Month: September 2021

Update: Since unveiling the tactics card battle system in Marvel’s Midnight Suns, some players have expressed concerns there could be loot boxes in the game.

However, the developers have confirmed that there are no loot boxes in Midnight Suns, or any microtransactions involved with the cards system. There will however be purely cosmetic skins that will be available for purchase, but these won’t impact the balance of the game.

Hey folks, regarding our battle card system, there are no loot boxes in Marvel’s @MidnightSuns or related microtransactions to get more cards (i.e. Gamma Coils). We will have purely cosmetic character skins for purchase that do not affect game balance in any way https://t.co/lHhdwbMpSZ

— Marvel’s Midnight Suns (@midnightsuns) September 1, 2021

Original Story: Marvel’s Midnight Suns is the next big Marvel superhero game, but with a tactics twist. In a new gameplay reveal, developer Firaxis shared more on the card-based strategy combat system players will use to fight in the battle with Lilith.

Midnight Suns is being developed by the Xcom makers at Firaxis, the strategy combat system might not be a big surprise. But in addition to the turn-based combat, players will also be utilizing the environment, team composition, and a random assortment of ability cards.

As revealed in today’s gameplay walkthrough, combat in Midnight Suns involves picking three heroes and using a deck of random ability cards. Your abilities are tied to these cards, and because each “hand” is random at the start of a battle, you’ll have to think strategically to get results. These cards can also be upgraded as you progress through the game.

This isn’t a card game like Hearthstone, but something similar to rogue-lites that use card abilities like Slay the Spire.

Players can use these ability cards in conjunction with the environment to deal massive damage to enemies as well. Blast your enemy at nearby gas tanks or even off the ledge to quickly clear the field of bad guys when you’re in a pinch.

You can also coordinate team attacks if you have the right heroes with you. Improving your relationship with these characters during Midnight Suns’ social segments will also improve your tag-team abilities.

As revealed during Gamescom ONL, Marvel’s Midnight Suns is a darker take on the Marvel universe with an emphasis on its more supernatural side. You’ll play as an original Marvel hero that you can fully customize and fight and live alongside famous Marvel heroes. While you’ll be able to socialize with them, you, unfortunately, can’t date anyone.

Check out the full gameplay walkthrough in the video above right here on IGN.

Matt T.M. Kim is IGN’s News Editor. You can reach him @lawoftd.

Today, XCOM developer Firaxis Games unveiled a look at gameplay for their upcoming tactical RPG, Marvel’s Midnight Suns. As you can see in the gameplay reveal trailer above, it is not simply “Marvel’s XCOM.” Instead, when it is released in March 2022 for PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, and Nintendo Switch, it will play much differently than Firaxis’s previous games.

For a deeper dive into the gameplay, check out the six-minute narrated gameplay walkthrough video below. In it, you’ll get a better look at the playing card/deck-based combat (these are superheroes, after all – they don’t miss attacks!) as well as the relationship-forging side of Midnight Suns that takes place in the Abbey.

Marvel’s Midnight Suns includes a large variety of heroes from across the Marvel universe, including The Avengers, the X-Men, the Runaways, and more. You’ll play as the Hunter, a completely customizable hero who is canon in the Marvel universe. You must unite heroes like Iron Man, Wolverine, Ghost Rider, and many more in an effort to stop the newly awakened Lilith, the Mother of Demons and also mother of your Hunter character.

Check out the first gameplay screens below:

For even more gameplay video, tune in to the game’s official website on September 7 for the next gameplay deep-dive. And if you missed the announcement (and announcement trailer) for Midnight Suns, check that out on IGN.

Ryan McCaffrey is IGN’s executive editor of previews and host of both IGN’s weekly Xbox show, Podcast Unlocked, as well as our monthly(-ish) interview show, IGN Unfiltered. He’s a North Jersey guy, so it’s “Taylor ham,” not “pork roll.” Debate it with him on Twitter at @DMC_Ryan.

If you or someone in your life is into both LEGO and Christmas, this one’s for you. The brand-new 2021 LEGO advent calendars are now available. Five sets are in stock this year: Star Wars, Harry Potter, Marvel’s Avengers, Friends, and City. And if you’re more into Funko Pops than LEGO, check out this year’s Funko advent calendars as well.

But first, a quick note: These LEGO advent calendars do tend to sell out, so you’ll probably want to grab them sooner than later if you’re interested in ringing in the holidays with daily builds.

LEGO Advent Calendars 2021

This year you have five sets to choose from, instead of last year’s four. The Avengers calendar is the new one this time around. It comes with seven minifigures: Spider-Man, Iron Man, Black Widow, Captain Marvel, Thor, Thanos, and Nick Fury. You’ll also get a bunch of accessories and tiny builds, like the Quinjet and Avengers Tower.

In the Star Wars LEGO advent calendar, you’ll also get seven minifigures over the course of the month of December. It comes with The Mandalorian, Grogu, a Tusken Raider, IG-11, and an IT-O Interrogator Droid, among others. As for the mini builds, you get things like Mando’s ship the Razor Crest, an X-Wing, TIE Fighter, as well as Boba Fett’s ship.

And once again a LEGO Harry Potter advent calendar is also available. It includes six minifigures: Harry, Hermione, Ron, Draco, Dudley, and Griphook. You also get all kinds of scenery builds and accessories from the movies.

As with all advent calendars, the idea is to open one little gift each day, starting December 1 and going through Christmas Eve. It’s a fun way to have something to look forward to as the holidays approach.

Chris Reed is a deals expert and commerce editor for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @_chrislreed.

We Need to Do Something releases in theaters, digital, and VOD on Sept. 3.

You know that strange elation when your whole body bursts into trembling goosebumps? You’re terrified but you feel undeniably ALIVE! This was a treasure I found in the middle of We Need to Do Something. Like its title, this unnerving titillation promised horrors that would rattle my bones and scratch at my nerves. Frustratingly, the film fails to deliver on this promise, ultimately offering a woefully murky and underwhelming tale of family and fear.

The premise is simple: A family of four hunkers down in their house’s spacious and sturdy bathroom to wait out a raging storm. Things turn hellish when they realize they’re trapped inside. This hideous bathroom is built like a pink-tiled prison cell; its windows, walls, and doors cannot be easily busted down. So, the family needs to do something to escape before they starve. You might anticipate an Escape Room scenario, where they investigate their surroundings to strategize some way out. Instead, this clamoring clan takes turns fruitlessly pushing on the door and whining, and none of it is all that compelling.

In his feature directorial debut, Sean King O’Grady makes a bold choice by never revealing the world beyond the bathroom walls, even to show what the family spies through a crack in the door. At first, this willful omission stirs tension, leaving a gap between what we suspect and what we know lies outside. It also leads to the surprising scare that caused my giddy outbreak of goosebumps. But repetition breeds contempt. Before long, this ugly bathroom is a bore to behold. Any could-be claustrophobia is suffocated by tedium of location and lack of action. Soon, I began to wonder if O’Grady didn’t have the budget to peek beyond the door. Or was the problem a lack of imagination? Either way, he leaves us stuck inside with characters that are shallowly confined to tedious archetypes.

Indie horror star Pat Healy (Cheap Thrills) plays bad dad Robert, who is defined by his too-tight necktie — worn even when he sleeps — and a thermos of booze. Starting out at irate, Robert has nowhere to go but scowling and screaming. This is about all he’ll do aside from grasping for grim laughs by drinking ANY form of alcohol he can find in the bathroom cabinets (at least that’s somewhat Escape Room-y?) By contrast, his wife Diane (Hocus Pocus’s Vinessa Shaw) is cool as a cucumber, even when that feels wildly unlikely. But hey, at least she gets a subplot as flimsy and dull as her fuzz-bunny-colored cardigan. Meanwhile, their pesky but sweet son Bobby is played serviceably by NOS4A2’s John James Cronin. Finally, The Vast of Night’s Sierra McCormick brings wide eyes and a sulking snarl to teen daughter Melissa, whose internal drama is signaled by a goth wardrobe topped by a bubblegum pink wig.

Through flashbacks, the film clumsily explores Melissa’s life before the bathroom, which involved a surly girlfriend (Lisette Alexis) with witchy inclinations. No other family member gets flashbacks, so Melissa is steadily made the center of the story. Perhaps this is why her parents and brother are so thinly realized? Maybe screenwriter Max Booth III is establishing an unreliable narrator, placing audiences into the perspective of a self-obsessed teen, who thinks everything — even the mysterious mayhem raging beyond their porcelain prison — is ultimately about her. However, even Melissa isn’t compellingly developed. She’s a careless collection of troubled teen girl tropes, from her alternative fashion to her spooky girlfriend, to a gruesome self-harm habit. It’s as if Booth watched The Craft once and felt he now understood young women. The result is superficial and low-key insulting, mistaking calamity for complexity.

With such an unstable character base, O’Grady struggles to ground the film in Melissa’s subjective perspective. Unlike thrilling psychological horror movies like Black Swan, The Babadook, or Saint Maud, We Need to Do Something never musters a satisfying surrealness that might blur the lines between what’s real and what this troubled heroine believes. Instead, King tosses out strange offscreen sounds and clattering nightmares awash in red lighting. So, even at its end, I’m left wondering what kind of horror movie this is: psychological? Supernatural? Lovecraftian?

Whatever it might be, it’s just plain bad.

Rachael Leigh Cook has shared her regrets over not taking on the role of Rogue in 2000’s X-Men movie, saying she recognized early on that she had made a mistake.

In an interview with The New York Times published on Sunday, Cook spoke about her decision to decline the role of Rogue in Bryan Singer’s X-Men movie more than 20 years ago. The actress passed on the part because she wanted to avoid acting on a green screen but says she realized her mistake as soon as she saw the posters for the big-budget flick.

Cook noted the move had been a “huge misstep” in her career, as she reflected back on her decision to focus on independent movies. “I really thought what everyone told me was correct when they said, ‘What we need to do now is make sure you’re taken seriously,'” Cook told the publication, acknowledging that she “definitely did things for the wrong reasons.”

The role of Rogue ultimately went to Cook’s She’s All That co-star Anna Paquin, who played the iconic Marvel character in four of the X-Men movies from 2000 to 2014. Paquin was slated to have a larger role in X-Men: Days of Future Past, but it was cut down before the movie hit the big screen, with Singer later releasing a straight-to-home video “Rogue Cut” of the film.

Now that Disney owns 20th Century Fox, the future of the X-Men franchise has become an extremely hot topic considering the MCU made it all the way to Avengers: Endgame with nary a mutant. That spell might be set to last a little longer yet, but it doesn’t mean that Marvel hasn’t been busy laying the groundwork for the mutant superheroes to show up.

Phase 4 could be setting the stage for mutants in the MCU, so you may want to pay attention to Marvel’s upcoming releases, particularly Eternals, which is coming out later this year, as well as 2022’s Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, and Black Panther: Wakanda Forever — a movie that could potentially introduce Namor as a big-screen baddie.

Adele Ankers is a freelance writer for IGN. Follow her on Twitter.

Respawn has announced that it will remove tap-strafing (a movement technique used by PC players) from the game in its next patch. It’s been seen by some as a controversial move from the developer, and feedback from across the community has been polarised.

News of the removal of tap-strafing was shared by Respawn on their Twitter account. The company said, “After much consideration and debate, we’ve decided to remove tap-strafing from [Apex Legends] in patch 10.1. Our reasoning: It’s inaccessible, lacks readability/counterplay, and is exacerbated by movement abilities.”

After much consideration and debate, we’ve decided to remove tap-strafing from @playapex in patch 10.1.

Our reasoning: It’s inaccessible, lacks readability/counterplay, and is exacerbated by movement abilities.

The next patch notes will include a more detailed note about this.

— Respawn (@Respawn) August 31, 2021

Prior to its removal, criticism towards the inclusion of tap-strafing within the game could predominantly be heard from the community’s console players. The high skill movement technique can only be achieved on PC and essentially involves a combination of air strafing, b-hopping, and movement adjustments to modify a player’s momentum in the air, allowing them to turn sharply and precisely mid-flight.

Despite it being felt by some players that the inclusion of tap-strafing within the game was unfair, its removal has also seen outcry. Across the game’s subreddit, some Apex players have complained that the removal of tap-strafing hugely impacts PC players who utilize a movement-based playstyle within the game. In a similar vein, others felt that the change acted as a nerf for PC players generally, who would still come up against controller players aided in combat by aim assist.

The removal of tap-strafing isn’t the only recent change to Apex that has come following community pressure. After the launch of Apex’s newest Legend, Seer, the studio took the decision to nerf the character following criticism from its fanbase who felt like a number of the character’s abilities were unbalanced and broke the action of Apex Legends.

Apex Legends’ tenth season kicked off on August 3 and will run for the foreseeable future. If you’re just starting out in the game then make sure to check out our top five tips and tricks for beginners in the game.

Jared Moore is a freelance writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter.