole new pillar of play to the party in the form of its customisation and creation tools, dubbed Live Mix. This gives us the ability to do everything from renaming vehicles, to changing the weather and traffic density, to even plonking down massive track pieces to create huge, skybound stunt courses.

The track creation suite should speak to me. 1990’s Stunts from Distinctive Software, with its pioneering track building tools, is one of the most formative racing games I’ve ever played and I’ve adored this sort of thing ever since. However, Wreckreation’s track builder has completely failed to inspire me.

There are some elements here that I find quite neat. I admire how most of the track modules automatically generate the necessary support structures beneath them to secure them to the ground, regardless of their elevation. It gives the tracks a feeling of physical presence, like the skyscraper-sized feats of engineering something like this would be. There are some clever considerations baked in here too, like how the scaffolding will handily delete itself if you place new track pieces beneath established ones. However, after clipping together a whole bunch of track segments (and one complete game crash as I tried to add the last piece), the net result is that they’re nowhere near as thrilling to drive on as they look. It just feels significantly out of date compared to the incredible depth and fine tuning available via the track builder in, say, the Hot Wheels Unleashed series.

Live Mix ultimately proved handy on occasion for dropping down a jump or platform in the right place to reach a smashable billboard, although I’ve since wound back on that. Tracking down and crashing through the many collectables quickly became rather dull thanks to the fact the world just isn’t very interesting to explore. This is a non-insignificant hurdle considering a lot of these collectables are additional pieces and modules for the stunt tracks. It’s hard to argue the juice is worth the squeeze here. I’d say Wreckreation’s residents would be happy to see fewer obstacles strewn all over the roads, but they simply clip straight through them in a shower of sparks, anyway – like the props are invisible.