Games — 95 articles on Backdrop

Games

Game reviews with a score, plus the craft behind them: what a design decision cost the team that built it, and why a game looks and runs the way it does.

95 articles · 28 scored reviews · latest 4 Oct 2026

Games4 Oct 2026

Capcom REX Project: rebuilding RE Engine for AI

Capcom's REX project rebuilds the RE Engine so AI can drive its tools. Two subsystems are already public, partly so models have something to learn from.

Games4 Oct 2026

Galactic Racer locks physics to 60fps on every box

Fuse Games fixed the vehicle tick rate at 60 and made 60fps the floor on every box. Reviewers still lose the track at top speed.

7.5/10

Games3 Oct 2026

End of Abyss: strong dread, and a map that lied

Eleven verdicts average 7.5 across a three-point range, and what reviewers kept hitting was the map. A patch fixed most of it the day after launch.

9/10

Games2 Oct 2026

Star Wars Galactic Racer: best scores since 2003

Eight verdicts average 9.0 across a two-point range, four days before release. The PC Metascore sits six points under the PS5 one.

8/10

Games1 Oct 2026

Gears of War: E-Day is best when it stays linear

Score 8 from five verdicts spanning 6 to 9.5. Reviews landed five days early, most of them campaign-only, and the split is about level structure.

Games1 Oct 2026

GTA 6 weather is localized now. That costs CPU.

Rockstar re-engineered GTA 6's weather to be localized and persistent. Those two words break assumptions an open world of that size is usually built on.

9/10

Games30 Sept 2026

Ace Combat 8 review: superb flying, rough on PC

Eight verdicts average 9.0 and Steam still reads Mixed. A 150GB install for a PS2-era bonus and a memory leak past 20GB are doing the damage.

Games30 Sept 2026

Witcher 3 on Switch 2: 720p buys the lighting

Handheld Switch 2 renders at 720p so the remaster can afford its new lighting and denser foliage. On PC the same rework ships as full path tracing.

7.5/10

Games29 Sept 2026

Minecraft Dungeons II review: safe, and divisive

Five verdicts on Minecraft Dungeons II run from 6 to 9. A three-point spread on a sequel critics agree refines rather than reinvents.

Games28 Sept 2026

Transport Fever 3 mods: modders paid up front

Urban Games paid its best modders, gave them early builds and a say in the tools. Their work ships on day one, on PS5 and Xbox as well as PC.

6/10

Games26 Sept 2026

Pawbay review: lovely town, and too little of it

A palette I'd happily steal, townspeople built from a handful of boxes, and a cat that only jumps where the game allows. A thin 6 from me.

Games24 Sept 2026

Undead Labs layoffs: what State of Decay 3 loses

Undead Labs went independent from Xbox and cut staff on the same day, 22 September. That timing follows from how runway funding works.

Games23 Sept 2026

Ninja Theory closing: 268 more Xbox jobs cut

Two buyers for the Hellblade studio fell through, so Xbox opened closure consultation on 22 September. Booty says the reset is three-quarters done.

9/10

Games23 Sept 2026

Well Dweller review: acclaimed, with one firm dissent

Six verdicts average 9 across a 2.5-point spread, from a perfect score down to a 7.5. Kyle Thompson drew, coded and designed all of it himself.

7.5/10

Games22 Sept 2026

EA Sports FC 27 is a good football game with a hub problem

Six verdicts average 7.5 across a 2.5-point range. What splits them is The Grounds, the open-world hub EA spent the year building.

Games22 Sept 2026

GTA 6 mod rules: no ports, no cross-game assets

Rockstar's guidelines end the big extraction projects and route paid work through its own storefront. What survives is the mod that brings its own assets.

8/10

Games21 Sept 2026

Silent Hill: Townfall nails the atmosphere, splits on stealth

Eleven verdicts average 8.0 across a four-point spread. Reviewers agree the atmosphere is franchise-best and argue about the stealth on top of it.

7.5/10

Games20 Sept 2026

Control Resonant splits on everything but its environments

Eight verdicts average 7.5 across a six-point range. Reviewers agree the environments are career-best work and disagree about nearly everything else.

Games17 Sept 2026

Blood of Dawnwalker may drop its 30-day timer

Rebel Wolves will keep the 30-day clock in a sequel only where a story fits it. That clock is also what paid for a world no single player finishes seeing.

Games17 Sept 2026

Build A Rocket Boy reportedly closing after cuts

Staff posted farewells on 16 September and Kotaku's sources say the studio is finished. MindsEye was built to prove a creation platform that never arrived.

Games16 Sept 2026

How Agent 64 rebuilt GoldenEye's guard reactions

Rare's N64 guards felt clever because of how they fell over. Agent 64 rebuilt the reaction animations and treats readability as the design goal.

9/10

Games16 Sept 2026

Fire Emblem Fortune’s Weave is near-flawless but for the cost

Nine verdicts average 8.8 across a three-point spread. The marks it drops are almost all for the most expensive thing in the game.

Games16 Sept 2026

Wo Long 2 demo: character creator unfinished

Team Ninja's alpha demo runs to 30 September and says outright that the character creator is in progress. That is the last cheap moment to move a body rig.

Games15 Sept 2026

Marathon drops seasons: PvE slips to 8 December

Bungie pushed Marathon's September update to 8 December and dropped the season calendar. What that calendar was doing upstream, in the art pipeline.

Games15 Sept 2026

Rayman Legends Retold delayed after going gold

Ubisoft moved Retold from 1 October to 3 December on 14 September, after the build had already gone gold. A Snowdrop rebuild is why that reads oddly.

Games14 Sept 2026

Thief Remastered's Tarnished Mirror: 3 missions

Nightdive confirmed the campaign its own Steam leak gave away. Three missions, five enemy types, full reveal 2 November, built on a 1998 engine.

7/10

Games13 Sept 2026

NHL 27 and the generative-AI commentary reviewers hit hardest

Seven scored verdicts average 6.8 across a three-point range, and the part reviewers hit hardest is the commentary EA expanded with generative AI voice.

Games13 Sept 2026

Polyarc closes: what Moss cost to build in VR

Polyarc shut on 11 September with 29 people out. The art discipline Moss was built on was the right answer to a platform that stopped paying for it.

Games12 Sept 2026

FF7 Revelation: one disc and a mandatory download

Square Enix is shipping the FF7 trilogy finale on a single Blu-ray you cannot play until it finishes downloading. The arithmetic is worth following.

Games11 Sept 2026

Physint on Xbox: the engine belongs to Sony

Sony cancelled Physint in June. Xbox picked it up. The game runs on Decima, built by Sony's own Guerrilla, and no Decima game has shipped on an Xbox.

7.5/10

Games10 Sept 2026

Marvel's Wolverine: PlayStation Studios' lowest score yet

Twenty-four verdicts average 7.5 across a five-point spread. Metacritic 78, and the lowest-scored PlayStation Studios game of the PS5 generation.

Games10 Sept 2026

Wardogs early access: 256km², one 2km fight

Bulkhead's 100-player shooter hits Steam early access today at $39.99. The map is 256km², and every match is decided inside a 2km box drawn fresh each round.

Games9 Sept 2026

Nintendo Direct at 16:00 today: Switch 2's winter, 45 minutes

Nintendo's general Direct runs at 16:00 Italian time and is billed at roughly 45 minutes on Switch 2 games shipping this winter. Watch it here.

Games9 Sept 2026

Metroid Ravenous 28 January, Kirby in spring

Nintendo dated Metroid Ravenous to 28 January and closed on a 3D Kirby for spring. Every announcement from the winter Direct, with dates and platforms.

9/10

Games9 Sept 2026

Valheim 1.0 ends five years of early access, near flawless

Eight launch-day verdicts average 9, running from an 80 to IGN's 10. Five years of early access ended today, and snow is the hardest biome for this art style.

Games8 Sept 2026

1666: Amsterdam early access: 13 years late

Ubisoft cancelled 1666 in 2013 and Désilets got the rights back in 2016. What reached early access on 25 August is a different-sized game.

Games8 Sept 2026

Halloween: The Game ships, banned in Australia

Refused classification over a power-up that gets you high, Halloween launched on 8 September everywhere but Australia — and cut a second buff days earlier.

Games8 Sept 2026

Ocarina of Time remake dated 5 November, and Link shines

Nintendo dated the Ocarina of Time remake to 5 November on Switch 2. Within an hour the argument had moved to a roughness value on Link's face.

Games7 Sept 2026

Sega's Super Game: a ¥100bn plan, cancelled

Sega announced Super Game in 2021 and weighed ¥100 billion over five years. Its president now says the scale of running the service is what stopped it.

7.5/10

Games6 Sept 2026

Hot Wheels Infinite Rush divides over its open-world turn

Six verdicts run from a 6 to a 9 and average 7.5. The disagreement sits over one decision — the playset became four open-world islands.

Games5 Sept 2026

Halloween: The Game: Metacritic 75, OpenCritic 56

Two aggregators read roughly the same handful of reviews and landed nineteen points apart. The pool is eight critics deep, and the game barely exists yet.

Games5 Sept 2026

Metro 2039: ray tracing and 60fps on a base PS5

4A Games says the performance mode holds 4K, 60fps and ray tracing on a standard PS5, not only the Pro. Corridors are what make that promise affordable.

8/10

Games4 Sept 2026

Orbitals turns a low frame rate into style

Ten verdicts average 8 and run from 6 to 9.5, a three-and-a-half point spread. The characters animate at 12 and 24fps on purpose.

Games3 Sept 2026

State of Play, 3 September: two shows back to back

Sony runs a State of Play and a State of Play Japan one after the other at 15:00 Italian time, and closes the first with an extended look at FF7 Revelation.

Games2 Sept 2026

Zero Company: Bit Reactor furloughed most staff

The studio behind one of Steam's top sellers put most of its staff on unpaid leave before launch. A senior technical artist said so publicly.

8.5/10

Games2 Sept 2026

NBA 2K27 nails the defence broadcast cameras barely show

Three scored verdicts average 8.3 a week into paid early access. The defence everyone is praising is built from footage broadcast cameras barely shoot.

Games1 Sept 2026

Black Flag Resynced 1.0.7 turns off the perk glow

Title Update 1.0.7 adds a Perk Effects switch, so the emissive aura on Edward's gear can be shut off. Live today at 14:00 UTC.

8/10

Games31 Aug 2026

Blood of Dawnwalker’s thirty-day clock splits the verdicts

Twelve verdicts average 8, running from 6 to 9.5. The thirty-day clock is what splits them, and it is an environment budget problem before it is a design one.

8.5/10

Games31 Aug 2026

Onimusha: Way of the Sword and the flaw Capcom chose

Twelve verdicts average 8.5 and the spread is unusually tight. The complaint that keeps coming back is the one Capcom wrote into the story on purpose.

9.5/10

Games30 Aug 2026

Elden Ring Tarnished Edition proves the doubters wrong

The Switch 2 port everyone wrote off after a 15fps demo is reviewing at 91. Six verdicts average 9.5, and almost nobody docked it for the cuts.

Games30 Aug 2026

Valve's 12TB leak: Portal 2 was built on TF2 arms

A decade of Valve's internal builds surfaced. The 2009 Portal 2 test rooms used Team Fortress 2 arms and leftover Half-Life 2 zombies as stand-ins.

8/10

Games28 Aug 2026

Captain Tsubasa 2 wins on spectacle, not football

Five published verdicts average 8/10. The high scores love the cinematic super-shots, the lower ones want the football back, and Tamsoft's answer is a parry.

Games27 Aug 2026

Elden Ring on Switch 2: less grass to hold 30fps

Tarnished Edition arrives on Switch 2 on 28 August, a year after a Gamescom demo reportedly ran at around 15fps.

Games27 Aug 2026

GTA 6 Extended Look: the 30fps question

Rockstar showed 27 minutes on a base PS5 and confirmed no frame rate. The number everyone is quoting is a deduction, and the reason behind it is the CPU.

Games27 Aug 2026

GTA 6 Extended Look: times, and what to watch for

Netflix at 3pm ET, YouTube six hours later, thirty minutes captured in-game on PS5. Four things to look for that a curated trailer usually hides.

8.5/10

Games27 Aug 2026

Star Wars Zero Company nails the tactics, not the camera

EA and Lucasfilm's Clone Wars tactics game landed today at 87 on OpenCritic from nineteen critics. The six outlet scores I could verify average 8.5.

Games26 Aug 2026

FF7 Revelation added a parachute. Now rooftops exist

The Planet's Crisis trailer showed the Weapons, a new summon, Vincent and Cid playable, and three new ways to move around the world.

8.5/10

Games26 Aug 2026

Resonance divides on how much a sequel can throw away

Twenty published scores run from 7 to 9.5. The split is about whether a sequel is allowed to throw away the thing that made the series famous.

Games26 Aug 2026

The Witcher 3's 2026 overhaul goes after the lighting

CD Projekt Red's second free overhaul of an eleven-year-old game buries a real global illumination rework inside a list of thirty-plus upgrades.

Games26 Aug 2026

Witcher 3 Songs of the Past: 2027, on the old engine

Songs of the Past lands eleven years after Blood and Wine, and a free Remastered upgrade arrives on 29 September.

Games25 Aug 2026

Blood of Dawnwalker found its 60fps mode in three days

The Blood of Dawnwalker gets a 60fps mode on PS5, PS5 Pro and Series X in the day-one patch, days after Rebel Wolves said the ceiling was fixed.

Games25 Aug 2026

Gamescom ONL: telling in-engine from a target render

Two hours of trailers, and most of what you learn from them has nothing to do with the games being announced.

Games25 Aug 2026

The Witcher 4 in 2028, and the number 500 underneath

CD Projekt Red confirmed The Witcher 4 is targeting a 2028 release, its first game built on Unreal Engine 5 instead of the studio's own tech.

Games24 Aug 2026

Arc Raiders pauses its wipe system until 2027

Embark Studios says the next Arc Raiders Expedition, opening in September, will be the last until early 2027.

7/10

Games24 Aug 2026

Beast of Reincarnation: something new, something unfinished

Game Freak's first real-time action RPG averages a firm 7 across eight scores, split between critics who found something new and something unfinished.

Games24 Aug 2026

Tides of Annihilation's face change is a lighting story

Fans compared new Tides of Annihilation footage to old trailers and called it a beauty nerf.

Games23 Aug 2026

PS5 discs end in 2028: licensed, not sold

Sony is phasing out physical PS5 discs from January 2028, and this week it reminded players their digital library is a revocable license, not a purchase.

Games23 Aug 2026

Silent Hill Townfall: what the fog has to hide now

Screen Burn's 18-minute reveal confirmed a first-person Silent Hill, a six-month PS5 timed exclusive and a lot of the series' trademark fog.

Games22 Aug 2026

Blood of Dawnwalker skips 60fps: two worlds at once

Rebel Wolves' vampire RPG ships with a 30fps Quality mode and a 40fps Balanced mode on PS5, PS5 Pro and Series X — no 60fps option at all.

Games21 Aug 2026

Black Myth Zhong Kui gameplay: a sword, not acrobatics

Game Science's 15-minute reveal trades the staff-and-transformation combat of Wukong for a grounded sword that blocks and parries.

9/10

Games21 Aug 2026

What it took to get Metal Gear Solid 4 off the PS3

Master Collection Vol. 2 reviewed to a 9.0 average this week, and the headline is simple — MGS4 is off PS3 for the first time ever.

Games21 Aug 2026

Call of Duty admits shader stutter is its problem

Modern Warfare 4's PC beta moves shader compilation out of your first match and into a background process before you even hit play.

Games20 Aug 2026

Harvey Smith's new studio rebuilds what Arkane knew

Black Pony Immersive went public this week, two years after Microsoft closed Arkane Austin and let 96 people go. The headlines are about the founders.

Games20 Aug 2026

Horizon Hunters Gathering is being descoped

Bloomberg reports Guerrilla is stripping the live-service layer out of its Horizon spin-off after bad playtests.

Games20 Aug 2026

Tides of Annihilation built a cathedral for a demo

Eclipse Glow Games built a full-scale cathedral in Chengdu just to run its first public hands-on.

Games19 Aug 2026

EA workers on the Saudi buyout: "I feel dirty"

Game Developer got current EA employees on the record about the $55 billion take-private, including staff at stable studios like Maxis.

8/10

Games19 Aug 2026

What Frogwares stopped modelling in The Sinking City 2

Frogwares ditched the open-world detective formula for tight survival horror, and critics gave it a full aggregate jump for the change.

Games19 Aug 2026

What Warren Spector's levels did with space

The Deus Ex and System Shock designer retired after 44 years. Immersive sim spaces are still the hardest thing an environment artist gets asked to build.

Games18 Aug 2026

Ex-Epic founders are all building AI-native engines

Three separate teams of ex-Epic people are building AI-first alternatives to Unreal, all promising small teams doing the output of fifteen.

Games18 Aug 2026

What porting Diablo 4 to Switch 2 costs the art team

A leaked Age of Hatred Collection would put Diablo 4 and both its expansions on Switch 2 next month.

Games18 Aug 2026

A 12-person open world, built refusing generative AI

Wolf Haus Games is shipping the open-world co-op cult sim Join Us with about a dozen people and no generative content tools.

8.5/10

Games17 Aug 2026

Mortal Shell II clears the original by a full grade

The reviews landed with premium early access, and they are a full grade above the original. Around thirty people made this.

Games17 Aug 2026

Sony's shovelware purge deleted a real developer

Ternox Games got its PlayStation publishing agreement terminated with no explanation, cancelling STONKS-9800 on PS5 and pulling thirteen older titles.

Games17 Aug 2026

Cancelled Star Wars Magellan: four years of environment

An ex-Echtra developer posted gameplay from the shuttered Star Wars action-RPG a year after cancellation.

Games16 Aug 2026

Kingdom Hearts 4 at D23: two art directions at once

Four minutes of Coco, Donald and Goofy playable for the first time, and a release window Square Enix put a number on.

Games16 Aug 2026

Hogwarts Legacy 2 is real. The job listings say more

Warner confirmed the sequel with no trailer and no date. The Avalanche job postings point at live-service, which changes what the art team has to build.

Games15 Aug 2026

Mafia on PS5 hits 60fps: the engine story

The Omertà Collection gave Mafia Definitive Edition a free native 60fps rebuild on PS5 — but left Mafia II and III untouched.

Games15 Aug 2026

Netflix closed Night School Studio, maker of Oxenfree

Night School Studio, best known for Oxenfree's painted-parallax world, is shutting down six weeks after its last release.

Games14 Aug 2026

Halo Campaign Evolved: why the new ring reads wrong

Marcus Lehto's complaint about Campaign Evolved's Forerunner ring names a real environment-art problem: ancient scale read through new-build surfacing.

Games14 Aug 2026

Marvel's Wolverine ships ray tracing at 60fps on a base PS5

Every Insomniac game before this one made you pick between ray tracing and 60fps. Wolverine's default mode is both, on base PS5 hardware, not the Pro.

Games14 Aug 2026

Saber's AI writer row, and the smaller AI in the game

A Bluesky post, a scorched-earth CEO quote, and a denial — that's the fight everyone's covering.

Games13 Aug 2026

EA's $55bn buyout, and the $700m bill nine days later

EA's Saudi-led buyout closed at $210 a share on 4 August. Nine days later came a reported $700 million in annual cuts, and BioWare is the name being said.

8.5/10

Games13 Aug 2026

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