News and Reviews

The new upgrade for Red Dead Redemption is out today on all platforms, and while the game is now live and playable on Xbox Series X|S, the upgrade path from the old Xbox 360 version isn't working for lots of players - and there's some confusion as to why at the moment. When the team at Rockstar announced this new version of RDR last month, they said that "current owners on PS4, Nintendo Switch, or the digital backward compatible version on Xbox One will be able to upgrade digitally for free". However, right now, lots existing owners of Red Dead on 360/Xbox One are being asked to pay the team's introductory 50% off discount for the new version. To be clear, Rockstar's init…

Ahead of launch later this week, Xbox and Activision have given us a closer look at the multiplayer maps coming to Black Ops 7 Season 01 - with four new levels coming to the Game Pass FPS later this week. The maps in question are Fate, Odysseus, Utopia and Standoff; the latter being a returning classic from 2012's Black Ops 2. You can take a look at the four new additions in action up above, and we'll chuck some descriptions for them down below as well: These four multiplayer maps arrive alongside some new Zombies levels, weapons, operators and progression improvements; which we've detailed elsewhere at Pure Xbox in our broader Season 01 overview. We'll throw the team's …

Nintendo has been releasing all sorts of software and firmware updates recently, and it's now rolled out an update for its Nintendo Today! mobile application. The app, which provides daily updates from the world of Nintendo, has today been updated to Version 2.2.0. It's currently live on iOS, with the App Store page also revealing "what's new". This includes a new Donkey Kong theme (seemingly inspired by the recent release Donkey Kong Bananza). Along with this, the app is now also avaialble in Thailand, Malaysia, Philippines and Singapore. Image: OatmealDome (via social media) If you haven't already downloaded this app, once again it offers regular updates on "all things…

Think every little secret about Street Fighter II has been discovered? Well, you'd be wrong, as a new debug menu has been found in the 'Turbo' version of the game. TurboAnnihilate is the one who made the discovery, unearthing a debug menu for sprite scaling and rotation. To access this menu, TurboAnnihilate says: This begs the question – were there ever any plans to add sprite scaling to the game? This effect is seen in titles like Art of Fighting and Fatal Fury, so it would be interesting to know if Capcom was experimenting with a similar approach for Street Fighter II. View full article

To celebrate the recent launch of Kirby Air Riders on the Switch 2, Nintendo has announced a new event for its Switch Online battle royale game Tetris 99. This event will take place between 4th December and 8th December 2025, and allows players to unlock a special design inspired by Kirby's new game. This also happens to mark the 50th Maximus Cup event! In some other Switch Online news, Nintendo has also released some new Animal Crossing: New Horizons icons for Switch Online members this week. View full article

Nightdive is still rolling out regular updates for its Switch eShop versions of Turok and Turok 2, and to kick off December, it has released two new patches. In Turok, you can expect all sorts of enhancements and improvements as well as a Switch-specific update. And in Turok 2, the team has added a bunch of improvements including cross-play multiplayer. It also shared some details about issues it's aware of in Turok 2. Here are the full details courtesy of the Nightdive website: Turok (2015) Patch 3 - 1st December 2025Turok has been updated on all platforms! PATCH NOTES Added Atari intro video. Updated KEX and Nightdive videos. Removed Acclaim intro cutscene. Save menu wi…

IO Interactive has confirmed that it's hosting a gameplay-focused livestream later this week, where it will share more on its upcoming PS5 title 007 First Light. Having been the star of a recent State of Play showcase, the James Bond game will next appear in a Beyond the Light livestream this Wednesday, 3rd December 2025. Gameplay director Andreas Krogh and senior level designer Thomas Pulluelo will "pull back the curtain on all things gameplay" from 8am PT / 11am ET / 4pm GMT on Wednesday. It'll be livestreamed on Twitch. One of the biggest releases for the first half of 2026, the game is slated to arrive for PS5 on 27th March. Will you be tuning in to the show, or have …

Developer IO Interactive is currently all-in on its upcoming action adventure, 007 First Light, but it sounds like Hitman fans needn't worry about the franchise's future. In an interview with Variety, CEO Hakan Abrak is very clear about the status of the Hitman series. "So of course there will be more Hitman," Abrak says, saying that the team is first focusing on bringing co-op to the existing game, calling it a "really, really good extension to the universe". After that, though, Abrak says IO will "be talking about the next Hitman — because, of course, there’s going to be a next Hitman." Exactly what form a future Hitman game will take is unclear, but Hitman 3 — now know…

It sounds like Dispatch developer AdHoc Studio knew it was taking a risk by adopting an episodic release schedule — but the decision paid off in the end. The interactive superhero drama dropped its first two episodes — of eight total — on the 22nd October, and then proceeded to launch two new episodes every following week. In years gone by, Telltale Games had all but driven the episodic model into the ground with its numerous licensed adventure titles. And AdHoc apparently had to navigate that lasting negativity when considering its approach for Dispatch. "Everyone was telling us not to do it," admits executive producer and CEO Michael Choung, in an interview with Knowled…

Paramount has revealed some of its future movie plans, but for us, the biggest draw is that Sonic the Hedgehog will be getting a brand new spin-off movie in 2028. Variety reports that this upcoming spin-off is currently untitled, but it's being referred to to as the "Sonic Universe Event Film". It will launch in cinemas on 22nd December 2028. More than three years away! Note that this isn't the planned Sonic the Hedgehog 4 movie, which is coming out in March 2027. We have no other details right now, but there are a lot of opportunities to branch out in the Sonic universe, with tons of untapped characters and other video games the movies can draw from. Plus, it seems like …

Cyanide Studio has revealed the third instalment in the Styx stealth series, Styx: Blades of Greed, has been delayed out of 2025, and will now release for PS5 on 19th February 2026. From the perspective of Styx himself, the following was posted to the game's Steam page: "Yeah, yeah, I know, waiting isn’t your favorite thing. Mine either. (Unless I’m waiting in the dark to stab someone, of course). The devs are taking a few extra months to polish everything up, tweak the bits that need tweaking, and make sure my grand return is as glorious (and chaotic) as it deserves to be." Blades of Greed follows on from Master of Shadows and Shards of Darkness, with a third entry almos…

Ghost of Yotei's latest update — patch 1.1 — has resulted in some pretty significant performance boosts. Analysed by our friends over at Digital Foundry, the update's introduction of VRR support is a win for all players, but it's an especially big deal on PS5 Pro. Just to recap, version 1.1 was headlined by the addition of New Game+ when it launched last week, but developer Sucker Punch also snuck in some juicy new graphical settings. A new 'Balanced' mode targets 40 frames-per-second, but really, it's the ability to uncap the game's frame rate that yields the most impressive results. The aforementioned Balanced mode, with ray tracing, manages to hover between its intende…

Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 is looking like the weakest-performing game in the series in quite some time, and new data from the European market sees that story continue. As reported by Chris Dring on The Game Business, citing digital and physical sales data from GSD, Black Ops 7 has been replaced at the top of the chart by EA Sports FC 26. This means a decline in sales for the first-person shooter, though it should be noted that this is fairly typical for the games market. Flanking it is Battlefield 6, which moves up a position from fourth to third, indicating an upward trend in sales. While raw numbers for the sales of Black Ops 7 have yet to be disclosed, this is just one…

One of the games you probably glossed over in our "games coming to Xbox next week" roundup over the weekend was Sleep Awake, which is a psychedelic horror game that's being developed by a brand-new studio. That studio is called "Eyes Out", and it's led by Spec Ops: The Line director Cory Davis, as well as the Nine Inch Nails guitarist (!) Robin Finck. If you haven't played it, Spec Ops: The Line is a very interesting shooter from the Xbox 360 era. Sleep Awake is a totally different genre to that game, of course, taking the form of an "immersive first-person psychedelic horror narrative experience that explores the realm between sleep and death". It looks suitably creepy a…

The Yakuza / Like A Dragon series has been one of the biggest surprises of the Switch 2 generation, with three games — 0, Kiwami 1, and Kiwami 2 — available on the platform already. In February next year, it'll be joined by the brand new Yakuza Kiwami 3 & Dark Ties which is much more than a remake of Yakuza 3, says RGG Studio director Yokoyama Masayoshi. In an interview with GameWatch (translated by Automaton), Masayoshi-san has said that this remake "contains some major hints about the future direction of the series." "We haven't officially announce anything related to that yet," Masayoshi continues "But once you play it, I think you’ll get an idea, or rather, a pret…

Yakuza Kiwami 3 will apparently feature "major hints" about where the Like a Dragon series is heading, despite being a PS5 and PS4 remake of a PS3 title. This is according to RGG Studio director Masayoshi Yokoyama, who isn't a stranger to saying stuff that'll make Yakuza fans sit up and take notice. "It contains some major hints about the future direction of the series," Yokoyama told GameWatch (as translated by Automaton). He continues: "We haven’t officially announced anything related to that yet. But once you play it, I think you’ll get an idea, or rather, a pretty solid sense of what we intend to do with the series going forward." Honestly, it's one hell of a quote, a…

Cyberpunk 2077 developer CD Projekt Red might be teasing something for the game's imminent fifth anniversary. We've written about this before, but it wouldn't surprise us in the least if the company has plans. After all, third-party developer Virtuos is — as far as we know — still working on updates for the open world title, having helped create Patch 2.3 earlier in the year. Some fans have theorised that the team's been working on another big update ever since, and the game's fifth anniversary would obviously be the perfect time to release it. Anyway, this rumour's been reignited thanks to a new post from the official Cyberpunk 2077 account on social media. For a while n…

The new version of Red Dead Redemption for Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S will be with us on Tuesday, December 2nd, and it's already Tuesday in some countries right now, hence why we've got some early footage! It always seems to be Fuzion Xbox Testing on YouTube that gets to this kind of stuff earlier than anyone else, and they've already provided us with detailed early looks at both the Xbox Series X and Series S versions of RDR 1. On Xbox Series X, we can see that Red Dead Redemption is running at a resolution of 4K and delivers some nice visuals despite looking dated in some ways, while the frame rate seems to be a locked 60FPS. Ah, finally! It's very much the same st…

Marvel Cosmic Invasion is kicking off December on Xbox Game Pass in a big way - and the new Marvel brawler is out now, which means early reviews are starting to trickle in for the newly-released Xbox title. So, we're going to gather up some of those early reviews down below for you take a look at. Spoiler alert; Marvel Cosmic Invasion sounds like it'll be a lot of fun on Xbox Game Pass! Console Creatures (9/10) TechRaptor (8.5/10) Nintendo Life (8/10) Push Square (8/10) GamesRadar (4/5) PlayStation Universe (7.5/10) At the time of writing, Marvel Cosmic Invasion has a score of 78 on Metacritic and a rating of 82 on OpenCritic; pretty good going for this one so far, then.…

Rockstar's new current-gen upgrade for Red Dead Redemption is starting to roll out in certain regions, and with the game now live in some parts of the world, we're seeing that this new version has a 50% launch discount on Xbox Series X|S. Available for seemingly the first two weeks after release, Red Dead Redemption has a half price offer right now. Here's how that's looking on the New Zealand store at the moment, with the upgrade expected to go live in other regions over the next few hours: Of course, we must note that existing owners of the Xbox 360 backwards compatible version will get this new upgrade for free anyway, so if you have that old version tied to your acco…

We might have to wait a little while longer than expected until we can see Elden Ring: Tarnished Edition in its full glory on Switch 2, but the title is still popping up at games expos around the world, giving us plenty of opportunities to see it in action. The latest slice of hands-on time came from the Milan Games Week 2025, where 'Corey Da Flame' captured the over-the-shoulder footage found above (thanks, Nintenderos). It's the same opening section that we have seen played on Switch 2 a couple of times now, and off-screen recording is never the best way to get an idea of things from a performance perspective, but things seem... less tarnished than we were expecting. Ok…

Last Friday saw the broadcast of The Mario Kart World: Knockout Tour Streamer Showdown, sponsored by Nintendo and overseen by our friends at IGN Entertainment. Featuring 24 UK variety and gaming influencers, the event showcased Mario Kart World's Knockout Tour at its most chaotic. The selected streamers were split into six teams of four, and commemorative trophies were offered to the quartet that accumulated the most points throughout the competition. Clearly, much more than honour was at stake here. Hosted by IGN UK’s George Forsyth-Nash (aka Nash) and Outside Xtra’s Jane Douglas, The Mario Kart World: Knockout Tour Streamer Showdown also benefited from insights by Outsi…

Jennifer Hale, one of the most iconic voice actors and best known for playing Commander Shepard in the Mass Effect trilogy and Naomi Hunter and Emma Emmerich in the Metal Gear Solid series, has spoken about her experience in playing Bayonetta in Bayonetta 3. Hale, who took over the role from Hellena Taylor for the third entry in the series, told GAMINGbible (via IGN) that she "got thrown under the bus by that whole thing." "I was unable to speak on my own behalf because I was under not one but two NDAs. Eventually, I was allowed to make a statement, which I appreciated, and I was able to present the facts,” Hale continues. Following PlatinumGames' announcement of the new …

Ahead of its PS5 version launching tomorrow, the Trophy list for Red Dead Redemption has gone live, sharing what is an identical list to the PS4 edition. Exophase has the complete list of 52 Trophies, which is mostly focused on the base game, with some Trophies for the Undead Nightmare expansion to go along with it. As this is the same list as the PS4 version, we can pull on the Trophy guides published for that edition to confirm we're looking at a very achievable Platinum Trophy on PS5. PSN Profiles lists just one missable Trophy, which requires you to "complete 20 story missions without switching to a new horse at a hitching post". The advice is to never hitch your hors…

The Witcher developer CD Projekt Red is reportedly sticking to its plan to release not one, not two, but three new games within a six year period. To be clear, the company's referring to the new trilogy, which starts with The Witcher 4. The Ciri-led adventure doesn't have a release date (or even a release window) yet, but the idea is that once it's out, you won't have to wait too long for The Witcher 5 and The Witcher 6. "As we had stated before, our plan still is to launch the whole trilogy within a six-year period," co-CEO Michal Nowakowski reiterated during a recent financial call. Nowakowski suggests that the (much) shorter development cycle will be, in part, thanks t…