Culture

Cyberpunk 2077 Is A Violent, Impressive Blend Of Deus Ex And The Witcher 3

The next game from the makers of The Witcher 3 is looking impressive, and perhaps most importantly, it looks like a real video game. A 50-minute behind-closed-doors E3 demo of Cyberpunk 2077 showed attendees proper gameplay, played live, that appeared like something we might actually see in the next year or two. Here’s the short…

E3 Presenters Faced A Well Known Challenge: Their Hands

Phil Spencer clearly does not know where his hands are supposed to go when he’s talking

Rage 2 Plays A Lot Like Doom, And That’s Awesome

Playing Rage 2 gave me flashbacks to playing Doom (2016). And that’s a very good thing. Remember when we were lukewarm about Doom? Remember when that project was stuck in endless development hell, and the franchise’s unimpeachable heritage was left to ride on the increasingly sour taste that Doom 3 had left in our mouths?…

Elder Scrolls: Blades Is Impressive, But Don’t Expect Skyrim

I have a feeling that the Elder Scrolls name is going to be a bit of an albatross for The Elder Scrolls: Blades, a free-to-play RPG for mobile that Bethesda announced at E3 From the demo at the show, it’s clear that the fundamentals of the series are there: You trudge through abandoned Elven hallways…

Ubisoft’s Starlink Is Surprisingly Cool, With Or Without Star Fox

Starlink: Battle For Atlas isn’t a Star Fox game. Nintendo’s furry pilot and his famous Arwing fighter are in the Switch version and—I hope you’re sitting down—not in the Xbox One and PS4 versions. It’s not even fully a toys game, a la Skylanders or Disney Infinity, because it turns out you don’t even need…

Overcooked 2 Lets You Crash A Restaurant Into Another Restaurant

The co-op cooking game Overcooked 2 was one of the featured third-party announcements during Nintendo’s E3 presentation this year. After playing it, I understand why. While others on the Kotaku team have been praising the first Overcooked for a while, I hadn’t had the time (or, sniff, the friends) to play it. At E3, after…

Mega Man 11 Is Exactly What I Hoped It Would Be

It’s been eight years since the last Mega Man game, and after the disappointing spiritual successor Mighty No. 9, it’s fair for us all to wonder: Is Mega Man 11 actually going to be any good? The answer, from what I’ve played so far, is yes. I played two full stages of Mega Man 11…

Track: Man Don’t Dance | Artist: Big Shaq | Album: N/A Kotaku Soundtrack is a selection of the stuff we’re listening to at the moment.

The Best Cosplay From ColossalCon, One Of The Biggest Shows Of The Year

ColossalCon was held earlier this month in Sandusky, Ohio, and it’s easily one of the best cosplay shows of the year. Not only is it a regular con, but outside are some idyllic grasslands, and inside the resort is a pool. That means cosplayers are free to tackle massive projects like the Shadow of the…

Bungie Says You Won’t Have To Leave Year-One Destiny 2 Weapons Behind

Sure, everyone’s worried about Cayde. But what Destiny 2 players have really been worried about lately is that, come September’s Forsaken expansion, we’re going to have to say goodbye to all our hard-earned gear. Fortunately, today the expansion’s director told PC Gamer that won’t be the case. In Destiny 2, you spend a lot of…

We Talked To The Last Of Us Part II‘s Director About The Game’s Violence (And More Treacherous Stealth)

LOS ANGELES—Neil Druckmann, creative director on the The Last of Us Part II, was nervous going into E3. “When you’re in it, when you’re working on something for so long you lost the forest from the trees,” he told me as we chatted at Sony’s PlayStation booth here at the LA Convention Center. He’d played…

To help get cosplayers started on their Assassin’s Creed Odyssey outfits—of which there will be many, because those two star characters are just to die for—Ubisoft have released a guide, showing the finer details on their costumes and the correct colours for each component

Cyberpunk 2077 Cosplay Is Here

CD Projekt Red has a long history of working directly with cosplayers on The Witcher, so it’s little surprise that the big showing for Cyberpunk 2077 at E3 this weekhas some A+ cosplay to go with it. Both cosplayers are dressed as V, the player character in the game. The woman lead is Maja Felicitas,…

Some More Characters We’d Like To See In Super Smash Bros. Ultimate

So,Super Smash Bros. Ultimate is going to feature every fighter to ever appear in Nintendo’s fighting game series. That’s fine, but it’s not enough. There could be, and should be, even more fighters. After all, why go back in time to rehash old favourites when there’s a whole world out there of characters who have…

Next February Is Gonna Be Lit

If you like playing a lot of big new video games at the same time, next February is going to be your month. As the flood of E3 press conferences washed over us these last few days, I and many others started to notice we kept hearing the same release month: February 2019. Seemingly every…

The Division 2 Is Political, Despite What Its Developers Say

The Division 2 shifts the setting from New York City to a ruined Washington D.C. While the gameplay aims to fix issues players had with the original, statements from one of the game’s creative directors about the narrative are frustrating. The goal, we’ve been told, is not to make a political statement, but in this…

Cyberpunk 2077 Is A First-Person RPG

We got a peek at Cyberpunk 2077 during Microsoft’s E3 press conference, but other than verifying that the cyberpunk setting will, in fact, have mohawks and buildings that appear to have been smuggled out of Blade Runner while nobody was looking, we didn’t actually learn much. Today, CD Projekt divulged some real details. The open-world…

Podcast: We React To Sony And Nintendo At E3 2018

The E3 press conferences are over, and there’s a lot to talk about. Maybe not as much as we were hoping for, but still a lot. On this third episode of Kotaku Splitscreen’s E3 coverage, Jason and I talk through our feelings on Sony’s big show last night and Nintendo’s Smashstravaganza this morning. We also…

Swinging Through New York City As Spidey Feels Effortless

The New York Insomniac created for Spider-Man is just about everything I’ve hoped for since the 2001 Sam Raimi movie with Tobey Maguire. The buildings are all very tall, divided between glass skyscrapers and old brick high rises. In between, there are alleyways bathed in the warm glow of a setting sun that never seems…

Nintendo’s E3 Booth Is Full Of Amazing Smash Bros. Props

Nintendo’s E3 2018 booth is mostly full of increasingly-sweaty attendees playing Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, but it’s also home to a veritable museum of real-life custom props drawn from Smash, and therefore from the company’s rich history of games. Kotaku EIC Stephen Totilo is on the show floor, and couldn’t help but snap a bunch…