Month: September 2026

Ghost of Yōtei, one of our favorite games from last year, is getting new content in October. We already knew it would include new story content and a roguelike mode, but today’s State of Play revealed our first look at gameplay. It also included a surprise – Jin Sakai, protagonist of Ghost of Tsushima, will be playable in the Most Wanted, the roguelike mode.

It’s become something of a tradition for PlayStation’s first-party games to get roguelike DLC after launch. It happened with The Last of US Part II, God of War: Ragnarök got a new story called Valhalla, and now Yōtei joins the pack with Most Wanted. This new mode pits players against waves of incoming enemies with customizable loadouts that can be altered with fun perks over time. One example has blades ignite in flame when under a certain HP total, while another summons wolves to attack after landing enough blows. Characters also have Ultimate abilities and Kill-Streaks, adding to the game’s arcade vibe.

Atsu, of course, is playable, but she’ll be joined by Oyuki, Nagato, and as a fun surprise, Jin Sakai from Ghost of Tsushima. If the appearance of bosses outside of the story mode didn’t tip you off, Jin’s appearance confirms that none of this is canon. But we don’t care one bit – it’s fun to see him return. Each character spawns in with a different loadout, and we’re curious to see how similarly Jin plays to his appearance in his original game.

Most Wanted drops on October 1, alongside the other single-player expansion, Echoes of Skigahara. If you have the base version of Ghost of Yōtei, you can upgrade to the Complete Edition to get the new single-player content for $14.99. For more Yōtei, check out our review.

Earlier this summer, at Summer Game Fest 2026, we got a first look at Gundam Rogue Orbit, a new action-driven Gundam game. And today, during Sony’s September State of Play, we’ve got a release date. Gundam Rogue Orbit is launching into action on March 5, 2027.

After the protagonist pilot is rescued, adrift in space, they’re brought in to pilot the Gundam and battle strange new foes. These animal-like enemies are certainly different from other Gundam series in design, which is sure to make the mech action of Rogue Orbit a little different than your average Gundam bout.

The Bandai Namco team is looking to court a more action-focused audience with this one, so it’ll be interesting to see whether it works out or not. The hangar customization certainly gives me Gunpla vibes though, so I’m curious to see how in-depth that goes. We’ll undoubtedly learn more as we get closer to Gundam Rogue Orbit’s release date of March 5, 2027.

Developer 4A Games debuted a new console gameplay trailer for the upcoming sequel to its long-running survival shooter series, Metro 2039, during this morning’s Sony State of Play presentation. The video showcased haunting scenes of post-apocalyptic Moscow as a large storm brews overhead, seen from the perspective of a new protagonist named The Stranger. Despite losing its main character, Artyom, Metro’s signature first-person gunplay and survival elements are still on full display. The trailer showcases a tense gunfight, populated by the distinct plinks of silenced submachine guns, all while The Stranger’s watch counts down the minutes until his radiation filter expires.

As it concludes, the trailer confirms Metro 2039’s release date: February 4, 2027.

Metro 2039 Release Date Trailer:

If you’re looking to catch up on the series before 2039 releases, I recommend catching up on Game Informer’s reviews of Metro Redux (a two-part remaster of the first two games) and Metro Exodus, which is a great entry point for newcomers and fans alike.

Insomniac’s Wolverine is coming very soon and ahead of its release, Sony has offered up one final trailer. The footage shows Marvel’s short king slicing up bad guys on airplanes, fighting giant robots in various outfits, and hanging out with various recognizable Marvel characters.

Insomniac’s Marvel’s Wolverine is coming to PlayStation 5 on September 15. Our review of Wolverine posts September 10, so keep an eye out.

We will post our review of Wolverine on Thursday, September 10 at 10:00 a.m. CT. See you then. gameinformer.com/reviews

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— Game Informer (@gameinformer.com) August 25, 2026 at 7:53 AM

For more on Marvel’s Wolverine, you can find all of our coverage here.

 

Platform:
PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, PC

Publisher:
Wolf Haus Games

Developer:
Wolf Haus Games

Release:
2027

Rating:
Mature

Join Us made a splash when it debuted during Xbox’s June 2026 Showcase. The zany cult-leader simulator puts you in charge of your own chapter of a widespread doomsday cult, tasking you with establishing your compound and wreaking havoc in the small town in which you establish your home. I spent about 45 minutes learning the ropes and toying around with the strange sandbox title and now, I’m excited to start my own chapter.

After customizing my cult with a logo, color scheme, uniform, and naming convention (I opted to have my members named after inanimate objects rather than numbers or Roman-inspired designations), it’s time to get underway. Join Us starts out with a brief tutorial, showing you the ropes under the tutelage of the overarching cult leader. I learned how to swing a baseball bat, crouch, shoot guns, and… blast a pig with a rocket launcher (the leader assures you that the pig is a “real piece of s—“). After spinning a wheel to determine your job, you land a coveted spot in the business branch, which means it’s your duty to expand to new regions. Assigning jobs that way is obviously dumb, but the game is very self-aware, peppering in self-referential humor like, “Maybe it was a mistake to assign jobs by spinning a big wheel.” 

After an opening cutscene, it’s time to get to work. Driving through Bedford County, your assigned territory, you get a sense for the small-town vibes this game is going for. If you think that means they’re going to leave you be, however, you’d be mistaken. As soon as I arrive at the soon-to-be compound, I come to the realization that we’re being robbed. After dispatching the armed burglars, it’s time to get to work.

Using a fax machine, I receive directives from the cult mothership. First, I need to gather resources, then build a conference table from which I will conduct business (AKA start missions). My first mission is to gather some food; you can hunt nearby wildlife, steal from the locals, or grow your own. I opt to do all of the above, taking down a bear, storming a nearby campsite, and planting some strawberries.

Next, I need some actual members in my cult. The home base airdrops some propaganda for me to hand out and tasks me with recruiting locals to my cause. To do this, I go to a nearby outpost of outcasts and pass out the paperwork. Each local has a level of susceptibility to your propaganda and recruitment techniques, depicted by a recruitment-chance percentage. Once you have someone in your stable, you can swap to play as them whenever you want, but be warned: They may not be as good at some of the tasks as you are. For instance, when I swapped to my first member, her ability to recruit a nearby vagrant was only 68 percent, whereas the leader’s recruitment chance was a whopping 98 percent.

Once you have members under your belt and beds built for them, the real cult simulation begins. My members immediately start tending to the strawberries I planted, and working on any other projects I need to assign. Unfortunately, I shot an innocent bystander on the way back to the compound, so my members also had some police to fight off once we returned.

From my time with the early hours of Join Us, I’m already excited to experience the various emergent stories at play, as well as see just how over-the-top the story can get. The loose narrative elements, the recruitment options, and the zaniness make it feel like a strange combination of Goat Simulator and State of Decay, which the studio is completely embracing. The team tells me what I played is just the start, as things get even wilder as the world goes through different phases and the doomsday cult’s prophecies may turn out to be true. I’m enticed to see how much more the studio pushes the envelope when Join Us arrives in March 2027.

A new expansion is on the way for Monster Hunter Wilds. While you’ll have to wait until next year to ascend, we did get a trailer at today’s Sony State of Play for the upcoming Monster Hunter Wilds: Ascendance.

Today’s trailer started with our Wilds crew encountering some new danger and arriving in a stronghold camp. A great dragon has arrived, clearing away the mists and revealing a constellation of islands above for our intrepid monster-hunting crew to explore.

It’s a Monster Hunter expansion, so naturally, new fights await, as do new versions of the weapons we’ve become accustomed to. These new tools, plus whatever new mobility we have access to thanks to the aerial setting of Ascendance, should hopefully add some fresh variety to our arsenal.

The cover monster for Monster Hunter Wilds: Ascendance looks to be a giant swirling sky dragon, which can twist the winds to its command. It all looks pretty exciting, and honestly, I’m happy to have a reason to get back to my Monster Hunter Wilds file sometime next year.

We visited Capcom to ask 75 rapid-fire interview questions to the developers behind Onimusha: Way of the Sword, the first entry in the samurai action game series in several decades. Join us for another Game Informer Rapid Fire segment with two of the creative leads behind Onimusha: director Satoru Nihei and producer Akihito Kadowaki.

The NES library of the Nintendo Switch Online Classics has three new titles: Ninja Gaiden III: The Ancient Ship of Doom, Ikari Warriors, and R.C. Pro-Am II. Each title is available now to subscribers.

Ninja Gaiden III: The Ancient Ship of Doom was released in 1991 as the final NES entry for the series. Its inclusion means the entire classic Ninja Gaiden trilogy is now available to Switch Online subscribers. The same is true of the R.C. Pro-Am racing series, with its 1992 sequel now joining the original (which has been available on Switch Online since February 2024). 

The run-and-gun action game Ikari Warriors is the oldest of today’s additions, launching in arcades in 1986 before being ported to NES in the U.S. in 1987. Ikari Warriors is historically significant as one of the highest-grossing arcade games of its time and helped developer/publisher SNK break through in the West.

Be sure to visit our complete database of every classic game currently available on Nintendo Switch Online (+Expansion Pack).  

Mario Kart World was the Switch 2’s big launch title, finally providing a sequel to the biggest Mario Kart game of all time. However, today Nintendo updated Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, originally released in 2017, enhancing its Switch 2 support with some added features. It’s a surprising move, as one might assume Nintendo would have fully moved on to the newer game, but 8 Deluxe is the best-selling Switch game of all time, and many still prefer it to World, so it’s a welcome improvement.

The most impactful change for most is the addition of more players to local multiplayer. Previously, the mode was capped at four racers, but now it supports up to eight. It makes for a cramped screen, but it’s nice to have the option. It’s also worth noting that you can only connect seven Switch 1 controllers to a Switch 2, so at least one of the eight controllers has to be a Switch 2 Pro Controller or Joy-Con 2.

The Switch 2 version of the game will now have shorter load times and higher resolution as well, on both the Switch 2 display and connected TVs. And for all you fans of CameraPlay (I’ve never met you, but I’m sure you exist), you can now use a USB camera in Online Play and local Multiplayer. That said, the latter is capped at 4 players – you can’t have eight players with cameras.

There are also some minor updates that also apply to the Switch 1 version of the game. All player speeds have been increased “by the equivalent of one coin,” the Boo power-up will now make you immune to slowing down, even when offroading, and players with the Booster Course DLC can now do VS Races with up to 96 courses.

The update is available now, and you can read the full patch notes here. It’s nearly a decade old now, but check out our review for Mario Kart 8 Deluxe – the game is even better now than it was back then. Afterwards, you can, read our review for Mario Kart World.

Platform:
PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, PC

Publisher:
Saber Interactive

Developer:
Saber Interactive

Release:
TBA

Released in 2002 for the PlayStation 2, the original Stuntman was a great concept that, for me anyway, proved far too challenging to be fun. Perfection was demanded, and extreme specificity was required for progress. It took all the fun out of controlling a car in a video game, which I imagine is how movie stunt drivers probably really feel after the fifth take of the same sequence, so in that way maybe it was a perfect simulation of the stunt driving experience.

But I have always remained enamored with the fun concept. Who wouldn’t want to drive a stunt car in a Hollywood movie without the need to sign personal injury waivers and the danger of bodily harm?

I played through four levels of Stuntman: Hollywood at Gamescom, including, perhaps most notably, the recently announced Jurassic World level. The team building the game at Saber Interactive, I believe, took away the same opinion I had back in 2002: if this game were more forgiving, it would be a lot more fun. That isn’t to say Stuntman: Hollywood is a total breeze. With the exception of the opening tutorial level, I had to retry each level at least once, but the challenge doesn’t feel as insurmountable as it did 24 years ago. Perfection is encouraged but not demanded, and specificity is only required in certain places.

In practice, the game almost feels like a slowed-down rhythm game crossed with Simon Says. As you’re driving through the sets – perhaps the biggest sets ever constructed for any movie ever – a director shouts instructions in your ear: drift here, get close to that obstacle there, hit that ramp, drive through that other obstacle there. Along with the director’s voice, there are also plenty of on-screen indicators directing you where to go and telling you what to do. The first run through a level is frantic as you try to quickly respond to every directive, and it can be overwhelming, but there is a joy to being successful, and I maybe had the most fun replaying a level after completing it at least once.

I played two levels that drove me through cities, one where I was trying to escape a collapsing factory during an earthquake, and finally the Jurassic World level. In that level, I drove a motorcycle away from an angry volcano while dinosaurs ran beside me, ramp-jumping over an angry Tyrannosaurus rex and sliding under the occasional obstacle. I haven’t been on many movie sets, but I can confirm from visiting the film set of Detective Pikachu that the animated monsters are not usually there when filming. My understanding is that they’re usually added later in something called “post”. But what do I know, and who cares? I would rather have the dinosaurs there to race with me and jump over, accuracy be damned.

Despite all the bombastic action happening on screen, one of the most notable elements of the Jurassic World level was the fast-paced, percussive remix of the classic Jurassic Park theme. It was bizarre, and you would never catch me listening to it outside of the game, but in context the absurd arrangement worked pretty well.

My big takeaway from Stuntman: Hollywood is that the two-decade-old video game concept might have finally found its footing. For those who want to pull off an undeniable take and nail every moment perfectly, I believe that still exists here. But for those like me who just want to participate in an admittedly hyperbolic simulation of being a stunt driver on a movie set, Stuntman: Hollywood is the most welcoming version of the experience the franchise has offered to date.