2K Games has surprise-dropped a PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S update for Mafia III that adds 60 FPS performance to the game alongside other technical improvements. If you already own the game on PlayStation 4 or Xbox One, the update is free; if you don’t, 2K is currently selling it on digital storefronts at 80% off.
The publisher has also revealed Mafia III: Definitive Edition for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S as well, and it includes the base game, all story DLC (Faster, Baby!, Stones Unturned, and Sign of the Times), and bonus packs (Family Kick-Back Pack and the Judge, Jury, & Executioner Weapons Pack) bundled together. This definitive edition is also available in the recently released Mafia: The Omerta Collection, which features Mafia, Mafia II, Mafia III, and Mafia: The Old Country.
Check out Mafia III in 60 FPS in the new trailer below:
Alongside today’s update, the Steam version of the game is getting a massive patch with all kinds of fixes, improvements, quality-of-life updates, and more. You can read those patch notes here.
2K Games has surprise-dropped a PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S update for Mafia III that adds 60 FPS performance to the game alongside other technical improvements. If you already own the game on PlayStation 4 or Xbox One, the update is free; if you don’t, 2K is currently selling it on digital storefronts at 80% off.
The publisher has also revealed Mafia III: Definitive Edition for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S as well, and it includes the base game, all story DLC (Faster, Baby!, Stones Unturned, and Sign of the Times), and bonus packs (Family Kick-Back Pack and the Judge, Jury, & Executioner Weapons Pack) bundled together. This definitive edition is also available in the recently released Mafia: The Omerta Collection, which features Mafia, Mafia II, Mafia III, and Mafia: The Old Country.
Check out Mafia III in 60 FPS in the new trailer below:
Alongside today’s update, the Steam version of the game is getting a massive patch with all kinds of fixes, improvements, quality-of-life updates, and more. You can read those patch notes here.
Forza Horizon 6, the latest open-world racer from developer Playground Games, was set to launch on PlayStation 5 this year but has since been delayed to 2027. Fortunately, it launches early in the year, specifically on January 26.
If you pay for the more expensive Premium Edition of Forza Horizon 6, you can start the game five days early on January 21, which is the same day the game’s first premium expansion goes live on all platforms (including PS5); despite Playground Games dubbing the expansion a “premium” one, the developer writes that it will be a free content update for all players in a blog. A physical version of Forza Horizon 6 will be available on disc for PS5 at launch from retailers. Developer Panic Button, which is the studio behind the PS5 version of Forza Horizon 5 that launched last year, is behind this PS5 port of Forza Horizon 6.
You can check out Forza Horizon 6 running on PlayStation 5’s 4K/30 FPS Quality Mode in the trailer below:
Playground Games says a 60 FPS Performance mode will also be available, though it hasn’t shared details on how the game might run on PlayStation 5 Pro.
If you preorder the game, you will get the pre-tuned Ferrari J50 added to your garage in-game after completing the prologue.
Forza Horizon 6 on PS5 will support cross-platform and cross-save with the Xbox and Steam versions. Plus, the game’s user-generated content is cross-platform, so PS5 players will have access to a large, growing collection of community-created content at launch. That content includes player-made EventLab races, Prefab vehicles, Garages, Estages, Liveries, and Tuning Setups.
Forza Horizon 6 hits PS5 in early access on January 21, ahead of its full launch on January 26.
Paramount Pictures is making a live-action Cyberpunk 2077 movie, according to a Deadline report. The publication says the movie is set in the Cyberpunk 2077 universe, which began with CD Projekt Red’s RPG of the same name and has since expanded into novels, comics, and anime like Cyberpunk: Edgerunners (which is getting a sequel this month).
Transformers One producer Lorenzo di Bonaventure, who has also produced multiple Transformers films, Snake Eyes, Madame Web, and more, is producing this Cyberpunk 2077 live-action movie. Beyond that, little else is known.
With Cyberpunk 2077 rich with stories, whether that’s the main story about V and Johnny Silverhand and their attempt to bring down Arasaka Corporation, the spy-centric Phantom Liberty expansion, or any of its myriad side quests, Paramount has plenty to draw on for this film. It sounds like this movie is still early in development, possibly even before pre-production, so it could be a while before we learn more.
Like most games born of Metroid, Echo Weaver’s inspiration is obvious. You explore and fill out a large, continuous map in a mysterious location and your abilities expand as you progress. Its other presumed inspiration, however, Outer Wilds, only makes itself apparent as you dig deeper into the unique structure of the game. You are stuck in a time loop in Echo Weaver, and it dictates what you can do and what you know about your suite of abilities. You don’t unlock new traversal moves and expanded weapons as much as you remember you literally had them all along. It makes the reward of discovery powerful in Echo Weaver, but it also creates frustrating barriers to progress.
As the titular Weaver, the character basically knows as much as the player holding the controller. You have a boomerang-like glaive you throw primarily to solve puzzles, and though it can be used to attack enemies, you won’t encounter very many. You also quickly learn that every few minutes, a vague calamity strikes, and you are forced back in time to start over. You keep your map progress and obviously everything that you’ve learned, and that’s more than enough to make death or resets not feel too unfair.
What really sets Echo Weaver apart is that many of your most useful abilities are not ones that you unlock, but rather ones you learn exist at some point along the way. For example, you can set your glaive on fire from the moment you start the game, but you won’t learn how until you’ve made significant progress. Mechanically, this is basically how every Metroid-inspired game works: Make enough progress and you will be able to do a new thing. But learning the often complicated procedures necessary for these later abilities that you could always do makes the reveal all the more rewarding. You weren’t given the ability to set your glaive on fire – you figured it out yourself. And that’s a good feeling.
This all plays into the time loop structure, too. The shortcuts needed to get to certain areas so you have more time to explore them were there all along – you just didn’t know how to see them. It’s why Echo Weaver feels more like a complicated puzzle box than a search action game where you’re killing the same creatures over and over, and I appreciate how that sets it apart from other games in the genre.
When you’re figuring things out and making good progress, it feels like you’re working in tandem with the time loop. But on the occasions when you’re not solving the puzzles you need, which is frequent, it can be frustrating. Running out of time when you’re trying to explore or just figure one last thing out becomes a burden, and the best course of action is often to just reset the time loop (essentially killing yourself), which feels like giving up in a moment that you don’t want to.
The worst moments of the time loop coming to a close are when you’re engaged in a complicated platforming gauntlet. Echo Weaver’s greatest shortcoming is that its jumping doesn’t feel great. Leaping is solid for general exploration, but when you’re trying to make it through thickets of thorns and endless pits that steal your health (and time), the action struggles to keep up with the demand. And when you’ve finally made it through and time loops just before you hit that checkpoint, it can be incredibly disheartening. Though resetting and trying again is built into the game’s design so it doesn’t become too much of a burden, I did hit a handful of distracting bugs primarily related to areas not loading properly when I fast-traveled to them.
Echo Weaver’s unique approach to the Metroid structure is admirable, unique, and well executed. The sense of discovery is fantastic, and though I realistically probably won’t immediately play the game again, the idea that I could start with knowledge of basically all of the abilities to rip through the game at high speed is an enticing one. Developer Moonlight Kids puts a lot of trust in the player to figure out how it all works, and the reward is palpable. That trust leads to some frustrated, aimless wandering, and the platforming challenges occasionally venture into feeling unfair, but by the end you will feel like a genius. That’s a good feeling to leave a game with.
While listening, I used my phone’s Shazam feature to create a list of all the songs I heard in the previews. Below, I’ll list each station and the songs I caught.
Cocotea FM
EoO – Bad Bunny
Si Es Trucho Es Trucho (Remix) – Axel Rulay featuring Farruko & El Afla
Canalla – Romeo Santos & El Chaval de la Bachata
Back Country Radio
Need a Little Time Off for Bad Behavior – David Allan Coe
Don’t Come Home a Drinkin’ – Loretta Lyn
The Conversation – Hank Williams, Jr & Waylon Jennings
AfroBank FM
Joha – Asake
Gye Wani – Pat Thomas featuring Ebo Taylor
Shay’sana – DJ Lag & Robot Boii featuring Kamo Mphela
The Chamber 106.6
I – Black Sabbath
I’m Broken – Pantera
Raining Blood – Slayer
Flash FM
Good Ones – Charli XCX
Electric Feel – MGMT
Midnight Sun (Girls Trip) – Zara Larsson & PinkPantheress
Dirty South Classics
Like a Pimp Mix – JefeEdai
Who Dat – JT Money
Born N Raided – DJ Khaled (featuring Pitbull, Trick Daddy, & Rick Ross)
And those are all the songs I heard on these stations.
Rockstar Games is gearing up for the long-awaited launch of Grand Theft Auto VI next month on November 19. We’ve been learning more about its protagonists, Jason and Lucia, the city of Leonida, and the in-game weather systems and wildlife players can expect to see. Now, Rockstar is letting players preview six radio stations in Grand Theft Auto VI.
You can find these radio previews here, and each features snippets of the hosts and songs you can expect to hear; the previews run roughly 1 to 3 minutes long. Alongside these radios you can listen to in-game, Rockstar has revealed that Grand Theft Auto VI will feature a series of “on-demand podcasts, with both radio and podcasts available to listen to in vehicles or on foot through newly introduced headphones and earbuds connected to their smartphones.”
Below, we’ll list each of the radio stations Rockstar has detailed today:
Cocoteo FM
Leonida’s home for the best of modern Latin music. Hosted by El Martillo and La Gata and featuring everything from bachata and merengue to dembow and reggaeton – Cocoteo FM is el party que nunca se apaga.
Back Country Radio
MW and Delta Dawne blast renegade country music to the Grassrivers, Port Gellhorn, and beyond. Stay tuned for Back Country’s roving reporter, swamp meteorologist, and Delta’s not-so-secret lover Mud Dog Mike checking in from the driver’s seat of his Grassrivers airboat.
AfroBank FM
Turn up the gbedu with Burna and Palmsy, AfroBank FM’s dynamic duo curating the best in African music, from 20th-century classics and undiscovered gems to contemporary sounds like amapiano, 3-step, and more.
The Chamber
Crushing metal has landed in Leonida. Jump in the pit with DJ Kerry and DJ Tom for classic metal from the ‘80s and beyond as they channel Leonida’s deep metal roots.
Flash FM
The Vice City institution that delivers the best in pop music with Robyn and Alex — guaranteed to make you dance no matter where you find yourself in the Goodtime State.
Dirty South Classics
A little southern hospitality from Trick and Trina, blasting regional rap and hip-hop classics. From the beach to the block, nobody reps Leonida and the South like they do.
And that’s a look at the radio stations you can preview today.
Clive Barker’s Hellraiser: Revival lives up to the horror franchise’s name by delivering indescribable suffering. Unfortunately, it’s inflicted on the players, and there’s no ecstasy to be found in what’s often a miserable experience. Despite boasting an alluringly dark, faithfully gore-filled presentation and borrowing from a successful first-person survival horror blueprint, the game stumbles both intentionally and functionally thanks to a litany of bugs.
Aiden Lynch is the uninteresting lead at the center of this tale. He must rescue his girlfriend, Sunny, after she unlocks the series’ dreaded puzzle box and is whisked away into the hellish Labyrinth by the Cenobites, led by the iconic Pinhead (with Doug Bradley reprising the role and unsurprisingly killing it). To restore Sunny’s mortal body, Lynch must navigate the Labyrinth’s dangers while battling a Cenobite-obsessed cult in the human world. This decent story is one in which the bland protagonist is the least memorable part, and has interesting things happen to and around him; he reminds me of an edgier version of Resident Evil’s Ethan Winters.
The story is propped up by a few solid scares and plenty of unsettling moments, plus neat callbacks for fans while remaining an accessible entry point for newcomers. Hellraiser: Revival commendably doesn’t skimp on the franchise’s disturbing gore and sexual content while never crossing a truly problematic line for the latter. Unfortunately, any entertainment the story elicits is hampered by cinematic and in-game cutscenes that frequently suffer from poor lip syncing, subpar audio mixing that muffles quieter voice lines, and subtitles that sometimes don’t match the dialogue or fail to appear at all.
The first-person blend of gunplay and melee lacks weight, with shooting feeling particularly bad thanks to unwieldy aiming. While basic combat is unremarkable, weaponizing the puzzle box adds some cooler wrinkles, like using telekinesis to grab and toss environmental objects (like dismembering foes with saw blades) or absorbing torchfire to lob at targets like I was X-Men’s Pyro. Quick-turning by pressing the left stick downward is awful because it’s so easy to trigger accidentally while sprinting. Many times I’d run to or from something only to whip around in the opposite direction because my thumb slipped, and there’s no option to remap the input.
Combat and stealth can be an uninteresting breeze since the sadomasochistic cultists have more sex drive than brain cells. They shoot at walls, occasionally blow themselves up with their own grenades, take cover infrequently, barely pursue when I flee, and lack any real tactics. I know they get off on experiencing pain, but they should have some sense of urgency or self-preservation. Other encounters are often nightmarish due to the game’s habit of flooding players with mobs of aggressive, mutated humans called Unworthy while frequently providing insufficient resources to survive. The resource economy is completely off. I found abundant ingredients to craft certain items, like basic bandages, that suddenly became nigh impossible to find/craft in the later hours despite searching just as thoroughly. Surviving by the skin of your teeth is a pillar of the genre, but I’d go long stretches unable to craft anything.
Money to purchase goods is just as limited, so I was ill-prepared for several battles. The store also frustrates, as certain items are on sale one moment and randomly unavailable the next. I have no idea why that is or what it adds. Saving up for an AK-47 before a big fight, only for the store to not sell it when I need it, is flat-out dumb. Things have a habit of being absent when you need them most, whether battling armored enemies without the blunt melee weapons ideal for fighting them or entering boss fights with a sliver of health. These instances didn’t make me think, “What a fun challenge!” Instead, I would groan, “Seriously, what do you want from me here?”
A lack of polish further spoils the experience. I once beat one of the primary antagonists by routing him around a table and filling him with bullets as he slowly chased me around without any deviation from his doomed strategy. Enemies trap themselves in geometry; the biggest example was witnessing a major boss get completely stuck and glitch out on a car it climbed onto in what I can only assume was supposed to be a scripted moment.
The only relative reprieve from combat is exploration-focused segments in the Labyrinth, where you dodge traps or awkwardly guide blocks to solve navigation problems using the sometimes finicky telekinesis. The Labyrinth areas have the strongest art direction and mood of Hellraiser: Revival; the macabre visuals look great. Since they lack combat, trips to the Labyrinth are consistently decent, but even these segments aren’t bug-free. A chase sequence with the Chatterer lost all of its tension when he became stuck behind what I guess is the Cenobites’ greatest weakness: a stone block. To “reset” him, I had to turn around, walk under the suspended block he was stuck on, and backtrack a good distance before the sequence fixed itself and we resumed our chase. It felt like going through a shoddy haunted house where the animatronics keep breaking down, and the lights come on to reveal the rusted machinery running everything.
There’s no way around it; Hellraiser: Revival is a technical mess, and it falls apart more and more as the roughly 10-hour adventure progresses. The most recurring issues are bad environmental pop-in and characters and objects constantly flickering in and out of existence, as if the game itself is prepared to collapse at any moment. I often fell through floors when knocked down, giving me glimpses of the hidden skybox below it before I stood up. I once hit an enemy through a solid wall, robbing me of any potential loot. Audio sometimes drops out completely, such as when I executed a large threat in silence when it should have sounded like a mess of gore. A subtitle once lingered on screen long after a conversation finished. The healing animation froze midway during a fight, leaving me vulnerable to enemies and leading to a cheap death. A combat encounter while waiting for an elevator to arrive failed to recognize that I killed everyone, forcing me to reload a save and do it again.
After watching Hellraiser: Revival’s finale stumble through the same visual and audio potholes plaguing the rest of the journey, I was angry. But upon taking time to cool down and reflect, my ire shifted to disappointment and relief that I didn’t have to play more. During the rare moments Hellraiser: Revival isn’t on fire in some way, it’s a halfway respectable take on the popular horror franchise. I just wish playing it didn’t so often feel like enduring the twisted machinations of Pinhead himself.
Muramasa: The Demon Blade is a Nintendo Wii exclusive and a beloved title among fans of developer Vanillaware, later enhanced with a PlayStation Vita remaster in Muramasa Rebirth in 2013. Rebirth also brought Genroku Legends, a standalone DLC with new stories and playable characters to the game’s gorgeous, painterly side-scrolling action. In a touch of painful irony, Rebirth has remained locked to the Vita, just as The Demon Blade was to the Wii before. Finally, though, Vanillaware is teaming up with publisher Marvelous to bring all of Muramasa’s history to modern consoles.
Dubbed Muramasa: Revenant Blades, this 4K remaster combines Rebirth and its Genroku Legends DLC into one cohesive package – you can lay that Wii and dusty Vita to rest now. I played roughly an hour of it in a quiet Marvelous office space in Tokyo’s Shinagawa district, and have been staring at my Switch 2 ever since, doing my best to manifest its immediate existence on the console. I haven’t touched the Muramasa series in well over a decade, but I didn’t miss a beat, slicing my way through the game’s first two acts on the Moral (see: hard) difficulty. It was tough, but that challenge only pushed me to pay even closer attention to what I was doing in this classic Vanillaware action-platformer beat ‘em up. I already can’t wait for more.
Muramasa has always been a looker of a series, but in this renewed 4K presentation, completely redrawn by Vanillaware’s artists, it is especially beautiful. Set during Japan’s Edo period, under the reign of shogun Tokugawa Tsunayoshi (who was in office from 1680 to 1709), it features the feudal Japanese visuals you’re imagining. But Muramasa mixes Japanese folklore, demons, and more to give Vanillaware’s trademark art some fantastical substance. As you move from left to right, or right to left, or up and down, or some combination of these directions, parsing through different screens within a given level, massive mountains hover in the background; trees bend and rotate as you walk through the forest, giving way to a labyrinthine vibe that protagonist Kisuke is likely also feeling; Machiya-style houses stack atop and beside Nagaya homes in cities, creating an endless puzzle of buildings you can enter to search or fight outside.
Combat remains as fun as always. Though it plays like a beat ‘em up, you use swords, so the result is a frenetic hack-and-slash experience that’s easy to understand, with plenty of depth to master. This Revenant Blades package promises over 100 swords to forge and dozens of skills to upgrade and master for your kit. Upgraded controls make all of it feel better to play, too, and the resulting combat reminds me of 2D fighters as I juggle ninjas and samurai in the air, countering their counters, and clashing blades to ensure I’m not hit – it’s intense, requiring all my focus to not die.
My learnings are put to the test against the two bosses I face in my hour-long preview: Kurozaru, a hulking menace that’s fast and uses shurikens and AOE attacks to stop me from getting too close for too long, and some giant centipedes, which crawl around the entire level and require me to slash away at different bits of their bodies to finally kill them.
There’s plenty more in the game I don’t get to see, like the other five stories to play through, each with new localization and English voiceover, additional skills and katanas to unlock, and the ways unseen parts look in this 4K remaster. But what I did get to see and play is enough to ensure I’ll be working my way through the rest next year. Until then, I’ll keep staring at my Switch 2.
It seems like just yesterday that Riftbound, the League of Legends card game, was bursting onto the scene with Origins. On October 23, its Radiance set will arrive with numerous new cards for deckbuilders to dig into, and today Game Informer is showcasing one of them: Ziggs, Explosive.
Long-time League players know Ziggs as the mid-lane artillerist and demolitions expert, flinging long-range explosives all around to maneuver, destroy, and cause general chaos and mayhem. Ziggs, Explosive makes good on both that vision of the League champion and his moniker, deploying special Bomb gear tokens on battlefields to tilt the scales in his player’s favor.
Coming in at 4 Might and 4 cost under the purple “Chaos” color scheme, Ziggs can exhaust resources to deploy a Bomb gear token. The Bomb itself has a Deathknell: deal 2 to an enemy unit here, and kill all other Bombs you control here. Consequently, when Ziggs defends, he may kill a friendly gear to give himself an additional 2 Might this turn.
You can see the synergy, then: plant the Bomb, hold the battlefield. Setting Ziggs up with a Bomb on a battlefield means you can guarantee a pretty hefty swing in your favor when an opponent tries to take the field. Little combat effects like this fit the “Chaos” moniker, letting Ziggs keep a few variables up when opponents want to press in on his turf.
Additionally, we got a look at an alternative art for Ziggs, his BZZZiggs skin from League of Legends. My favorite part is the flavor text. If someone at Riot Games accurately assessed me as someone who enjoys a good Bee Movie joke, well, good job.
Riftbound’s Radiance set officially goes live on October 23, 2026, with Pre-Rift events leading up to the release. If you want to keep up with all the card previews, head over to the Riftbound Radiance card gallery here.
