Aside from being free, we don’t see a reason why you wouldn’t want to get into this one. The unique visuals and a very fun vibe underline the absurd premise of spirits having the ability to craft and inhabit clay pots. These will then partake in 4v4 battles where you try to douse your opponent’s kiln with water. You do that with basic attacks but also have access to special moves depending on your pot’s shape.

Preorders are now live, and you get a generous amount of goodies, which includes Stickers, Glazes, and Sword and Ink Lids, all of which are cool ways to make the pots you craft truly your own. Of course, there’s an in-game store with a lot more options, and Double Fine Productions has promised microstransactions locking you out of getting them.

All in all, it looks like this one’s going to be quite the entertainer if you’re in the market for something different. The trailer’s below if you want to take a look.

Kiln launches on April 23rd for Xbox Series X/S, PS5, and PC.

While details are a tad too scarce for our liking, the team has announced further improvements to stability, gameplay, further polishing, and responses to player feedback in the second patch. Information on the third patch will also be available as we approach its scheduled release.

If you haven’t been keeping up with this title, it’s otherwise been a rough but fairly entertaining romp through Tyndalston. The city and its various consequences managed to offer enough to keep us interested. Still, it’s one that clearly needed more time in development (even despite various circumstances). We’re hoping that Liquid Swords manages to pull off a strong recovery, given how this one can really click when all of its systems come together.

Samson is currently exclusive to PC on Steam and the Epic Games Store, but console versions have been considered. As always, stay tuned for more updates on them in the coming weeks and months.

While the release build may have been hard to put down for a significant number of you, there’s no denying that there was room for improvement. Bandai Namco is building on the momentum from previous patches to bring even better performance to the game on all platforms. The gameplay is also getting a few touch-ups, with changes to balancing in combat that buff enemies and make them hit harder in additional playthroughs, but with the rewards of increased Haze.

You’re also going to find a lot of new things to do with the Affinity System, with three different categories to build across all characters and UI changes that make tracking it all a lot easier. There are also new customization and character creation features – check out some of the patch notes below and the full changes here.

For our part, we believe that these changes are going to be quite welcome and could make Code Vein 2 even better than what it was when it came out.

Patch Notes

Optimizations for All Platforms

• Optimized the collision data for certain objects and structures in the field to reduce processing load.
• Optimized the initialization process that occurs when enemies spawn to reduce processing load.
• Reduced the processing load of several partner outfits.
• Optimized enemy spawning to reduce stuttering while riding the motorcycle.
• These consist of further improvements to the optimizations implemented in Ver. 1.0.6.
• Reduced the processing load of attack effects for certain boss enemies.
• Reduced the processing load of effects used in certain weapon formae and magic formae.
• Reduced the processing load of hit effects for certain weapon formae and magic formae.

Feature additions and improvements

1. Addition of a difficulty selection feature for additional playthroughs.

• We have added an Enhance Enemy Difficulty During Replay option to the Game Settings. This setting is enabled by default.
• When you replay the game using your save data, enemies will be stronger and you will earn more Haze when defeating them; however, turning this setting off will restore enemies to their original strength and Haze drops to those of the first playthrough.

2. Addition of an Affinity display and adjustments to the mechanic; additions of Trade and Gift features.

2-1: We added a UI that displays your Affinity with your Partner.

• You can check your Affinity in the Change Partner and Gift screens at a Mistletoe.
• For some Partners, the Affinity is hidden at the start, but it will become visible once you reach the point in the story where you can give them gifts.
• Affinity is divided into three categories: Exploration, Story, and Gifts, each with their own maximum limit. To reach 100% Affinity, you must raise all three categories to their maximum limits.
• Exploration Affinity increases by adventuring with your partners and defeating enemies. Affinity increases more slowly when defeating enemies weaker than the player’s level.
• Story Affinity increases by completing Quests received from your partners and advancing each of their individual episodes. Lou gives no quests; her Story Affinity increases by progressing through the main story.
• Gift Affinity increases by giving your partners food or valuables.

These are rumors that remain unconfirmed at the moment, as Gamersky reports on whispers among leakers that the team behind the game has been laid off after the studio was dissatisfied with the game’s reception. Producer and director Xia Siyuan is apparently a notable one among them. He reportedly registered his own company, although other employees apparently haven’t fared as well. There’s talk of unpaid salaries and legal action – more trouble for a studio that faced extensive controversy when the game was released, owing to its shaky performance dominating much of the initial discourse.

A fair amount of additional content was also allegedly ready to go for Wuchang, which could have helped it gain a little more traction, but might now remain unused courtesy of the team’s exit. That’s a shame, as this is certainly a title that many among us would’ve loved to dive back into to take on new threats and explore more visually stunning levels.

You might think that a bunch of people who liked the game as much as we did would obviously be okay with its problems. But that’s far from it. It’s just that we think that love it or hate it, Starfield doubles down on the kind of experience it wants to be, for better or worse. It’s a divisive title not because it falls into the binary viewpoint of good or bad, but because it chooses to be strong in ways that come with specific trade-offs.

Its very strengths are a double-edged sword, the magic of what it truly is clashing with the frustrations that its formula brings to the table. Wondering how that could be? Join us on a trip through Starfield’s star-studded landscape and find out why it has been praised and belittled for just being itself.

The Grand Scheme of Things

Let’s start with Starfield’s size and scope. Its “world” is a literal galaxy just waiting for you to engage with it. As a sci-fi adventure aimed at letting you carve out your own name in the stars, it’s astoundingly large, and deliciously grandiose. Its ambitions rival its size, and perhaps even help define it with the magic of hopping between systems as you engage with the many factions you come across, their quest lines and other distractions making your time with it an adventure that even you can’t really predict from moment-to-moment.

There’s also its emphasis on player agency, with the world at your fingertips and a ton of things for you to do at any given moment. There are factions to choose between, ships to build, planets to scan and learn more about before you visit them, smuggling, mining, and, of course, the RPG side of things to allow you to truly make your character feel like an extension of yourself, a small but shining speck among the stars. It’s a fantasy that truly puts you at the center of it all while still impressing upon you that you’re only a part of a larger universe.

That’s all well and good but we can see where players who didn’t resonate with these strengths are coming from. The game’s scale should have felt seamless, but its systems dictated that the massive universe you’re let loose in was fragmented into menus that got in the way of hopping between planets, loading screens pulling you out of the spell that it cast on you. Its universe felt like a collection of different maps, none of which fed into each other for players who were unable to find their footing.

The very freedom that we loved so much could feel like the game refusing to connect with its spacefarers. Players diving into it around the time of its release were used to their games easing them into whatever the experience was selling, instead of leaving them to discover it all on their own terms. Where other titles provided carefully curated journeys, Starfield was about the journey itself, a distinction that would take time many of its players did not really have at their disposal to make.

The game’s size, meant to inspire a sense of awe and wonder, felt like it was deliberately placing walls that its players had to get past. The freedom that was meant to allow players to craft their own adventure felt like they were left adrift among the stars, without a clear path to the destiny they knew was waiting for them in the blackness of space.

It was a game that asked for time that many of its players could not, or would not, choose to give it.

Learning To Love It

We’ll be honest, we’re pretty clear on why so many of you didn’t click with Starfield right off the bat. Its systems can get overwhelming at first glance, and it does take a bit of time to settle into a routine that works for you. But once you get there, the game opens up into something you might have even adored. The faction questlines we mentioned earlier? We couldn’t get enough of them. The same goes for the slow burn of building our characters from the ground up, engaging with the side content, and the sense of just existing in a world outside of the real one, but just as diverse and unpredictable.

Of course, all of this must factor in the knowledge that Starfield was a game from Bethesda, whose track record of great titles meant that all of these factors were a given. But it also meant that this was a game that needed patience, and a willingness to endure its learning curve. You could even say that we stuck with the game for the sake of a thorough review, and you would have a valid point. But the fact that all of us continued to play it long after we put down our thoughts should speak to that argument.

But as we looked deeper, we began to see a few split seams in the experience, with Bethesda’s usual quirks coming into play. There was a definite stiffness to some parts of our time in the Constellation, and a lack of polish in certain areas. Conversations in which the person we were talking to lacked enough expressions to make it feels real immediately come to mind, along with a bunch of systems that could feel outdated when games like Red Dead Redemption 2 and Baldur’s Gate 3 were already out there.

But again, this was a game from Bethesda, a studio that was known for the eccentricities that its games had in play. Did we think that the fact that Starfield had them felt oddly reassuring in a way? Sure. But did we also think that their presence in a game as ambitious as this one felt like the studio was clinging to its old ways in a world of video games that were rapidly evolving? Also yes.

That’s because to the average gamer, who in all probability has a limited amount of time to engage with a game, first impressions can be hard to shake off. Starfield does take too long to reveal its depth, and it’s very likely that for many gamers, it asked too much of them too early. It demanded patience from a modern audience that was quite unwilling to wait when there were other games that came out with far more accessibility than this one. Understandable, of course, but it was also sad to see so many potential fans miss out on all the fun.

But what exactly were they missing?

Living In The Moment

To us, Starfield was clearly better enjoyed as an RPG sandbox, despite it coming across as a game that was all about getting lost in space. We found joy in engaging with its many factions, navigating the complexities that arose from such interactions along with choosing between all the possibilities for our characters that were laid out in front of us like a very enticing buffet. We bought homes and ships, choosing to express ourselves on the ground while our forays into space were designed to serve specific goals that we had in mind.

But we can see how people who expected to be flying off into the unknown could have felt let down by a lack of organic discovery in the early hours of the game, and in how its moment-to-moment gameplay seemed geared towards keeping their metaphorical boots firmly on the ground. To those players, the pull of gravity on the planets they were exploring might have felt too strong for them to shake off, and rightly so. It was a matter of mismatched expectations that was a major source of the backlash it received.

And with the game finally dropping on the PS5, we expect that the same old arguments are going to be hashed out between all of the newcomers diving into the adventure for the first time. It’s a situation that’s oddly similar to Crimson Desert, another title that doubles down on its identity and dared to take an approach that earned it some backlash even as others have been unable to put it down.

The divisive discourse around Starfield isn’t going to fade because it’s baked into the game’s very foundations, and not from temporary chatter. It may not be the universally loved RPG that many of you might be wanting it to be, but that very divisiveness points to a game that’s special in its own right thanks to how committed it is to a specific vision. The way in which the very facets of its experience that appeal to its fans can be reasons for its others to train their guns on it has made it a fascinating source of conversations around games that make demands of their players, instead of the other way round.

But for those of you who meet it on its terms and tune it to its wavelength, you’re in for a romp through space that’s going to stay with you long after you move on to other titles. And for that, we’re glad that Starfield exists.

Note: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, GamingBolt as an organization.

This time around, Jun Aslan and their fellow companions descend to the fiery depths of an underground volcanic ruin, where Eruption, a new gauntlet ability, proves to be quite handy at navigating and avoiding all of the nasty magma. It has quite a range of useful functions, allowing you to build bridges out of limestone deposits, redirect magma flows, and clear a path when there’s debris in your way, but this may only be a taste of things to come.

The new trailer joins last week’s look at a journey to a frosty planet where alien ruins loomed large before we were abruptly cut off from learning more about them. Nevertheless, Exodus looks to be an ambitious title that aims to keep you as immersed as it can in a universe filled with some incredible biome variety, combat and terrifyingly powerful threats like the Mara-Yama.

It arrives next year for Xbox Series X/S, PS5, and PC, and despite everything else that’s coming up, the time can’t pass fast enough. Stay tuned for updates in the meantime, including a date for that extended showcase.

Granted, we’re apprehensive because it’s Metal Gear Solid, a title that’s been a part of our childhoods (and recently saw a revival thanks to highlight of 2025 after the success of Delta: Snake Eater.) However, our fears may be unfounded, as the duo is more than capable of crafting a film that can truly capture the essence of what Naked Snake and co. are capable of. Sony’s Sanford Panitch, President of the Motion Picture Group, had a lot of good things to say about them as well.

“Zach and Adam are thrilling storytellers, masters of visuals and suspense, and two of the most impressive director/producers working today. With projects across all the company’s film labels, we are so happy to create a home for them, and proud to have them as part of the Sony family.”

Lipovsky and Stein seem equally thrilled about the prospect of bringing Kojima’s iconic franchise to a new medium altogether.

“We are honored to be partnering with the incredible executive team at Sony. Metal Gear Solid was nothing short of a groundbreaking cinematic masterpiece that forever revolutionized video games. We are thrilled and honored to bring Hideo Kojima’s iconic characters and unforgettable world to life.”

While there’s no information about potential story beats or whether it’s going to be Solid Snake at the helm of the new story, we’re hoping that we get to at least see Big Boss in whatever Sony is cooking up.

Well, that tradition is all set to continue in this one, as you explore a visually unique world with wonders that piqued your curiosity, and enemies that are likely to have you noping out of there double time. It’s a great balance, although you’re going to be hard-pressed to take on a survival loop that can have you traveling high and low across a multitude of biomes, trying to scrape out an existence from a land that demands a premature end to the fun (and you).

You get to bring your pals along with multiplayer co-op, but the procedurally generated world is still going to keep the bunch of you on your toes. Your biggest threat is going to be the fog that’s slowly creeping across the land, driving all who come into contact with it to the brink of insanity. But for those who dare venture into its depths, some rewards are worth the risk.

We’re inclined towards games that tip the scales and can’t wait to see how our strategy works with this one. The trailer below has us pondering a revised approach, though.

The story puts you in control of Charlie Disco, a man who has clearly practised his martial arts as much as his music. He takes on his former band members in battles where he lets his fists do the rapping (pun intended). Aside from raining down pain to the beat of his own tunes, Charlie can work with anything you have on your playlists, too, and this is a title that we’re eager to push to its musical limits.

Additionally, you get to hang out at a dive bar that doubles up as your base of operations while also serving as a source of lore drops, taking you through how things soured between Charlie and his former band. With combat flowing to the beats of whatever’s playing in the background, consider bringing a metronome to this one.

For our part, we’re going to be playing Kung Fu Fighting on loop as we show our former bandmates what’s what. The trailer’s below for those of you who want a taste of its neon-drenched visuals and insane gameplay.

Sony has had the same idea, and the results of that train of thought have led to the announcement of a very stylish limited edition of the DualSense controller. It’s a lovely shade of gold, a not-so-subtle homage to Goldfinger, with the game’s logo emblazoned on the touchpad. We’re quite excited to see one out in the wild, as it’s a design that’s quite catchy (and hopefully not as susceptible to drifting).

It’s definitely something Bond would use if he were to break the fourth wall and play the beginning of his tryst with MI6 himself. Of course, he’d probably appreciate precision, especially when having to use every tool at his disposal in a title intent on making the player feel as much like Bond as possible.

Pre-orders for the controller begin on April 16th, and it launches alongside the game on May 27th (although you’re going to have to wait a little longer to play it on the Nintendo Switch 2). There’s even a very cool trailer for the controller, which you can check out below.