Building a post-apocalyptic future on a budget takes imagination, or at least resourcefulness. If nothing else, the pared-down science-fiction thriller Breathe has plenty of the latter. It's set in 2039, after pollution has rendered the air on Earth mostly toxic, sending large portions of the planet’s population to an early grave and placing the rest at the mercy of gas masks and oxygen tanks. While a few reasonably convincing establishing shots of a crumbling New York City help set the doomsday mood, the world-building is mostly a suggestive tint: Through filters and color correction, the filmmakers give their Brooklyn backdrop a sickly orange – the same hue of contamination that bathes stretches of Fallout’s nuclear wasteland and the Las Vegas of a much more expensive sci-fi movie set exactly a decade later. You want to cough just looking at it.

If that unnatural dustbowl shade doesn’t immediately plunge you forward in time, the casting should. Turns out that Quvenzhané Wallis, a.k.a. the little girl from Beasts of the Southern Wild, is now in her 20s – a revelation sure to leave some viewers feeling as old and dilapidated as Breathe's NYC skyline. Wallis plays Zora, the tinkering teenage offspring of scientist Darius (Common) and his no-nonsense wife, Maya (Jennifer Hudson). The three live together in a Brooklyn bunker, staying alive thanks to a high-tech filtration system.

For better and worse, the storytelling is as economical as the production design. At first, that seems like purely a blessing. We’re spared, at least, any unnecessary exposition, as screenwriter Doug Simon and director Stefon Bristol (See You Yesterday) simply reach the natural, probable conclusion that the world will end up literally choking on its environmental mistakes. The opening runtime is better spent on getting us acquainted with the close-knit survivors. With quick brushstrokes of sensitivity – and the mood-setting hum of John Coltrane on the record player – the filmmakers paint an oasis of warmth and affection at the end of the world. We’ve only just met these folks, but we feel the loss when Darius treks into the poisoned outdoors to bury his dead dad, disappearing from the movie and the lives of his wife and child.

Breathe works best as a clash of needs and uncertain motives. The main plot unfolds months after Darius' departure, when Maya and Zora – having mostly given up on ever seeing him again – face a threat to their sanctuary. It comes in the form of Tess (Milla Jovovich), Lucas (Sam Worthington), and Micah (Raúl Castillo), who have traveled from Philadelphia in search of answers to their own encampment’s dwindling oxygen supply. The movie withholds certain pieces of key information from both the audience and some of the characters, and then builds the increasingly tense standoff between the two parties around those. Tess claims to have worked with Darius in the before times, which is how she knows about the bunker, but Maya has never heard of her. Is the stranger lying to steal their technology and safety? Or are these travelers just desperate people in need of a lifeline?

Most of the action takes place on the same block of abandoned city street, placing the at-odds survivors in each other’s crosshairs or dropping a heavy door between them. It helps that the actors are mostly top-notch – Hudson all steely distrust, Wallis tempering Zora’s fear with optimism, Worthington liberated from the bland virtuousness of his Avatar avatar. And Jovovich, no stranger to orange-hued fallen worlds, racks up the urgency from the moment her baby blues appear behind a shield of glass.

There’s the basic outline of a crackerjack thriller here, set to the ticking clock of an O2 reserve always on the wane. But Breathe could have used a few more complications and a little more clarity of message, too. As an allegory of trust and community, it’s muddled at best: COVID optics and the prominent introduction of Malcolm X’s autobiography – a gift Darius gives to Zora – beg for a larger meaning that doesn’t emerge. Perhaps Simon and Bristol are too sentimental to draw any truly withering conclusions from the tussle between these two desperate, disparate groups. Though there’s a sharp ambivalence to the setup, the kind that could leave a viewer wondering what they’d do in the situation, it eventually devolves into a cleaner binary of scrupulous and not.

The “movies are too long these days” crowd may release a relieved sigh upon learning that Breathe runs a cool 93 minutes. Certainly, no one could accuse the film of wasting much of their precious time. But there’s a fine line between efficiency and skimpiness, and by the end of this very brisk hour and a half, it’s the drama that’s started to look rather asphyxiated. Plenty of sci-fi movies overstay their welcome luxuriating in a fancifully conceived future. This one could have used a little more room to, well, you know.

When the point of a movie is excess, it becomes difficult to know when to stop. Boy Kills World is the perfect example: A pulpy, ultra-violent martial arts actioner, the first feature from director Moritz Mohr runs equally on snark and splatter. But where does the fun kind of overstimulation tip over into the exhausting kind? About 40 minutes into this 110-minute film, as it turns out.

The product of an international coalition of overgrown adolescents – made in South Africa by a German director, with a Swedish star leading a largely American cast – Boy Kills World stuffs every action-movie trope it can think of into its dystopian world, and then some. At times, it plays like a hyperactive tribute to the 1973 Japanese classic Lady Snowblood, in which a mute orphan undergoes a brutal training regimen that shapes her into a living instrument of violent revenge. At others, it’s more like a Hunger Games parody, with comedic strokes broad enough to make the Wayans brothers proud.

These clashing modes come together in the character of Boy (Bill Skarsgård), whose sole purpose for living is to kill dystopian dictator Hilda Van Der Koy (Famke Janssen) after she murdered his family as part of an annual “culling” ceremony in which dissenters are dispatched on live TV. (Again, it’s all very Hunger Games, down to the Van Der Koys’ yellow-and-black flower sigil.) Since then, he’s lived in the jungle being groomed for revenge by a mysterious shaman (Yayan Ruhian) who keeps telling him that Hilda murdered his family, and now she must die. Finally, the opportunity comes when Boy infiltrates another culling ceremony in the capital — a city whose medieval and futuristic elements are crammed together haphazardly, placing Middle Eastern-style outdoor markets next to old-school video arcades.

There are a few points where Boy Kills World’s untamed imagination reaches its full potential, as in the scene where Boy fights for his life on a massive TV soundstage against an army of cereal mascots. Unfortunately, however, most of the movie is held back by its own juvenile sense of humor. H. Jon Benjamin, a wonderful actor with a delightful (and recognizable from dozens of animated projects) voice, narrates in the guise of Boy’s “inner monologue.” A great idea, in theory. In practice, it means massive chunks of explanatory voiceover in the first 15 minutes or so, and then a string of profane wisecracks throughout the rest. If you like the idea of following a character through a long, technically complicated tracking shot, only to have that character look straight at the camera and think, “oh, fuck,” get ready: You’ll have that experience half a dozen times.

It’s all kind of fun at first, but despite the fantastical framing, the actual storyline of Boy Kills World is repetitive and predictable, right up to a twist that derails the proceedings both tonally and narratively. (That’s a nice way of saying that it makes no goddamn sense.) There’s a lot of action and not a lot of thought going on here, which would be fine if there wasn’t so much plot as well.

The problem isn’t Skarsgård, who at times has the physicality of a young Jean-Claude Van Damme (a supreme compliment). It’s not Janssen, who manages to wring a few hard-earned drops of believability out of her absurd character. You can’t even lay the blame on any of the supporting players, although their roles are uniformly one-note: Brett Gelman, Sharlto Copley, Michelle Dockery, and Happy Death Day’s Jessica Rothe all chew the scenery as members of the villainous Van Der Koy clan.

The issue is more that Mohr has no sense of moderation – again, something that shouldn’t be a problem in a film that’s predicated on action overkill. But his approach, while enthusiastic, ends up undermining the very things that should make Boy Kills World a blast. Take the comic-book bloodshed: Early on in Boy’s rampage, a minor villain has her arms chopped off, and she screams and waves her stumps around as blood sprays everywhere. Cool! But a modest scope chafes against excessive aims when Mohr starts employing CGI blood to fill in the gap between his effects budget and his ambition, culminating in some painfully fake-looking splatter.

Similarly, the hand-to-hand combat is a delirious mishmash, with some scenes featuring long, unbroken choreography and others filmed so illegibly that it’s impossible to see what’s going on. It’s a film that’s so preoccupied with looking cool in the moment, it completely forgets about creating a coherent whole. With so many creative kills on screen, it’s ironic that Boy Kills World is done in by self-inflicted wounds.

Infested is now streaming on Shudder. This review is based on a screening at the Overlook Film Festival.

It’s not difficult to make spiders scary. Many people are frightened of them anyway, even when they’re normal sized and not reproducing at an apocalyptic pace. In this way, the new French film Infested is playing the horror-movie game on easy mode: All it needs are a few hairy legs and a cluster of creepy-crawlies skittering across the edge of the frame. A respectable chunk of the audience will squirm in their seats, regardless of whatever else the movie has (or doesn’t have) going on. First-time feature director Sébastien Vanicek delivers enough of these shivery kicks to make Infested worthwhile, if not necessarily a new classic of the genre. At different points, it evokes such fun analogues as Gremlins – the arachnid that sparks this whole ordeal is purchased in the back room of a store that’s not unlike Mr. Wing’s antique shop – and the 2011 John Boyega vehicle Attack the Block.

The latter comparison is rooted in the film’s setting: Most of Infested unfolds inside of a massive housing complex somewhere in suburban Paris, which becomes a war zone once the authorities learn about the spider-based mayhem that’s unfolding within its walls. They know more than the residents about what’s going on, which means that they know more than the audience as well – an approach that actually does a lot to ramp up the film’s sense of paranoid tension. That’s because the story is told from the perspective of Kaleb (Théo Christine), a ne’er-do-well in his late twenties living in his deceased mom’s old apartment with few prospects besides an informal hustle selling fenced Nikes to his neighbors.

Kaleb is, conveniently, also an exotic animal enthusiast, with a menagerie of heated aquariums in his bedroom and a dream of someday opening his own reptile park. That’s why he purchases an unknown, but probably illegal species of exotic spider in a plastic takeout container from a shady guy with a store full of stolen goods. It’s not too hard to guess where this is all headed: Kaleb transfers Spider to shoebox, shoebox has an unnoticed hole in it, spider escapes and kicks off a rampage of toxic bites and eggs laid in pus-filled torsos. All clear and fair enough.

But Infested also spends a frustrating amount of time developing the relationships between Kaleb; his sister, Manon (Lisa Nyarko); her best friend, Lila (Sofia Lesaffre); and Lila’s boyfriend (who also happens to be Kaleb’s estranged childhood best friend), Jordy (Finnegan Oldfield). The frustrating part is that the only reason we’re learning all of this is to give some poignancy to these characters’ eventual peril and probable deaths, which makes the mind wander back to spiders, which leads to wondering why we’re watching these people argue with one another when they could be covered in spiders already. (There’s also social commentary at play – low-income housing occupied by people of color, institutional indifference, etc. – but thankfully it’s not too heavily underlined.)

To be fair, this was not a big-budget production, which means that there’s only so much spider action Vanicek and crew can put onto the screen. A sequence late in the film where arachnids attack the surviving characters en masse uses flash and noise to both enhance and distract from the minimal effects. It’s a smart strategy, and one the movie uses frequently: There’s a lot of chaos and yelling every time the characters are corralled into a space with or without poisonous super-spiders. That keeps the viewer’s cortisol spiking, but can get tiresome after a while. Because let’s face it: We’re here for the spiders, baby! The creature-feature elements of Infested are all executed with panache and a great sense of tension, employing both CGI and practical effects to riff on such classics as the mirror scare and the shot where something – in this case, a whole shitload of spiders – is crawling across the ceiling above an oblivious character’s head.

The body horror, while limited to a handful of scenes, is appropriately gruesome and covered in nasty, gooey pustules. The art department gets an impressive amount of mileage out of Halloween-store cobwebs, and dizzying 360-degree camera rotations do the rest of the destabilizing work. The result is the kind of film where a viewer feels compelled to shake out their pant leg afterwards to make sure there aren’t any critters hiding in there, which, on an elemental level, makes Infested a success – even if it is taking an eight-legged shortcut to chills.

The AOC Agon Pro AG456UCZD joins the ranks of OLED gaming monitors as one of its bigger challengers. It has a lot in common with a gargantuan Corsair Xeneon Flex 45WQHD240, albeit without the signature bendable panel of that model. What you get is a 45-inch, OLED ultrawide gaming monitor for $1,399. This might have sounded like a steal a couple years ago, but the OLED gaming monitor market is sizzling right now. So while the AG456UCZD’s detractors aren’t huge, it has to brace itself from some unimpeachably excellent alternatives, even if they’re not all fighting on the exact same footing.

AOC Agon Pro AG456UCZD – Design and Features

The AOC Agon Pro AG456UCZD is a true desk-domineering monitor. With its 45-inch panel, it stretches 39 inches wide and curves tightly forward. On a 48-inch-wide desk, it leaves little space for computer speakers on either side, though it includes speakers of its own. The stand is perhaps an even bigger issue. Shaped like a giant metal boomerang, the stand’s base sticks out a full foot. Setting the AOC Agon Pro AG456UCZD up straight forward, this would see the stand cut right into the mousing area of my two-foot-deep desk, and thus required rotating the stand to an odd angle. The monitor includes a VESA mounting accessory should you want to go that route, though its heft could present issues with many mounts.

From the stand on up, the AOC Agon Pro AG456UCZD shares many design similarities with the AOC Agon Pro AG276QZD I recently tested. The stand features a useful range of adjustments, including a surprising few degrees of rotation. It would have been a plus to see cable routing through the stand, but at least AOC includes a small cable hook on the back of the stand to help keep things tidy. It also built a headphone hanger into the stand, but the size of the display prevents it from being terribly useful.

The thin display panel shows off its looks by not including a large plastic backing on much of its rear. Instead, all of the extra electronics are housed in a smaller section on the back. This area features an angular design and RGB lighting that adds a bit of style but is still rather tame.

Since the main electronics are limited to the center of the rear, the joystick control for the monitor is only really accessible from under the display, and it’s even a little hard to find there. To make up for this, AOC includes a remote control. This provides convenient access to all the features and menus of the monitor, including quick control for volume and brightness.

The AOC Agon Pro AG456UCZD upgrades the USB offerings of its smaller sibling. It includes four USB-A ports on the left side, making them much easier to access than bottom or rear ports in many cases. Those ports can link to a system connected over USB-B or USB-C with a built-in KVM that can automatically toggle between hosts. That USB-C port is also great for laptop users, as it supports DisplayPort 1.4 and 90-watt power delivery.

A pair of HDMI ports will work with consoles or streaming devices, though they are limited to a 100Hz refresh rate at the monitor’s 3440x1440 resolution. To get the full 240Hz refresh rate at 3440x1440, you’ll want to use the full-size DisplayPort connection or USB-C.

Since this monitor is already taking up plenty of space on its own, it’s great to see that AOC has built the power supply into the unit. That wasn’t the case for AOC’s smaller OLED, which required an external power brick.

AOC Agon Pro AG456UCZD – Testing

While all of the recent OLED gaming monitors will share the commendable quality of having effectively infinite contrast, there is still plenty that sets them apart. Some of the differences are obvious, though plenty are subtle enough that only concrete measurements can suss them out. To that end, I’ve tested the AOC Agon Pro AG456UCZD with a SpyderX Elite colorimeter using the monitor's default settings as well as a number of different adjustments to see how they improve, alter, or worsen the quality of the visuals.

Most OLED monitors deliver impressive color, and that’s the case for the AOC Agon Pro AG456UCZD as well. By default, it achieves 100% coverage of sRGB, 92% of AdobeRGB, and 96% of DCI-P3 color spaces. That said, the color isn’t terribly accurate. In fact, it’s a bit of a mess. Many colors see a deviation from the intended target, with a max dE of 13.76 and an average of 3.74. In other words, most of this inaccuracy will be perceptible. If you’re not creating content or a demanding media aficionado, it may not be a big deal.

At default, the contrast measures at infinite, with pitch black pixels alongside an SDR peak brightness of 268.5 nits. The monitor defaults to 90% brightness, though, which sees a max brightness reach around 190.4 nits. Since the monitor also defaults to a Warm color temperature setting, I also check brightness without this, and the default brightness rose to a comfortable 203.1 nits. With the anti-glare coating on the display, this is a reasonable level for office use as long as strong light sources aren’t hitting the screen. Sunlight will easily overwhelm it.

HDR performance is commendable, though. The monitor was able to reach 794 nits when displaying a 10% window, and on a monitor this big, that’s a large area. For the full screen, brightness is capped much lower, reaching only 154 nits. This was in the HDR Native mode, which shines brightest. Other HDR modes sat closer to 630-640 nits.

AOC Agon Pro AG456UCZD – Gaming and Performance

The AOC Agon Pro AG456UCZD is not an excellent all-around display, but it has a lot of love for gamers. The 45-inch panel that’s such a wonder for immersing yourself into games and movies alike could have been a boon for productivity as well. It certainly has the space for some major multi-tasking, and I’ve used a 34-inch ultrawide for work extensively to great success. But the 3440x1440 resolution is simply stretched too far at this level, resulting in softer detail. It also requires a lot more looking around, since things on one side of the screen are physically further from things on the other.

This monitor also suffers from the fringing seen on many of the early OLED gaming monitors from 2022 and early 2023. This issue can see thin lines of the wrong color appear on the edges of other pixels where two colors meet, such as the faint red and green lines that will appear on the sides of a yellow object displayed on a white background. Here in mid-2024, plenty of other OLED monitors have updated panels with different subpixels layouts that don’t suffer from this same fringing. Because the Agon Pro AG456UCZD’s pixels are especially stretched out, the fringing can’t hide underneath sheer pixel density either. Instead, it’s only further highlighted by the low pixel density.

Thankfully, these issues all but vanish in games. The fringing is much harder to spot in games and movies, and even the low pixel density hides itself well in the faster action of a game. While I worked, I noticed these issues, but when I sank in hour after hour in Helldivers 2, the display's merits stood out more. The rich color and contrast brought Terminid and Automaton worlds to life, and the 240Hz refresh rate kept Overwatch 2 running super smooth. The display also benefits from the near-instant pixel response time of OLED to avoid ghosting, so that 240Hz goes even further in gameplay. All of these aspects pair with the extreme size of the display, which quite effectively wraps up my field of vision when sitting at arm’s length.

Some games still don’t play too nicely with ultrawide aspect ratios. As a result, they can look distorted toward the sides of the screen, stretching the visuals, as I saw in Helldivers 2. Others might limit what you can see vertically while stretching less pronouncedly on the horizontal axis, as Overwatch 2 does. Some games simply don’t allow for 21:9 aspect ratios. It’s hit or miss, but even in the games that don’t properly support 21:9, it can still prove impressive in spite of its awkward issues. The center of the display — where your focus is likely to be — also doesn’t run into these issues.

It’s a plus to see the AOC Agon Pro AG456UCZD include speakers, but they are not without issue. They can spit out enough sound to use in place of desktop speakers, but they sound pretty boxed in most of the time, like a loud speaker playing through a thin wall in the next room and resonating a bit inside their housing. The result is audio that’s distorted and overly skewed toward bass. It’s a little easier to accept for music, and it feels explosive enough in games like Helldivers 2, but listening to speech is rough and hard to discern because of that unnatural EQ.

In Velma Season 2, a group of lobotomized high school girls (now brains in jars) puts on a death metal show. Velma Dinkley (Mindy Kaling) likens a Beyoncé concert to a religious experience while hanging out with her newly Wiccan girlfriend Daphne Blake (Constance Wu). Norville "Shaggy" Rogers (Sam Richardson) is terrorized by visions of the dead, while Fred Jones (Glenn Howerton) converts to Catholicism to attract more customers to his "spooky stuff hunting business". Those, uh, meddling kids? This isn’t your parents’ Mystery, Inc. It doesn’t feel like anyone’s, really. It’s hard to say who the latest, meandering installment of Charlie Grandy’s acerbic Scooby-Doo update is for. While it succeeds at making its titular heroine slightly more tolerable, Season 2 of Velma takes several, irreversible steps backward.

Solving mysteries is the crux of the show, and Velma’s supposed primary motivation. And yet, the genital-mutilating killer now on the loose in Crystal Cove constantly takes a backseat to a dozen other story threads that smack of writers painting themselves into a corner. Daphne’s two adoptive mothers are running to be elected co-sheriffs! Norville is still having visions! Fred is upset about what happened to his mother at the end of Season 1! It’s all very tiring when all you want to do is see the plot unfold in a logical manner. But Velma can’t even do that right.

Instead, Season 2 is full of mostly unfunny gags from the same cast of characters that struggled to work with similar material last season. One minute, there’s more of the ridiculous “explanation” for why Norville is transforming into the Shaggy we know and love from 55 years of Scooby-Doo cartoons. The next, Velma wastes time trying to convince classmates that Daphne isn’t the Wiccan novice she claims to be. None of these moments are particularly well-written or satisfying. Not when there’s so much more to explore.

These distractions come at the expense of new characters like the mysterious Amber (Sara Ramirez). Instead of spending more time on their relationship with their mom, former Hex Girl Thorn (Jennifer Hale), the writers would rather throw Amber into an episode-long “Breakfast Club detention” with Velma’s core quartet. Fred still gets some of the funniest moments thanks to Howerton’s unhinged performance, but he’s wasted on pining after his mother and spending time cracking paranormal cases that we don’t even see.

Thankfully, Velma (the character) has become less insufferable. She’s somewhat capable of empathy now and keeps the rapid-fire sarcasm mostly to herself, though most of her dialogue remains wry and ironic, as though she’s aware there’s an invisible audience to please. While the rest of the cast seems oblivious to the outside world, Velma remains fixated on being clever to please others. But one thing remains a constant: She loves Daphne. Or at least she says she does. You’d never know from the way she treats her supposed girlfriend.

Despite Velma fumbling her admission of love for Daphne at the end of Season 1, the couple did share a kiss. It seemed to foreshadow a bright future for their relationship, but instead Season 2 brings us two bickering girls who end up in nonsensical misunderstandings. It’s a constant throughout these 10 episodes. Velma and Daphne have supposedly known each other since they were children. Their mutual romantic feelings have had plenty of time to marinate, so why do they treat each other like strangers? By the time Velma and Daphne come together in a meaningful way, the show’s reached its absolutely ludicrous conclusion, which does nothing to inspire confidence in their future.

Velma Season 2 had every shot at taking the fiery feedback from the first season and blossoming into a fun riff on the classic Scooby-Doo heroine. Instead, it seems to have doubled down on everything that made Season 1 so unpalatable. A near-total mess of confusing plot threads, confounding twists, and bad jokes, it seems content to set its source material ablaze in the name of subverting expectations – and not in a good way. It’s no mystery why this follow-up fails to captivate, but if it were, I’m just not sure this version of Velma would even be up to the task of solving it.

Netflix’s Dead Boy Detectives never lets you forget that it’s about two boys who turned to detective work after they died. Thankfully, this is no slow building Surf Dracula situation: When we meet stuffy Edwin (George Rexstrew) and the rowdier Charles (Jayden Revri), the two deceased British teenagers have been assisting their fellow ghosts with unresolved matters for decades. Viewers are dropped right into the adventures and afterlife of the characters first introduced by Neil Gaiman and Matt Wagner in the pages of The Sandman #25 – though it isn’t long before their routine is disrupted by the arrival of amnesiac psychic Crystal Palace (Kassius Nelson). Dead Boy Detectives quickly makes clear its overall approach is whimsical horror, pitting its central trio against all sorts of ghosts, demons, and other macabre threats with a winking, humorous tone. On that front, it’s entertaining, garnering laughs with characters like an apologetic emissary of Hell or a bizarre, anime-inspired tree with giant teeth named, naturally, Teeth Face.

Helping Crystal – who’s been suffering from a wee bit of possession – brings the Dead Boys to a small town in the Pacific Northwest (played by Canada – this is a Greg Berlanti-produced DC adaptation, after all). They stick around these overcast environs, continuing to take cases and contending with the ongoing looming threats of a witch named Esther (Jenn Lyon) and the supernatural bureaucrat known as Night Nurse (Ruth Connell). Lyon and Connell provide tremendous fun as these decidedly determined characters, who each have their own reasons for entrapping Edwin and Charles. Lyon’s Esther is casually cruel and humorously flippant, with Lyon bringing a gleefully malicious vibe to the character that feels like she’d make a great sparring partner for Jennifer Tilly on Chucky. Connell is pitch perfect as uber disciplinarian Night Nurse, who is all about maintaining the rules of the afterlife and furious the Dead Boy Detectives have broken so many of them.

There are some jokes the show hits one too many times, though. In this world, ghosts can communicate with cats, but the fact that every cat they meet speaks in a grumpy, foul-mouthed voice wears thin – as do Lukas Gage’s appearances as the human form of the Cat King. He’s an enjoyable scenery-chewer, but his scenes grow repetitive with time. Similarly, a couple of snarky and insulting miniature Sprites are initially amusing before suffering from diminishing returns in later episodes.

Other supporting characters also feel adrift. Yuyu Kitamura is very funny and endearing as Crystal’s amusingly direct neighbor, Niko. Yet despite learning all the secrets of the Dead Boy Detectives fairly early on, she rarely joins their investigations the way Crystal does. Kitamura gets a laugh by acknowledging that fact, but it does nothing to change how needlessly superfluous her character sometimes feels. More obviously incidental is the living girls’ landlord, Jenny (Briana Cuoco), whose ample screen time contributes very little to the overall story, despite Cuoco’s likable performance – most noticeable during a bizarrely random and extraneous subplot about the tattooed butcher’s secret admirer.

Rexstrew and Revri have a nice chemistry together as the odd couple at the center of the story, and Dead Boy Detectives gets decent mileage out of a burgeoning love triangle between their characters and Nelson’s. Charles flirts with Crystal, while Edwin hides long-simmering romantic feelings for his partner-in-crime-solving. Nelson meshes well as the new member of the team, but she’s also unfortunately saddled with an arc about the demon (David Iacono) that once possessed Crystal. It’s dull, and always drags the show down.

Like many 20something actors playing teens on TV, the leads in Dead Boy Detectives don’t really look like 16-year-olds. though hHere, it makes sense you’d hire actors who won’t look dramatically older in potential future seasons, given that they’re supposed to be unaging ghosts. But it’s funny – and often amusingly distracting – how frequently the dialogue hammers home that Charles, Edwin, Crystal, and Niko could all still be in high school. (If two of them had a pulse, at least.) When Jenny repeatedly calls Crystal “Kid,” it’s very apparent we’re watching a 35-year-old actor say this to someone nine years her junior, and it feels like the show would be better served by not drawing our attention to the cast members’ ages at all.

Ruth Connell’s presence reflects the strange development of Dead Boy Detectives. Originally ordered as a sorta-kinda spinoff of Doom Patrol (where Connell first played Night Nurse, though other actors appeared as Charles, Edwin and Crystal) for Max, it was sold to Netflix along the way and has been retrofitted into the universe of the streamer’s Sandman series. Appearances by The Sandman’s Death (Kirby) and other familiar faces make it harder to not compare the two series and Dead Boy Detectives just isn’t as strong as The Sandman, despite Neil Gaiman’s involvement in both. Dead Boy Detectives can’t match The Sandman’s dramatic heights, and even when it gets more serious, it often feels superficial and try-hard. Sometimes it hits its “isn’t this all wacky and weird?” marks, but other times it feels a bit leaden.

Season 1 thrives at its mid-point, when it emphasizes procedural mysteries over serialized storytelling. The third episode, about a family reliving their own murder again and again, is a highlight that leans into pure horror. Though the finale is just so-so, it’s preceded by a strong penultimate episode that fleshes out Edwin and Charles’ personal histories while one of the Dead Boys sets out on a trippy and harrowing journey to save his partner. There are times when the special effects are clearly straining against a limited budget, but there’s impressive and creative imagery throughout the season, including a sort of corpse garden, cool creature designs like the aforementioned Teeth Face, and a couple of backstories rendered in different animation styles.

The Veil premieres with two episodes on Hulu on Tuesday, April 30. New episodes will stream every Tuesday through May 28.

The first scene of The Veil, the new six-part limited series about spycraft and shouting, shows Imogen Salter (Elisabeth Moss) stomping with determination through a sleek airport terminal. (There are only ugly Sbarros and whiny children in real life, not on television.) She meets her mark, a nondescript “foreign man,” then goes in for the kill. Whoever he thought she was – and she’s apparently been with him for 27 days – was a ruse. As INTERPOL comes to drag him away, he’s practically shaking his fist and shouting “I’ll get you for this, Elisabeth Moss!” She smiles. It’s another case in the books.

This “you think you know me, but you don’t” opening really did a number on me. For most of this show – a not-very-good ticking-clock caper with occasional flashes of John le Carré-like insight into the world of professional deception – I was expecting the carpet to get pulled. For starters, Moss is doing an English accent the whole time. She’s going to turn out to be from Bloomington, Indiana any moment, right? But no, what you see here is pretty much what you get. She’s playing an MI6 agent who’s working furiously to stop a Muslim terrorist cell from setting off a dirty bomb somewhere in a highly populated American port. With such a 24-esque setup, The Veil could pass for the most cutting edge television series of 2004!

The operation begins in a refugee camp on the Syria-Turkey border. Imogen drives up a snowy mountain just as several Yazidi women recognize that, in their midst, is an ISIS operative – a perpetually-scowling woman named Adila (Yumna Marwan). She claims to be a French citizen who just kinda-sorta got swooped up into ISIS and, while present at some of their mass murder atrocities, wasn’t really on board, so to speak. But there is reason to believe that she is actually “The Djinn of Raqqa,” a big cheese in the organization, plotting a major action.

Imogen rescues her from the camp and they begin an odd couple-like adventure from Istanbul to Paris to London to, eventually, some countryside manner that reminded me of the end of the Netflix movie The Gray Man (not a good sign). Only Imogen’s mind games can suss out the truth of the situation and save thousands of lives, so we’re told, so a lot is at stake to let our heroine work her magic. While the location photography looks nice, the shooting style is pretty standard, as is the dialogue. It’s kind of hard to believe something so rote would get made today. Other 2024 efforts from FX and Hulu like Shōgun and Under the Bridge are both far more innovative.

There are a few interesting moments. According to The Veil, there’s enough radioactive material inside imaging machines found in abandoned Iraqi hospitals to create a dirty bomb. (Remind me to Google that to see if it is true – but on somebody else’s computer, I don’t need the feds coming down on me.) Another fun element is the ongoing chest-thumping between national intelligence organizations. While Imogen ostensibly works for Britain’s MI6, she’s a lone-wolf-who-gets-results type; for this gig, she reports to her employer’s French counterpart, the DGSE. Her handler/plot-complicating romantic interest, Malik (Dali Bensallah), and his boss, Magritte (Thibault de Montalembert), are frenemies with the CIA’s man in Paris, Max (the very entertaining Josh Charles). Max hurls a great deal of amusing Francophobia their way, and his jokes about long lunches and banker’s hours are quality fun at first. Then it just gets repetitive. Still, there’s probably some truth to the fact that independent agencies working toward a common goal likely do keep information from one another, mostly because they think their colleagues are annoying.

An effort is made to keep The Veil from being too retrograde in its politics. Malik is very much one of the good guys, and he is of French Algerian heritage. We don’t exactly see him praying five times daily, but there’s a shot of him readying for dinner with his family with tagines on the table. Also, the martyrdom-obsessed ISIS grunts seem to have their strings pulled by Russians. Are Russians actually running ISIS these days? That’s one I will Google: This seems to be one invented by the show’s creators.

At the end of the day, The Veil is not going to be one of the more memorable lines on the résumé of creator Stephen Knight, the Dirty Pretty Things and Eastern Promises screenwriter who most recently found mainstream success with Netflix’s Peaky Blinders. But that’s not to say it isn’t wholly without its thrills. There were several times in which I said “oh, how’s Elisabeth Moss gonna’ get out of this one?” and then she did something clever to work her way through a jam. Oftentimes this involves faking an accent, but one encounter includes taking a metal traffic pole and using it like a baseball bat on some motorcycle-riding baddies. Knight’s scripts constantly insist that if Imogen were just left alone to work her magic, she’d have everything sewn up. But other people (men! Lunkheaded men!) keep getting in her way.

Moss is at her best when she’s thinking five steps ahead and using inter-dimensional psychology on everyone around her, but she handles her few Jason Bourne-like moments reasonably well. There’s a scene or two where it’s required for her to slip into a sultry Angelina Jolie Mode and, considering how serious and not-playful the rest of The Veil is, it just doesn’t work.

Beyond entertainment, The Veil shoots its shot at some greater, philosophical meaning. Both Moss and Marwan’s characters are women surviving loss and trauma, and negotiating life through different identities. Veils, if you will. But I found these dramatic moments corny and obstacles to any real engagement – paling in comparison to how, say, David Fincher’s The Killer found a way to be deep without spoon-feeding platitudes to the audience. By the final episode, I was pretty checked out and ready for this so-so series to end.

The original FlexiSpot E7 has been a popular choice among the best standing desks for years, but it seems FlexiSpot understands that there's always room for improvement. The FlexiSpot E7 Pro is a considerable upgrade over the standard E7 frame, bringing better load capacity and sturdiness, killer cable management, and an increase in height range. Let's dive in and explore why the FlexiSpot E7 Pro is such a good buy.

FlexiSpot E7 Pro – Design and Features

Regardless of which desktop material and finish you opt for, the FlexiSpot E7 Pro is an attractive offering. That being said, I'd recommend paying a little extra for the solid wood or gaming series desktop – the latter of which was included in my test unit – if durability is a major selling point for you, as the cheaper chipboard material is likely to provide the least longevity of the bunch.

The FlexiSpot E7 Pro frame comes in black, white, or gray, but I'd argue the black one best achieves the sleek vibe most commonly associated with gaming desks. More importantly, its thick legs and automotive-grade steel allow it to hold up to 440 lbs – at least double what many cheaper options provide, and more than enough to handle even the most robust battlestations out there.

Even better, the desk's exceedingly quiet dual electric motors can raise and lower to heights between 50.6" and 25", which should comfortably suit most users. I'm 6'2" and have found equal comfort in sitting and standing, and the stability even at its highest point has been fantastic. It's worth noting, though, that the standard E7 frame may be better for those looking for the absolute lowest height adjustment, as it can be adjusted between 48.4" and 22.8".

Underneath the desk is a large cable management tray to help keep all of your cords out of sight, and the included magnetic fabric cable cover snaps in place to ensure that things remain even tidier. It's not likely the average person will be peering beneath your setup to examine your cable management tray, but I still love the super clean look for my own peace of mind.

The Flexispot E7 Pro's keypad display shows you the desk's current height alongside buttons that let you program different seated and standing heights if you want to automate your experience. There's even a handy child lock option on the front, and an efficient USB-A charging port on the side – both features that don't frequently appear on the keypads found on cheaper desks.

There are a number of other useful accessories available (sold separately), such as dual monitor arms for a two-monitor gaming setup, or under-the-desk power strips for tidying up cables even further when you have a lot of tech in a single area – but admittedly, most of these things can be grabbed cheaper elsewhere.

FlexiSpot E7 Pro – Assembly

The FlexiSpot E7 Pro frame shipped separately from the desktop and arrived a few days after the former arrived, but the unboxing experience was equally simple for both. Everything was neatly packaged and well-protected, and it took minimal effort to get it all out and ready for assembly.

Afterward, it took me around 30 minutes to unbox and assemble the desk, and I didn't find any of it to be particularly challenging. Everything is laid out in a clear and concise manner in the instruction booklet, and the included multi-use screwdriver is perfectly adequate for getting things done. I'd still recommend a power drill for making absolutely certain all of the screws are secure (and to save your arms some work).

I've assembled quite a few desks in my life and found the FlexiSpot E7 Pro to be one of the easier ones I've worked with. But do be aware that the parts are heavy and that those with an even worse back than mine may find it useful to have two hands on deck – especially when it comes time to flip it over post-assembly.

FlexiSpot E7 Pro – Gaming

There are two gaming-focused desktops that can be purchased alongside the FlexiSpot E7 Pro frame. These are designed with finish that allows you to comfortably use your mouse without a mousepad. One is tailored for FPS players and claims to improve accuracy, while the other is designed to offer lightning-fast movement to MOBA players.

The desktop's slightly rough texture is a nice touch for casual gamers just looking for the most efficient route to getting in and playing, and it all looks and works fine for just having some fun. But if given the choice, I'd nevertheless recommend going for the solid wood desktop and using a versatile gaming mousepad, since these desktops aren't equally ideal for every genre.

Though there's not much about the FlexiSpot E7 Pro that is gaming-specific, that doesn't mean it's not a stellar choice for the hobby. It brings immaculate levels of stability alongside up to 60" of width and 28" of depth, which is ample room for a large tower while also making sure you have space to move your monitor(s) closer or further based on your needs. And it goes without saying that having on-the-fly height adjustment is an ergonomic delight for extended play sessions.

With all that being said, if budget is a deciding factor for you, there are admittedly plenty of cheaper options available that will get most of these needs met. But for those seeking something that feels considerably more high-quality and long-lasting, the FlexiSpot E7 Pro's extremely sturdy frame, whisper-quiet motors, 440lbs of weight allowance, and killer cable management help it stand above many of its contemporaries. Its 15-year warranty should also give you a lot of comfort considering how even many well-known companies only offer 10 years or less.

Today we’re looking at Stellar Blade, the new PS5-exclusive action-adventure game from Korean studio Shift Up. Starting at the main menu we have three modes, and from a player perspective, they are nigh on perfect. Each does what it states: Resolution mode focuses on the highest pixel counts, Performance mode targets the smoothest and highest performance, while the best, and default, is the Balanced mode that aims to provide the best compromise of both.

The differences are small – in side-by-side comparisons, the only changes I noticed are that depth of field and screen space reflections are of a slighter lower quality in Performance mode, with the focal depth being shallower in Balanced and Resolution mode. Additionally, the hair quality of the main character Eve, as well as other characters, is also reduced, specifically in real-time cinematics, as you move from Resolution mode down to Balanced and then Performance. Aside from this, the biggest changes are frame time, resolution, and thus texture sampling. Resolution mode is capped at 30fps and appears to target a full 3840x2160 with dynamic resolution scaling (DRS) possible but not necessary. Performance runs at 60fps targeting 2560x1440, and again DRS is possible but no counts were found below this. Both modes use a spatial upscale, which could be Unreal Engine’s own TAAu spatial pass or AMD’s FSR1. This results in some instability in the image on thin elements and oblique textures to the camera.

Surprising for some, the best image stability comes from Balanced mode, which also targets 60fps and a 3840x2160 ceiling. It uses a temporal reconstruction pass which may be Unreal’s own TAAu solution or FSR2. This looks to be dynamic, or at least, reconstructed from a 2880x1620 to 1920x1080 base, which again demonstrates why pixel counts are not that important. You can see in the video that thin edges, specular highlights, light sources, volumetrics, and certainly hair is far more dithered, noisy and unstable in Performance mode, and even Resolution mode, as compared to Balanced mode. This does come at the cost of the required pixel blends that soften high-frequency details in textures and such, but here the trade off is worth it – in normal play, this mode looks close enough to Resolution mode at a higher framerate to not be worth the cost of dropping to 30fps. This is due to Resolution mode having great per-object motion blur, but the fast locomotion and action, along with input latency impact, can take a while to acclimatise to. Due to the game’s reliance on fast timing-based combat, this is a high cost, for me, over the small image reduction balanced costs.

Performance Modes Compared

When it comes to performance, as I stated, these modes are nigh on perfect. The Resolution mode is, from all my tests and almost completing the entire game, a fully locked and perfectly paced 30fps. Running through the world, climbing buildings, or fighting hulking genetic monsters, the game holds a flat line on the required 33ms and thus 30fps readout. Likewise, the Performance mode runs an equally locked 16ms frame time target giving us a locked 60fps. From my long sessions of play and testing, I could not find any areas that cause a deviation from that target at all. Even if they did, it would likely be single frame dips into 33ms, but this never happened in my performance captures.

Balanced is the only mode that can fall below the designed 60fps rate, with it often hovering into the mid 50s during play. Vitally, it always keeps within the next refresh cycle of 33ms when it does, giving us a small but noticeable level of micro judder during exploring and combat. The worst case was the high 40s when heavy alpha and particle effects had filled the screen, hammering bandwidth and fill rate, but these instances are very brief. Anyone with a variable refresh rate (VRR) monitor or TV will have a much smoother time as the game is often just shy of the 16ms frametime required. The PS5 supports a 48-120Hz range in its VRR mode, and these dips often fall within a 20-25ms frametime, making them end up feeling as smooth as the Performance mode, but with better image quality and the best input latency, which is vital for cutting through the trouble in style.

Size and Scale

Stellar Blade is big in all aspects: large levels, a vast cast of characters, and tons of enemies, locales, and hulking bosses with which to do battle. What starts as a linear combat/exploration game opens up and out significantly, and as you continue through this derelict and desolate world you see a wide variety of beauty. From the sun bleached beach of the start through crumbling Greek-like cities, underwater tunnels, lush green outskirts, and the dense town of Xion, you will see some gorgeous sights throughout your playtime.

Powered with Epic’s Unreal Engine 4, it is an impressive looking game with strong visuals, lighting, and cinematography. Character models are a highlight, with Eve herself being front and center, with soft and fleshy skin tones and long, physics-based hair – a key character trait which folds, self collides and moves with grace with Eve’s motion. Animations are fast and fluid, and expand with a wide variety of moves, weapons, skills and outfits. All characters have an equally high-construction quality, with soft sub-surface scattering on skin, deep parallax eyes, and a good balance of polygon count bolstered with texture and normal map details. A big reason for the human-like quality is that many of the characters are based on digital scans of real people, which alongside the brilliant physically-based lighting and material systems provides a borderline photorealistic look – but with just enough artistic change and ethereal design to never stray into the uncanny valley.

The Naytiba enemies are equally lavished with effort and style, with general cannon fodder having a mutated but organic style. You have spider-like robots, mutant hermit crabs, horse-meets-hammerheads, and giant pyramid head fleshy bosses galore. The animation and fluidity of all the enemies is a big reason why things often look the best during gameplay. As you slash, flip, slide, and topple colossi throughout the game, everything feels as alive and physical as you do.

Adding to this is the brilliant use of lights, shadows, alpha, and particle effects. Whenever you block an attack, slice into an enemy, or teleport behind a beasty, you are greeted with GPU-accelerated particles, via splatters across the floor and even yourself. Enemies can also dish out the effects with liquid projectiles flying across the screen, splatting and spreading on the floor or clouding the air with a poisonous haze temporally.

Underwater the sense of depth and light propagation is very good, with a clear split of above and below the sealine helping make these sections atmospheric. The use of post effects is again central to the look and feel, and a high quality per-pixel motion blur is included, which works well across the three modes. High quality sprite-sampled bokeh depth of field is used during gameplay and the real time cinematics. This aids the high CGI quality these sections have, making them look close to offline renders at times due to the composition and consistency. They are also used to focus your gaze on important areas or frame the shot as per standard cinematography ques, and though some of these are longer than I personally liked, it helps drive the story and character development well – in between all the butt kicking.

That said, not everything is roses in this garden, as the scale of the game and high quality it achieves can be contrasted by some weaker aspects. Textures, as a whole, are good but not great, with some lower-quality mips used on incidental objects and walls, causing them to lack much detail. Colour schemes can be a little too beige in some of the city sections, and the dreaded yellow painter man has run ahead of you to clearly mark the path forward. Although I understand the benefits this offers, it does, in my opinion, become redundant on the exploration aspect to have these yellow breadcrumbs rather than using light, design and architecture to draw you through. The issue is not exclusive to this game, but I must say it felt at odds with Stellar Blade’s otherwise focused art design.

Animation of characters outside of action can be a little wooden and, ironically, robotic, with some sections having very stiff movement and limited facial expressions, which can vary from great to ok depending on the scene. Sound is also very good, but the voice acting on some scenes and over reliance on the same combat sound bites of Eve can become repetitive a few hours in. More variety here would go a long way. Polygon counts can also be low with some signs of the old, cross-generation base the game started with. Similarly, some sections of volumetric light and water surface effects are not always up to the same high standard. Most of these are small complaints though, and they do not distract from a vast, enjoyable, skill-based and above all, gorgeous-looking game that delivers on its aims.

Summary

For a brand new studio, Shift Up has certainly lived up to its name. The quality, variety, scope, and size on offer is exemplary for such a small studio. It has grasped and overcome the challenges of Unreal Engine and not fallen afoul of any of the common streaming stutter or performance hiccups that can blight other teams. The choice of performance modes is commendable, with options available for those who prefer a locked 30 or 60 fps, as well as a balance for those that want the apple and the branch along with it. As a PS5 exclusive it will likely be a game that has legs far beyond the final credits, offering up a visual and gameplay experience that is quite welcome in the gaming garden.

It’s wonderfully ironic that the biggest breath of fresh air the soulslike genre has received in years comes from an adventure that takes place entirely underwater. Where most dodge-rolling action games are drab, bloody, and edgelordian, Another Crab’s Treasure is bursting with bright colors, cartoonish sea creatures, and silly humor. That extreme departure from serious and spooky vibes makes it standout in an increasingly crowded space, even when it follows the formula extremely closely in every other regard. It suffers from overly simplistic combat, a general lack of challenge, and some bugs and camera wonkiness now and again – but with memorable characters, an extremely enjoyable story, and lots of original ideas, Another Crab’s Treasure had me grinning all throughout my 20-hour tour of the ocean floor.

As a cuddly crustacean with a license to krill, Another Crab’s Treasure has you using a discarded dinner fork to turn all manner of sea life into sashimi. Aside from its unique oceanic setting and comedic approach, you’ll probably recognize a lot of what’s here: you’ve got “bonfires'' to rest at called Moon Snail Shells, harsh consequences for dying, chunky bosses who can kill you in short order, and, of course, those sweet, sweet perfect parrying mechanics for people who want to be a sweaty little hermit crab. But there’s also a ton of attention paid to less conventional areas, including some light platforming and puzzle solving – like one section where you’re jumping around a skyscraper of sea litter and socketing fuses to power heavy machinery needed to open the way – and those wrinkles go a long way toward differentiating it.

The cheery vibe is present throughout its charming story, which has far more meat on its bones than you might expect. You play as a meek and conflict-averse hermit crab named Kril, and after your shell is unjustly taken from you, you embark on an action-packed quest to get it back. Along the way you befriend a gang of loveable arthropods, like Konche, the wise old hermit crab who serves as your mentor, or Firth, the douchey social darwinist with an ego as powerful as the tides. The story expertly manages to stay light and humorous for the most part, even as it occasionally dips into murkier waters, like Kril’s battle with depression. It does flounder a bit in the final act with an ending that’s quite unsatisfying (though maybe there’s some secret alternate ending I missed where things are less of a bummer), but I still overwhelmingly enjoyed the story Another Crab’s Treasure tells.

You’ll spend a lot of this damp expedition in high stakes combat anytime you sea anemone, whether that be deadly minions who outnumber you or positively ruthless bosses, like a giant deranged crab with plastic eating utensils tied to its body. Fighting mirrors the slicing and dodging melee stylings I know and love, only pared down to just a handful of combat mechanics to master. There aren’t many enemy attacks to learn (most of which are very telegraphed), and there’s a lot of leniency on things like getting the timing right to perform a perfect parry, all of which make for a much less challenging experience than veterans of the genre might be used to. I didn’t die too much at all, even during boss fights, which unfortunately meant I rarely encountered the level of sweatiness I typically desire – but, surprisingly, I wasn’t bothered much by this, simply because so many of the encounters and enemies are memorable and entertaining in their own right. As it turns out, it’s easy to forget that a boss is easy to beat when that boss was an electric eel who tries to kill you by shooting slices of bread out of a toaster.

For the most part, Another Crab’s Treasure takes a lot of queues from Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, where your abilities and fighting style are fairly static and have less room for configuration. The one brilliant exception to that, though, is the shell-swapping hermit crab ability that augments your armor and mobility, and also gives you a unique ability depending on the nature of your carapace. For example, if you nest inside of a tennis ball, you’ll be able to roll down ramps or at your enemies like a fearsome pill bug, whereas wearing a soda pop can will turn you into a badass sorcerer who can cast fizzy bubbles as a ranged attack. Collecting all 69 of the hilariously imaginative shells in order to discover which suits your playstyle is easily one of this salty sojourn’s best components. I particularly liked the Matryoshka doll shell that works as slower heavy armor at first, then becomes more balanced medium armor when broken, and finally, agile light armor when broken again – this game is seriously bursting with great ideas, folks.

That cleverness isn’t just limited to interesting new shells, either – this maritime voyage is unrelenting in its creativity, and every leg of the adventure had at least a few moments where I stopped to laugh at some clever aspect of its worldbuilding. You’ll meet one stylish lady crab who wears a silica gel packet as a shirt and whose long curly hair is a discarded orange peel, and fight lobsters who behave like horse-mounted knights. You’ll learn to use a fishing line as a grappling hook, and face a hysterical crab boss who gracefully wields a pair of chopsticks like a samurai sword. There are so many ingenious little details and gags as you smack and dodge roll your way through golden sand and murky tides, I felt the need to stop and smell the seaweed a lot more frequently than I initially expected.

However, even the best moments do occasionally get dragged down by bugs and wonkiness, including camera angles suddenly going wacky on you or your poor crustacean’s cephalothorax getting caught inside the environment. In one instance, an enemy’s grapple animation bugged out, leaving the villainous fish twisting bizarrely until I was forced to select the “instant death” option from the menu to reset my world. There’s also an issue with the camera in particular, where the kill animation that accompanies some finishing moves will cause the camera to swing around your character and clip through the world about half of the time, which is both visually annoying and can sometimes get you hit by an attack you might have otherwise avoided. None of this stuff is terrible enough that it had a major impact on my predominantly awesome time, but they were still fairly common irritations.

Warning: this article contains full spoilers for X-Men ’97: Season 1, Episode 7!

X-Men ’97 took a bit of a detour following the highly dramatic Episode 5, with the subsequent installment shifting focus to Storm and Professor Xavier and leaving viewers to stew over the many mutant deaths so recently witnessed on Genosha. Episode 7 is more what we would have expected from a follow-up. It’s another briskly paced chapter that both allows the characters to mourn their loved ones and sets the stage for a truly epic finale arc.

“Bright Eyes” nails the complex mix of grief and rage that follows such a monumental tragedy. We get to see the team mourn the fallen Gambit (complete with the much-needed cameo of Gambit’s former lover Belladonna and the Thieves Guild crew) and process their trauma in different ways. The Genosha scenes make excellent use of Beast, a character who up until now had been playing a frustratingly passive role in the series. The funeral scene also proves what an inspired choice it was to bring Nightcrawler back into the fold here and now. His unique brand of wisdom and compassion is exactly what the show needed.

However, it’s the Rogue scenes that hit hardest in the first half of the episode. Rarely has the character been so compelling, as she sublimates her grief into a quest for vengeance and cuts a swath of destruction across the Marvel Universe. Last week’s Storm-centric episode gave Alison Sealy-Smith a chance to shine, and this week it’s Lenore Zann’s turn in the spotlight. She aptly conveys Rogue’s pain and rage in the aftermath of a profound loss.

These scenes also give us some cool guest stars in Captain America and General Ross (Josh Keaton and Michael Patrick McGill, reprising their roles from What If…?). The original series normally had to settle for silent cameos when it came to non-X-Men characters, so it’s nice to see X-Men ’97 isn’t operating under that same limitation.

Had this episode remained so focused on the grieving process, it might have grown a little tedious by the end. Fortunately, X-Men ’97 is never a series guilty of spinning its wheels or taking the slow burn approach. The focus quickly shifts toward setting the stage for the three-part “Tolerance Is Extinction” storyline that will cap off Season 1. We get hints of Operation: Zero Tolerance and even get to meet its ringleader, the humanoid Sentinel Bastion.

Bastion certainly makes a strong impression here. His encounter with Gyrich is a chilling way of introducing this major villain. There’s a bit of camp to the character (hence the “Purple People Eater” needle drop), but it also quickly becomes clear that he’s ruthless in a way we’ve rarely seen from villains in this universe. Theo James’ quietly sadistic vocal performance certainly helps. Also appreciated is the way in which this episode establishes the power dynamic between Bastion and Mister Sinister. Episode 6’s implication that Sinister was the true hand behind Genosha’s destruction didn’t feel right given the character’s usual motivations. Now we know that Sinister is a pawn in another villain’s complex game.

This episode’s strongest sequence comes in the shift to Madripoor and the team’s reunion with Bolivar Trask. Here we get a gut-wrenching payoff to Rogue’s arc, as she avenges Gambit and the other victims of Genosha by dropping Trask off the ledge of a skyscraper. That’s an unexpectedly bleak turn for the character, and something that never would’ve flown on Saturday mornings. I’m interested to see what long-term ramifications Rogue faces for this callous act; hopefully, it’s not swept under the rug in the push toward the finale.

Trask’s “death” also paves the way for an enjoyable action scene as the X-Men take on a new breed of Sentinel and Cable shows up to save the day. This episode offers up a little bit of everything in its efforts to set up “Tolerance Is Extinction,” and it even drops one final bombshell: Magneto lives. As ambivalent as I am about X-Men ’97 negating his sacrifice, I can’t wait to see how the Master of Magnetism factors into Bastion’s plans.

Game adaptations are a tricky business. In trying to capture the spirit of a comic, show, or movie while also abiding by the conventions often demanded of a video game, something is likely to get lost in the translation. Sand Land, the open-world adaptation of the titular manga by the late, great Akira Toriyama, is a prime example of such a case. In many respects, it's wonderful to see the world of Sand Land at this scale with some of its original charm coming through at key moments, and its emphasis on vehicles for exploration and combat gives it a unique gameplay focus. But the majority of its roughly 25-hour runtime equates to a very by-the-numbers action-adventure, where everything else around it – from storytelling to quest design – left me feeling rather underwhelmed.

Sand Land isn't necessarily a deep examination of the human condition, nor is it intended to be, but its premise of demons and humans coexisting in an arid wasteland fighting comically corrupt governments makes for an immediate hook. The struggle for resources, particularly water, unravels to become more about building a resistance, making amends for grave mistakes from the past, and the lengths its villains will go to cling onto power and control. You control the childish fiend prince Beelzebub, whose soft side always wins out regardless of how often he proclaims to be the scariest, most evil demon around. He's consistently endearing and brings characters together like the shamed veteran Rao and genius mechanic Ann for a fun group that unpacks their dark histories throughout the journey.

There's a lot to like about Sand Land, but it loses much of its impact from what really seems like a phoned-in presentation. While the voice performances are largely good fits for each character’s personality, the writing itself falls into tons of cliches and rote conversations to carry the story along. And most of these shortcomings are spotlighted in stilted cutscenes (where you'll have to manually click through each line of dialogue) that woefully undersell what could have been legitimate moments of hype, levity, or sincerity. The rare occasions it's able to turn things up with a fantastic pre-rendered scene to provide some of the excitement I know Sand Land is capable of, but they're so few and far between that it's hard to be fully invested in the adventure when the storytelling itself isn't either.

That’s made just a bit more disappointing because it's such a joy to see Toriyama's signature artwork and character designs in motion, impressively recreated in 3D here. His penchant for over-the-top goofiness tucked under some darker themes still underpins this adaptation, even as it ventures into new territory for the sparsely explored series. Sand Land is also a good representation of his imaginative vehicle designs, evident in parts of the Dragon Ball series, and it's where this adaptation finds part of its strength.

Sand Land's best qualities are found in its vehicle system, which it smartly relies on for most of its gameplay. You can load up to five vehicles to take with you and then instantly summon each one on the fly, all of which offer a variety of use-cases and specific strengths. The old reliable tank was my go-to for combat, but in tight spaces the Jump Bot's maneuverability gave me a distinct advantage and its mortar shells were just strong enough to take down enemy bots. Later on, you also get a special mech that mixes both melee and ranged abilities, which packs a mean punch and is required for a few puzzles along the main quest.

Quests like these contain some notable highlights that come to surface with a few interesting boss fights or dungeon-like scenarios that challenge you to aptly wield your roster of vehicles. Infiltrating enemy strongholds, for example, often have distinct stealth sections to break up the pace followed by some explosive mech and tank battles. One sequence led me through a labyrinthine ruin to sprinkle in puzzles and get me used to controlling a newly acquired Hover Bot before pitting me against an imposing kraken boss. It made for some satisfying chaos where I used the Hover Bot to tread water before swapping to my tank on safe spots at opportune moments for big damage. Individually, these elements aren't particularly outstanding, but they are solid enough that they create some enjoyable moments when mixed together.

The primary region of Sand Land might be a barren wasteland, yet there's a nice feeling to driving across large stretches of desert and seeing how far it reaches, or being overwhelmed by large structures like the abandoned battleship at the Junker's Market where scavengers congregate. However, it's the all-new location of Forest Land where expansive vistas and lush vegetation provide a refreshing contrast. Winding roads and steep cliffs guide you through a handful of key points of interest and past optional diversions, like caves and ruins with plentiful resources to pilfer. Sidequests and hunting targets, albeit basic, also fill out the world to net you resources and experience as you might expect, although I do appreciate that Sand Land avoids feeling bloated with unnecessary fluff in a way that can typically weigh down the genre.

Vehicles remain most of the focus when it comes to exploring this world, too – whether that be just getting from point A to point B or solving basic puzzles in a dungeon. It works well since they feel good to control despite their specific quirks, and hot-swapping between them seamlessly keeps the momentum going. It was fun to speed through the world on the motorbike, immediately change to the tank to take out an enemy squad, switch to the Jump Bot to reach a plateau where key resources are found, then be on my way again with the motorbike all without a hitch.

Keeping your favorite vehicles in top shape is important, too, and that's where the crafting and gathering elements of Sand Land come into play. You'll need to upgrade them consistently to stay within enemy levels, and thankfully, most of the resources required to keep the pace come to you naturally through enemy drops and items found in the open world along the way. Customizing each of them with specific weapons or swapping different engines and chips genuinely affects how they function, and it's nice to actually feel the tangible difference once you've upgraded a vehicle or changed its parts.

Developer ILCA was cooking with gas when it comes to the customization, riding the line between simplicity and depth – sometimes you don't really want complexity and just want to blow things up, and Sand Land does deliver on that front. But while the vehicle system itself is to be commended, rarely are you presented with challenges that bring out the most in it. That’s due in part to a lack of enemy types and poor AI, which often extends to many of the bosses, so that circling around them and blasting away like shooting fish in a barrel is good enough to win most battles. I felt somewhat unsatiated by the time I wrapped up Sand Land, because despite its vehicles being a definite highlight, I was left wanting more in terms of creative challenge.

While I'd say Sand Land leans on vehicular combat roughly 70% of the time, the other 30% relies on hand-to-hand on foot combat, and that’s one of its other glaring shortcomings. It's a fairly shallow endeavor that seems like it exists only because it has to in order to fill in scenarios where Beelzebub needs to fight in-person. There's a straightforward skill tree to upgrade basic features like better attack damage, stronger special attacks, or more effective item usage, and that comes along with perks or summonable abilities you can get from your companions who tag along for the ride. However, these action-brawler style fights turn out to be button-mashing affairs where you dodge telegraphed enemy attacks, and it lacks both fluidity in the controls and that satisfying feedback you'd expect to get from landing a hit.

Gazing out across my lively medieval burgh in Manor Lords, I see great promise. The detailed buildings, villagers, and landscapes are always pleasant to look upon. The complex, rewarding, if not necessarily precision-balanced economy is entertaining and intuitive to interact with. And the war cries of my homegrown militia, off to bash some bandits, remind me that each bloody clash is costing someone a son or a husband. But for all its potential, Manor Lords is an extremely Early Access-feeling Early Access game at this point. Sometimes, it even seems more like a proof of concept than a finished product.

There is fun to be had in this initial release of Manor Lords. The freedom to lay out bustling streets and market squares, putting villagers to work on sprawling farms and in smoky backyard workshops, is a joyful and generally well-paced experience. The road tool is a little fiddly for my liking, but laying out custom lots and snapping everything together dynamically at the corners makes it easy to craft settlements that look and feel cohesive and realistic.

One of my favorite little touches is the addition of backyard workshops, which let you move commerce into the places where people actually live. That's much more accurate to the era Manor Lords is trying to capture than having massive commercial buildings everyone works at. I get this cozy, familiar feeling when I zoom in and can see that this is where the town blacksmith lives. And just across the way, Herman and Agnes brew beer for the lively tavern down the road.

Almost everything about the sound design and visual presentation is exceptional. Rainstorms patter and boom, leaving roads slick and strewn with puddles. Winter blankets everything in a sparkling frost. The animations for something as simple as getting water from a well are grounded and meticulously detailed in a way that always rewards me for zooming in.

There's even a neat feature that lets you run around as a character in your own town, but… not without some weirdness. For one thing, you'll always be the same exact guy, no matter which portrait you chose for your ruler during set-up. And for another, the collision detection on buildings is clearly unfinished. An open gate might feature an impenetrable, invisible wall, whereas you can wander right through the outside of a church without a care like a sacreligious ghost.

This, and several other features, to be clear, are marked as work-in-progress in the UI. And that's totally fine. Manor Lords is consistently up-front about what's finished and what isn't. I also ran into some other fun and funny visual glitches, like a horrifyingly deformed sheep that looked like it got lost on the way to a John Carpenter movie. Again, stuff like this doesn't ruin the experience, but it does remind me that we're very early in Early Access.

The main difficulty in Manor Lords comes from keeping all of your villagers supplied with food and fuel so they don't die, then providing them with amenities like clothes and beer to level up their dwellings and start producing wealth. It's a pretty decent little economic loop that offers enough friction to prevent outright snowballing, especially when you get a large population that is dependent on crop fertility, mills, and bakeries to not starve. You can even specialize a settlement in making money and trade for most of your material needs, which is pretty neat.

It can be a bit rough getting things going initially, though. As I discussed in my Six Things to Know Before You Play Guide, there are very limited ways to distribute your starting five families' labor that won't get you into big trouble. The tutorials are decent, but the UI sometimes made it difficult to find the information I wanted. For instance, you can hold Tab to see what everyone in a given building is doing. But I couldn't for the life of me find a way to view a list of all available families and what they were assigned to. This is a complex management game. I need more spreadsheets!

The other thing that can go very wrong early on is getting wrecked by bandits before you have the resources to build a full militia unit. And it seems like there's really no recovering from this. On one save file, two of the bandits just stuck around and kept burning things forever, even after several minutes on the fastest game speed, so I couldn't rebuild, but I also never got a game over. So much for that run, I guess.

When I did get a proper army assembled, though, I really enjoyed the core of the RTS combat. It's sort of Total War lite, with formations of about 20 to 40 guys who can be spearmen, axemen, pikemen, or archers. Each of these must be equipped individually with weapons, shields, and armor you either have to make or trade for yourself, which ties the economic and warfare systems together nicely. Eventually, by building a manor, an elite cadre of men-at-arms can be recruited who are fully customizable, and can equip even better gear.

Issuing orders is a breeze, and there are a number of different commands from “charge forward” to “give ground” that cut down on the amount of micromanagement required in battle. The issue is, I hardly ever needed to make much use of these systems in the current build. Your ultimate adversary, that nasty baron across the way, was never able to put together an army that could compete with one even a fair-sized town of my own could muster. Random bandits become almost a joke to deal with once you have at least two full regiments. I didn't even find myself taking enough casualties to affect my economy much in the late game. Outgrowing the greatest possible military challenges seems far too easy, and left me simply waiting around to generate enough Influence to claim more of my rival's lands. A system for the King's Favor, which can speed this up, doesn't seem to really be implemented yet.

Oh, and that manor I mentioned earlier? It's also quite a bare-bones and clunky system at this point. (Though, again, the UI will warn you of this.) There's a tax office that simply doesn't do anything. You can build walls and towers, but everything enclosed by them becomes considered part of the "blueprint" of the manor itself, which stops you from building anything else in that area ever again. So you can theoretically wall off your whole settlement, but gods forbid you ever need to move, demolish, or rebuild anything in that area. I'd honestly recommend just plopping the basic manor building and the garrison to max out your retinue size… then don't worry about it until later patches make it actually usable.

There's also only one map right now, which is a bit of a bummer. It's huge, and gorgeous, featuring several regions to start your settlement in. But I look forward to seeing more varied geography in the final version. Also, not letting me pick my starting tile is pretty annoying, and often led to me restarting over and over until I was randomly placed in the one I wanted.

In his own words, Stellar Blade Director Hyung-Tae Kim is a visualist, not a storyteller, meaning whatever Stellar Blade lacks in its story he’s tried to make up for in its gameplay. It’s a refreshingly transparent statement, and after playing through Stellar Blade, one I find mostly accurate. This is a gorgeous action game with excellent character and monster design and exciting combat that continues to evolve in fun and interesting ways across the 30-hour adventure. Its story, light RPG elements, and the actual substance of its characters, on the other hand, fall well short of the high mark set by its combat. Stellar Blade certainly isn’t pristine, and in some spots it's positively dull, but it’s sharp in the areas that matter most.

Stellar Blade’s setting is a familiar one: The Earth is a post-apocalyptic wasteland, and humans have fled to a colony in space. You play as Eve – a member of the 7th Airborne Squad – who is sent to the surface to eliminate the threat of the Naytiba, horrific monsters that laid claim to Earth once the humans fled.

What follows is a predictable tale that sees Eve linking up with the last remnants of human civilization and collecting four hypercores guarded by four big bosses, each of which comes with new revelations that answer the questions of what happened to the Earth, why the humans fled to space, what created the Naytibas, and so on and so forth. None of the reveals were particularly surprising, and while the back half of the story is a bit more interesting once all the cards are laid out on the table, any emotional moments fell flat for me because of a near complete lack of character building in the front half.

And this is really the biggest issue with Stellar Blade’s story: its characters lack any kind of personality, charm, charisma, or anything that might have endeared me towards them in any way. After 30 hours I can barely tell you anything noteworthy about Eve outside of the fact that she’s fiercely dedicated to her mission; she’s very close with her fellow 7th airborne squadmate, Tachy; and she doesn’t like getting wet. We’re never given any sort of insight as to who she really is as a character, she’s got no sense of humor, and her interactions with her companions Adam and Lily are incredibly shallow. Those two don’t fare much better, either – despite the fact that they act like they share a strong bond, it never feels believable because you never really see it formed. Without any of that, it was hard to become invested in Eve, her mission, or Stellar Blade’s world in general.

Thankfully, the most important part of an action game is the action itself, and Stellar Blade checks pretty much all of the boxes when it comes to its combat. It’s smoothly animated, challenging, satisfying, has a healthy amount of enemy variety, and while there's a lot of depth, it never became overwhelming in what it demanded of me.

You could say that Stellar Blade’s combat is derivative, but at the very least it's derived from one of the best in Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice. Like Sekiro, it is very defense-driven – enemies are prone to launch into long, uninterruptible combos and the only way to properly deal with them is to precisely press the block button just before their attacks land to parry each attack, one after the other. Every parry you land takes away a point from the enemy’s balance, and once their balance is broken, you’re able to land a hugely damaging blow that will kill most standard enemies outright and deal massive damage to bosses.

Unparryable attacks are clearly telegraphed with flashes of color. A yellow flash means an attack is straight up unblockable and needs to be dodged; a blue flash signals an attack that you can Blink past by holding forward and dodging through the opponent to their backside; and then a purple flash is the sign of an attack that can be Repulsed, which forces you to hold back and press the dodge button at just the right time to deflect and expose the enemy’s weak point. Once again, all of this is very similar to Sekiro’s style of telegraphing unblockable moves that either must be jumped over, Mikiri Countered, or avoided at all costs, and it works just as well here.

Developer Shift Up smartly didn’t settle for just straight up copying Sekiro’s combat, either. It adds its own twists in the form of Beta Skills, which are a series of four special attacks that Eve can use for specific purposes – including a wide sweeping attack that hits multiple enemies, a triple stab attack that does massive single target damage, a shockwave type move that hits enemies at a distance, and a shield breaker that deals extra damage to an enemy’s armor. These attacks can be used by spending Beta Energy, which is gained by landing hits and parrying strikes, so you’re well incentivized to engage with the enemy as opposed to just running away and sneaking in a hit when you can.

Speaking of those enemies, one of the areas in which Stellar Blade particularly excels is in its enemy variety and design. There are more than 48 different types of Naytiba to fight against, and while some of them are only slight variations of each other with different weapons, at least those different weapons have their own combos and techniques that you still need to learn in order to properly deal with them. Boss fights are great too, with intense battles against huge and aggressive monsters that always had me on the edge of my seat.

Combat felt fresh all through the 30 hours it took me to beat it, partially because of the aforementioned enemy variety, but also because at just about every major chapter in the campaign, I would get a new tool or mechanic that changed up how I approached certain encounters. There’s a wrist mounted drone that could fire a bunch of different ammo types from a distance, along with new mechanics like Burst Skills that added yet another layer of resource management and became critical for tough fights.

Burst Skills are similar to Beta Skills, in that they are special attacks that require energy to use, but they are more powerful and typically result in an enemy being slumped on the ground. To balance that added strength, Burst Energy is much harder to build, requiring you to either perfectly dodge enemy attacks, successfully use a blink or repulse, or by spending a point of your Beta Energy to use a Beta Chain, which essentially exchanges the two resources. It was fun to make on the fly decisions about whether to spend two points of Beta Energy on a less powerful Beta Skill, or spend a single point to gain a point of Burst Energy and use a much stronger attack later.

It’s considerations like these that really make some of the tougher bosses in Stellar Blade sing. Not to mention the fact that the Burst Skills themselves just look cool as all hell. The cherry on top of all of this excellent action is the exceptional soundtrack, which features everything from blood pumping bangers during boss battles, to beautiful, ear-tingling melodies while exploring its desolate world.

When you’re not hacking away at Stellar Blade’s horrific looking Naytiba monstrosities, you’ll be doing some light RPG activities like exploring Xion (mankind’s last bastion of civilization), restocking at shops, changing your hair, picking up quick and light requests from a bulletin board, or taking on meatier sidequests from NPCs. True to everything else in Stellar Blade, none of these tasks were particularly interesting from a storytelling perspective, save for one involving a man and his love for a broken down singing android. They do occasionally culminate in a big “round two” fight against a stronger version of a boss that I had previously fought, but outside of those few moments, I quickly found myself tired of the sidequest grind.

First off, many of these sidequests have you returning to old levels in order to reach a specific spot to either pick up some sort of note or item to deliver back to the quest giver. While this is mostly fine in the more open ended zones where there’s a map and numerous fast travel points to make travel much less of a chore, it is an absolute pain when it comes to the linear levels where you have nothing to guide you but a blip on your compass. Most of the time virtually nothing has changed in these levels either, so it’s literally just retracing your steps through the same level, minus any of the surprises you might have encountered on your first time through, all to collect a single item that you weren’t able to pick up before.

What makes this worse is that very rarely did I ever feel like the effort was worth the trip. Most of the time the rewards are just Gold and EXP. EXP is great, as level ups give you skill points to explore more of Stellar Blade’s well developed skill trees. But later on, which was when the sidequest fatigue started to settle in, skill points were less exciting because the remaining upgrades were either skills that I had passed on because I didn’t really feel like I needed them, felt like very incremental stat increases on moves that I didn’t use very often, or were extremely situational upgrades.

Then there’s Gold, which for the most part is a useless currency in the latter half of the campaign. It’s used pretty much exclusively for refilling consumables or getting more crafting components, which I practically never had to do because you find so many of all of those things just by opening treasure chests and breaking boxes.

Thankfully, exploration fares better. The two open zones of Stellar Blade aren’t enormous, but they are densely packed with hidden collectibles and fun enemy encounters that always made me want to thoroughly explore as much as I could before making a break for the objective marker. There are collectible cans that can be returned to your base for a variety of rewards, core parts that increase your max health and energy, robot loot pinatas that contain all sorts of goodies, exoskeletons that greatly alter your stats and can affect your approach to combat, and of course, 30-or-so outfits that you can use to change Eve’s appearance. There is an impressive variety among those costumes, so for every skimpy swimsuit or super tiny miniskirt, there's also a classy dress or stylish outfit that makes Eve look like, as my wife put it, “An Insta Baddie”. I always looked forward to finding a new skin, and truthfully, it’s very satisfying to have another big action game outside of Insomniac’s Spider-Man series that features really high quality unlockable cosmetics that you don’t have to purchase with real money microtransactions.

One other feather in Stellar Blade’s cap is that it mixes up its gameplay fairly well. It’s not all just hacking and slashing. Occasionally you’ll have to go deep underground into a creepy lab where your scanner and sword don’t work, turning it into a genuinely spooky survival horror style game. There are also some cool Uncharted like action sequences as well as a good mix of linear and non-linear level design. Not all of these breaks from combat hit, and the platforming-heavy sections are particularly annoying whenever they come up, but they nonetheless do a good job of relieving the monotony that would come from just going from fight-to-fight with nothing in between.

After beating Stellar Blade, it’s also worth mentioning that there’s no New Game+ at launch. It will be coming down the line as free DLC, but right out of the gate, there’s not much waiting for you at the end beyond a hard mode that doesn’t seem to change much outside of enemies hitting you harder. This is especially frustrating because once you beat the game, your save file with all of your unlockables, costumes, and other collectibles is basically stuck at the final boss fight. You can’t take those costumes over with you to a new game, forcing you to do an entirely fresh playthrough, outside of one new costume that you get for beating the game, and you can’t even skip cutscenes on your subsequent playthroughs.

[editor's note]: Right after this review was published, a patch dropped that added New Game+. It doesn't change the score or verdict of the review, but it is a very welcome addition. They said they were adding it soon, and I guess they really meant it!

2024 has been a cracking year for tennis fans so far. Reebok brought back its classic Court Victory Pump sneakers, Zendaya got stuck into a saucy bit of mixed doubles on the big screen in Challengers, and now one of the greatest tennis videogame series’ has returned after a 13-year-long hiatus. TopSpin 2K25 delivers an on-court experience that’s every bit as smooth and snappy as it was two console generations ago, and it features licensed superstars and stadiums that now more closely resemble the real thing. It’s a shame, then, that some convoluted career progression systems and the inclusion of virtual currency hold TopSpin 2K25 back from being an outright winner.

Developer Hangar 13 is best known for making Mafia games, but here the team has gone from whacking mobs to smacking lobs without missing a beat. TopSpin 2K25 feels genuinely terrific to play, its simple set of responsive controls allow for dynamic rallies that closely replicate the pace and tension of the sport, and there’s a supremely well-balanced sense of risk versus reward that comes with performing charged up shots and serves. It feels fist-pumpingly fantastic to nail the timing on a powerful flat stroke that blasts triumphantly down the tramlines, and conversely quite crushing when you greedily overcook it and the ball abruptly smacks into the top of the tape.

If you’re new to the series or to tennis games in general, TopSpin 2K25 features one of the most comprehensive tutorials I’ve ever encountered in the genre. There’s well over an hour’s worth of mini-challenges to complete here, covering everything from the basic set of strokes to more advanced tactics and player positioning. It’s presented for the most part by John McEnroe, who you either know as the legendarily ill-tempered tennis player or the narrator from Netflix’s Never Have I Ever depending on your age bracket. Generally speaking, TopSpin 2K25 is still very easy to pick up and play, but I found completing the TopSpin Academy’s 30-odd lessons held me in good stead as I progressed deep into the bigger tournaments of the MyCareer mode.

Grand Slam, Thank You Ma’am

MyCareer really is the centre court centrepiece of TopSpin 2K25, and it’s a pretty meaty mode. During each month of the tour you get the option to play target-seeking training games, special challenge events, and proper ATP tennis tournaments, all while keeping track of your player’s energy level which starts at 100% and slowly depletes with each match you play. I had to carefully build rest months into the calendar in order to recharge, since every time my player’s energy dropped too low it inevitably resulted in injury that put me out of action for extended periods. However, these injuries only ever seem to occur during menu screens in between matches, and never actually forced me to retire hurt during play. I brazenly went into the Australian Open final with only 1% energy and ended up rupturing my achilles, but I wasn’t informed about it until after I’d raised the trophy – and by then my player was probably too drunk to care.

Energy management isn’t the only thing you need to stay on top of during MyCareer, though. There’s a leveling system that doles out attribute points to help shape your player’s strengths whether you favour slinky serve and volleying or if you’re more of a burly baseline brawler, a status system that gives you lists of objectives to tick off in order to progress from unknown to legend and unlock new tournaments or challenges to compete in, as well as global player rankings both overall and for the year-to-date to measure your progress. Hiring a coach brings its own set of unique goals, too, creating enjoyable games within games that had me hitting a certain number of inside out backhand winners during matches to unlock special attribute boosts, for example.

However, like a debutant pair of doubles partners, these various progression systems occasionally step on each other’s toes. Midway through the second year of my career I had managed to crack the top 10 in the world rankings, but I was still ineligible to enter any of the major Grand Slam tournaments because I hadn’t yet fulfilled all of the requirements to elevate my status to the ‘Star’ level. Instead, I had to go off and grind through a number of lesser TS250 competitions, which made me feel like I was arbitrarily spinning my wheels against fictional nobodies when I should have been going head to head with the likes of Daniil Medvedev and Taylor Fritz. On the plus side, since you can adjust the length of matches at any time, I was able to distill these time-wasting tournaments from full games down to a series of tiebreaks. This thankfully made them briefer than a pair of tennis shorts from the 1970s, at the cost of a slightly diminished amount of awarded XP.

Eventually you unlock unique matches against legendary players such as Roger Federer and Pete Sampras in the men’s tour, and Serena Williams and Steffi Graf on the women’s side. These are compelling little scenario modes that shuttle you through key points in a match, and they bring a welcome injection of variety to the range of match types available in MyCareer.

The considerable list of licensed stadiums all look fairly true to life, and there are some nice little animations to add some personality in between points, like the way players will occasionally collapse onto their backsides after a particularly grueling rally. That said, there are also some noticeable rough edges to the presentation. There’s no coin toss at the start of each match, so you’re never given the option of whether you wish to serve first or receive. There’s no Hawk-Eye technology, either, and therefore no option to challenge close line calls – although the somewhat rigidly placed instant replay camera angles make it tough to scrutinize them anyway. There’s also little to distinguish one tournament win from another; you’re awarded the exact same trophy in the exact same ceremony whether you’ve just won a smaller satellite event or one of the majors. After a few tournament wins, I just started skipping the post-match pageantry like it was the opening credits to an episode of Stranger Things.

Doesn't Make Any Cents

Virtual currency was probably still just an idea jotted down in a 2K executive’s dream journal when TopSpin 4 was released in 2011, but it’s since become the default currency for in-game transactions across 2K’s stable of sports games, and it rears its ugly head here in TopSpin 2K25, too. Every tournament and special event you win awards a modest amount of VC, which in turn is used for everything from buying new clothing and racquets, to hiring support staff that buff your energy preservation and injury recovery, to even acquiring houses around the globe to help reduce travel fatigue.

After 15 hours invested in MyCareer, I’m reasonably flush with the stuff and haven’t once contemplated spending actual money on packs of VC (which of course you can do), but then again I tend to dress my created player as though they’ve just lost a bet in the locker room. If you’re a more fashion conscious tennis player and you’re not content to style your avatar in the occasional off-brand shorts and skirts you can earn purely by playing tournaments, then your mileage may vary.

What does slightly irritate me about the use of VC, though, is that it’s resulted in a warped in-game economy where it’s somehow cheaper to buy a house in New York than it is to buy a new tennis racquet. The prize money you’re awarded from a Grand Slam tournament is also not even remotely similar in scale to real life; winning the Wimbledon final should net you millions of dollars, but in TopSpin 2K25 I pocketed a measly 194VC – just barely enough to buy a pair of Wilson-branded socks or a little more than half of a pair of Nike-branded track pants. It’s all a bit silly, really – a virtual currency that you can buy with real dollars that doesn’t make any actual sense.

I’m willing to look past the questionable virtual currency nonsense, however, because the action out on-court is of such a high standard. I’m only two thirds of the way towards reaching the level 30 cap for my created player, and there are still plenty of courts to unlock and objectives to tick off as I enter my seventh year on the tour. Beyond that, I’m also keen to get stuck into the online tournaments once the servers become more populated, and there’s also a Battle Pass-style rewards system that could well keep me on the hook for several more months to come. Even its licensed player shortcomings could be remedied in due course, with further professionals already promised to be added in the future at no extra cost.

How can a character as gruff and stoic as Knuckles the Echidna (Idris Elba) carry a whole TV show? The answer lies in a loveable, dim-witted human companion: Wade Whipple (Adam Pally). Wade may play second banana to James Marsden’s Tom Wachowski in the Sonic the Hedgehog movies, but the new Paramount+ miniseries Knuckles is his time to shine – and to become the next warrior of the Echidna Tribe. Well, sort of: His Tournament of Champions is actually a nationwide bowling competition in Reno, and he’s already been dumped by his team in favor of an 8-year-old girl with rich parents. Thankfully, Knuckles is on hand to straighten Wade out, and the pair set off for an almost-epic clash of the 10-pin titans.

Let’s be honest – it makes zero sense. But pairing Knuckles with Wade is an absolute master stroke. The bumbling, ’80s obsessed man-child is the perfect counterpoint to the last of the Echidna warriors, and their unlikely friendship becomes the backdrop for an adventure that inverts Sonic and Tom’s relationship in the movies. Here, Knuckles is playing it straight while Wade amps up the comedy with a never-ending series of daydreams, misadventures, and slapstick gags. Elba is wonderfully steely as Knuckles, while Pally hams up just about every scene he’s in. It’s a fantastic dynamic: Knuckles’ determination in the face of Wade’s constant blunders keeps both the plot and the laughs rumbling along.

It’s great to see other members of Team Sonic return for the show, with both Ben Schwartz and Colleen O'Shaughnessey reprising their movie roles, plus a delicious cameo from Christopher Lloyd as great Echidna elder Pachacamac. There’s plenty of action, too, and with two former G.U.N agents – in the form of Kid Cudi and Ellie Taylor – tailing Knuckles and Wade, getting to Reno isn’t quite as easy as they both hoped. This results in plenty of face offs, and a boss fight at the end of the series that offers some true exhilaration. The production value here is surprisingly high for a streaming series, and the combat feels chaotic, well-paced, and a lot of fun. The introduction of Wade’s family – a killer combo of Stockard Channing as his mom and Edi Patterson as his sister – is a high point, and their disastrous Shabbat dinner culminates in a fight scene that spins wildly around the Wade family kitchen to the sound of “Hava Nagila.”

Knuckles does a neat variation on the formula from the Sonic movies, with the baddies deriving their power from one of the echidna’s own quills. But there’s enough variety and novelty here to prevent things from feeling stale. It’s not speed that’s the factor in the miniseries, but pure brute force – one that Wade hilariously hopes to adopt through his training with Knuckles. Naturally, there’s a training montage, along with a kick-ass soundtrack of ’80s classics and alt-rock hits from the ’90s and early ’00s. Watching Wade rock out to Scorpions’ “Rock You Like a Hurricane” is a delight.

Knuckles is pure joy, but it’s so much more than that, too. The bowling competition adds a quirky twist that leads to motorbike-back duels, an epic bowl-off, and a mid-season rock-opera hallucination featuring the voice of Michael Bolton and The Mighty Boosh’s Julian Barratt in a low-budget owl costume. It’s a madcap vibe that suits such an outrageous premise and perfectly offsets Knuckles’ prickly nature.

Knuckles is riotously funny with a ton of heart, and while the little red guy lends his name to the series, it’s Wade who ultimately steals the show. Pally’s brand of zany comedy brings a lot of laughs, and the whole caper is stitched together with some high-stakes action that feels just as grand as the movies’. Knuckles deftly channels the buddy cop energy of Sonic the Hedgehog in surprising directions, and it’s a welcome addition to this growing cinematic saga. It’s not just more of the same, either – this adventure feels funny and fresh in ways that are completely unlike the films. The titular lead often takes a back seat to Wade’s over-the-top personality, but that’s not a bad thing – it’s an exciting twist on the Sonic formula that sets Knuckles apart. Throw in a fistful of frenzied fight scenes and a main quest that’s touching and hilarious, and Knuckles adds a burst of chaotic energy to the franchise.

For those seeking a versatile, high-end dynamic mic, there's really never been a reason to look beyond the Shure SM7B. It has remained one of the best microphones for podcasting and music production over the years thanks to its clear, warm tones and incredible build quality. Its only downfall is that it has always required a preamp to get enough gain from it for quieter performances. Thankfully, that changes with the newer SM7dB, which takes a nearly flawless mic and makes it essentially perfect with an onboard preamp that eliminates the need for cumbersome (and sometimes expensive) external attachments.

Shure SM7dB – Design and Features

On the outside, the Shure SM7dB looks almost identical to the standard SM7B save for an imperceptibly longer length and a few new switches on the back that we'll get more into below. The visual styling of the mic is probably the only thing more recognizable than its signature sound, so Shure did the right thing by not changing anything up in that regard. It's a bold and attractive beast, sporting solid black all around and a sturdy, heavy build that makes it clear from the moment you pick it up that it's designed to last.

Of course, the whole purpose of a refresh of this decades-old mic is the addition of an onboard preamp. This removes the need to buy a Cloudlifter (or other external preamp solution) to push the mic to its highest potential, giving you a toggle on the back panel to switch between +18dB or +28dB of clean gain. You'll need to pop on phantom power to get this boost, but many affordable interfaces will facilitate that with no problems. For instance, my $200 Scarlett 2i2's 48v power button made this part of the process a snappy one-click affair.

That being said, if you're someone with a decked out streaming setup or a more sophisticated studio, you may already have plenty of preamps that mean you won't need your mics to have built-in boosts to begin with. In that case, a handy bypass switch on the back of the mic disables the onboard preamp altogether. And honestly, the standard SM7B would likely be just fine for that well-prepared foundation for $100 less, making the SM7dB a cool but unnecessary side-grade for you.

The one other notable quality of life improvement added to the SM7dB is the change to the high-pass and mid-boost switches, which are no longer recessed and can be moved easily with a finger or thumb. Considering how important these can be to cleaning up or boosting certain frequency ranges, it sure is nice not to have to break out something like a flathead screwdriver to adjust them anymore.

Shure SM7dB – Performance

Anyone familiar with the SM7B probably already knows that it's a powerhouse whether it's being used for broadcasting or vocal performances. It's hard to find a popular podcaster who doesn't employ it in their setup, while artists ranging from Dave Grohl (Foo Fighters) to Michael Jackson have recorded some of their most iconic performances with one of these bad boys. It's about as versatile as a mic can get while never feeling like it sacrifices anything in one area to shine in another.

Shure insists nothing about the internals of the SM7dB have changed beyond the addition of the preamp, so the mic's classic warm and natural tone remains intact. The detachable pop filter also returns from the original to provide incredible protection against plosives, and a larger close-talk windscreen included in the box cuts this down even further if needed. I've yet to feel like I needed to swap to the bigger one, but your needs may vary, especially in professional broadcast settings.

As a recording artist with a setup in a non-optimal part of my house, I'm most impressed by the SM7dB and how it works so well in untreated rooms. Where my extremely sensitive condenser mics tend to pick up tons of irritating background noise, the SM7dB's cardioid polar pattern ensures absolutely no sound is picked up from behind the mic and that any input from the sides is drastically reduced. It grabs my voice belting from the front and virtually nothing else, meaning I can finally run my dishwasher and record vocals at the same time like the irresponsible amateur I am.

Speaking of noise, the shock mount system within the SM7dB also makes it so that readjusting (or accidentally bumping) the mic won't cause it to pick up much, if any, undesired vibrations. This makes it ideal for podcasters who move around a lot and want to eliminate handling noise when readjusting their position. Most importantly, it's one less thing you'll need to buy separately — a common theme with this feature-rich mic.

Sometimes, a video game surprises you by doing something you don’t expect: A plot twist, a novel game mechanic, or an idea you don’t really see anywhere else. And sometimes, a game is precisely what it says it is on the tin: What you see is what you get, for better and for worse. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Arcade: Wrath of the Mutants is the latter. An enhanced port of the 2017 arcade game from developer Raw Thrills, Wrath of the Mutants is a very good beat ‘em up that is beaten down by a lack of content and features. It’s a tasty slice of New York pizza if you like beat ‘em ups, but only a single piece; you’ll probably be hungry again an hour later.

Let’s get the obvious out of the way first: Wrath of the Mutants’ visual style, story, and character designs are ripped straight from the 2012 Nickelodeon TV series. That’s a neat, stylistically distinct period in Turtles history, but its biggest inspiration is actually the 1991 arcade classic Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Turtles in Time. If you’ve ever played Turtles in Time, you should be able to jump right into Wrath of the Mutants because, on a gameplay level, they’re basically the same. You’ve got a standard attack which can double as a throw when you’re right next to enemies, a jump, a jumping attack, a dive kick, and a spin attack you perform by pressing jump and attack at the same time. The only difference I can point to is that spin attacks don’t cost health in Wrath of the Mutants, which is a welcome change since you’ll need to use it often to stay alive.

Turtles in Time remains one of the best beat ‘em ups ever made to this day, so copying its systems isn’t a bad thing, but it does make Wrath of the Mutants feel a little basic when you compare it to modern beat ‘em ups like Streets of Rage 4 and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge. Those used the template of games like Turtles in Time as a base to build action with more complexity, more depth, and more systems that both reward mastery and encourage replayability. That’s not to disparage Turtles in Time or say it doesn’t hold up, because it does, but it also doesn’t feel as fresh when compared to beat ‘em ups designed for current consoles, a feeling that carries over to Wrath of the Mutants.

Considering Wrath of the Mutants is a seven-year-old arcade game that predates either of those modern takes, that’s not particularly surprising. Besides, it was designed to be easy to pick up and play and suck up as many of your quarters as possible without making you hate it, so it’s probably unfair to expect it to add a lot of nuance to the genre. But if you’re being introduced to it for the first time in 2024, as this console and PC port is intended to do for a lot of people, it does feel a lot simpler than what you might be used to. Simplicity isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but if you’re looking for more, know it’s not hiding somewhere here.

The Turtles’ kits are essentially the same as they’ve always been, but there are a few things to liven up the moment-to-moment brawling. The first is your Turtle Power, a powerful special attack unique to each character. Once you fill up your meter by whacking enemies with your basic katana, nunchuck, sai, or bo staff attacks, you can unleash your Turtle Power to utterly demolish regular enemies or deal big damage to bosses. You’re even fully invincible the entire time you’re letting loose, which is cool.

More importantly, these moves help establish the Turtles’ personalities. Michelangelo uses his nunchucks to carve up a pizza from midair while yelling, “We got pizza! We got pizza!” I couldn’t tell you why the slices explode when they hit enemies, and it’s probably better not to think about it too hard, but it’s an extremely Mikey thing to do and my co-op partner and I laughed every time one of us did it. Meanwhile Raphael (the angriest turtle in the history of the known universe) just punches the ground really hard a bunch of times, Leonardo spins around so fast he makes a tornado that sucks up his enemies, and Donatello turns into Raiden from Mortal Kombat and summons an electrical storm from his staff that zaps everyone around him. It’s good, goofy stuff.

And then you’ve got your item pick-ups. There are standard pick-ups like things that’ll fill your Turtle Power meter and entire boxes of pizza that will refill your health. But there are also shurikens that take out enemies in a single throw, a power-up that lets you spin around on your shell to dish out the hurt, and the ice cream kitty: an unholy terror who emerges from her cooler and zooms around like the Killer Rabbit from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. All glory to the ice cream kitty!

The best power-ups, though, are the assist characters: Metalhead and Leatherhead, a turtle robot and the world’s most traumatized mutant alligator, respectively. Metalhead launches missiles and Leatherhead deathrolls absolutely everything in sight – and both clear the screen, even if enemies in an area haven’t fully appeared when you summon them. That’s one of those nice quality-of-life things you don’t notice until it’s not there.

You’ll need all these tools because, like the beat ‘em ups of old, there is no dodge or block button (you’ll have to jump or walk out of the way manually), and Wrath of the Mutants throws a ton of enemies at you at once. There’s a lot of variety here: regular Foot Clan ninjas, ninjas with spears, ninjas with lightning guns, mousers, Krang robots with laser guns, Legally Distinct Xenomorphs, the works. You have to approach each of them in different ways, too, so you’re always on your toes.

Managing your Turtle Power meter, health, and items in the environment adds a little bit of depth and rewards you for making smart choices about when to use what, which keeps moment-to-moment decision-making fun. When you use Turtle Power at the wrong time, you’ll feel it, but its presence opens up interesting questions. Do you spend that Turtle Power now so you can start building it up again faster, or save it for a big fight to get the most out of it? Do you grab that pizza now, when your health is relatively low and there’s a lull in the fighting, or do you try to clutch this fight out and save it for you or a friend, just in case? Good beat ‘em ups force you to manage your resources and make split-second choices, and Wrath of the Mutants has that part down.

The boss fights, sadly, are less interesting as a lot of them are too mechanically similar. For example, they all have an area-of-effect attack you have to jump over, which is cool the first few times, but once you realize every boss has it, it’s just kinda there. However, a few bosses shine thanks to unique mechanics – Rocksteady’s flamethrower, Karai’s teleport, Stockman’s ability to fly and drop green goo on you, and so on. It becomes a good challenge to time your Turtle Power right and avoid their scariest stuff by being invulnerable when it happens, but not all of them have these twists, and I wish more of them stood out.

By far the coolest thing about Wrath of the Mutants is how much stuff has been added for this home release. It’s basically double the size of the original arcade game, adding three new levels and six new bosses, including a new final boss. The original voice cast from the TV show also returns, and everyone gives a good performance. The highlights are probably the late Gilbert Gottfried as Kraang Subprime – a casting as absolutely incredible as it sounds – and Kevin Michael Richardson as Shredder, mostly because his voice sounds like it was forged in the fire of a dying star. Don’t get me wrong, though: everyone here is good, and had I not known new lines or characters were added, I would have never been able to tell the difference.

The same goes for the new levels, and I love all three because each one adds something fun. The Amusement Park has you dodging rollercoasters and cardboard monsters popping up in the foreground and background as you explore a haunted house. Enemies literally teleport into the Dimension X stage, and there’s a big eyeball trying to blast you with lightning. And Shredder’s Lair is, well… where you fight the Shredder, and without spoiling things, it’s pretty cool. Not all of the new bosses are as big of a slam dunk, but several – like Karai, Rahzar, and Tiger Claw – are at least memorable. And even the ones that aren’t are funny.

Unfortunately, even with all of that new content, Wrath of the Mutants isn’t long, even by the standards of the short-but-sweet beat ’em up genre. You can finish the whole story campaign in about an hour (roughly the same as Turtles in Time, but half of Shredder’s Revenge), and it’s not particularly difficult on the standard difficulty, though Hard mode might take you a couple tries if you just try to mash your way through. Part of the reason for this is that you can effectively use the two continues per stage (which are split across everyone if you’re playing co-op) and three lives per continue to brute-force your way to the end, but on Hard, you only get two lives per continue. It a small change that makes things harder without feeling unfair and forces you to learn how to avoid damage and memorize the locations of key power-ups and health items. For my money, it’s the best way to play.

Once you’ve beaten Hard, however, there’s not a lot of incentive to keep playing besides high scores because there are no other modes and nothing else to conquer. Bafflingly, you can’t even enter your name on the high score screen; Wrath of the Mutants just records the character, so if you play it with friends and you’re switching Turtles it can be hard to know who got what score on a level.

Wrath of the Mutants’ biggest deficiency is probably its most disappointing: there is no online co-op. There is a local co-op mode for up to four players, and it’s excellent, but that means you’re limited to playing it with people in your house/apartment/condo/RV/sewer-beneath-New-York-City, or via Steam’s Remote Play workaround. This is a game I’d love to play with friends who live across the US and internationally, and it’s lousy that there’s no easy way to do it unless they’re sitting on the couch with me. Don’t get me wrong: I’m a couch co-op evangelist, especially for beat ‘em ups, but it would be nice to have the option to play with friends even if we can’t all be in the same room.

I also ran into a level-breaking bug on Shredder’s Lair that only appeared in co-op where enemies wouldn’t spawn, but we couldn’t progress. We tried restarting the level, but hit the issue again. The only way out was to use the Leatherhead power-up, which made all the enemies on the map visible. Remember how I was talking about quality-of-life things? Once he’d killed them we could proceed, but since we’d already summoned him on the previous attempt, there was no way forward. This isn’t a huge deal because the levels are fairly short and we only spent a few minutes getting back to where we were, but it’s worth mentioning.

All of that said, I’d be lying if I told you I didn’t enjoy Wrath of the Mutants. It’s a solid beat ’em up played solo or in co-op, it captures the look and feel of the TV show admirably, and it’s genuinely funny, whether it’s Donnie lamenting that the health items you come across are “floor pizza” or Krang’s robots yelling things like, “Prepare for undesirable outcome!” Ninja Turtles is as much a comedy as it is anything else, and you have to nail that to really get what makes this weird universe tick. And yes, Shredder says the line. You know which one.

In its early access state, No Rest for the Wicked is already full of surprises. Mostly those are great, like how one moment I found myself marveling at its slow and precise combat (all but unprecedented in the action RPG genre) and the next I found myself decorating my home like I was in an M-rated Animal Crossing. On the other side, although it’s certainly to be expected from a game that’s clearly labeled as unfinished, there were also some not-so-fun surprises, like various technical issues, a loot and inventory management system that needs some serious tweaking, and some levels that can be a headache to navigate from an isometric perspective. There’s nothing there that feels unsolvable, though, and all of those problems are eclipsed by just how exciting and special this genre-blending pioneer felt throughout my 30+ hours with the content that’s already available.

The setting doesn’t rock the boat too much: You play as a magically imbued warrior and generic chosen one, sworn to fight back an ancient plague that seems to be a pretty serious problem for folks, since they absolutely cannot stop transforming into Lovecraftian horrors at every opportunity. After arriving in the land of Sacra by boat, you immediately set to the task of helping these poor souls out by slaughtering all manner of ghoulish, feral wildlife, infected humans, and murderous bandits, all while suspiciously side-eyeing the zealous, militant church that will almost definitely become the bad guys in the back half of the campaign. It’s not exactly a peachy world to explore, but the compelling characters with top-notch voice performances and depressing vibes of a beautiful world gone terribly wrong are both exceedingly well done and quickly become an extremely alluring reason to press on through each harrowing area and lethal boss. As of now, this story is cut short 10 hours in, just as things are getting interesting, so time will tell if it delivers on that front. So far, though, it’s off to a very strong start.

It definitely helps that No Rest for the Wicked is quite easy on the eyes at nearly every moment, owing to its painterly art style, expressive and memorable characters, and gobsmackingly beautiful foliage. Man, oh, man does Moon Studios sure know what it's doing when it comes to plants – clearly that experience working on the Blind Forest that Ori enjoys jumping around in has been put to phenomenal use. I will say, though, that at first glance the bizarre humans can be a bit off putting, with their creepily disproportionate, gorilla-like limbs, especially when you jump into the character creator and immediately see a default that looks like a waxed sasquatch. But once I hopped into the world and saw how it fit in with the stylized art, I was quickly put at ease with how I looked from a bird’s eye view.

Combat sets itself apart as much as the art style, as this divergent action-RPG takes the brisk skirmishes of Diablo or Path of Exile (where you’re triggering a cascade of powerful abilities to kill hundreds of enemies in seconds) and replaces them with steady, methodical, and wonderfully deadly swordplay against small numbers of opponents. Instead of running around as a god of the battlefield, you’re a squishy adventurer who will have to master dodge rolls, perfect parries, and the rare combat ability here and there to scrape by, which makes battles much more challenging and demanding of your full attention. We’re not racing back to our corpses to recover lost loot or working with a finite number of healing items or anything like that, but there’s still plenty of difficulty for us masochists to enjoy. That fresh take on the genre works incredibly well, making for a journey that starts out as much more challenging than most, and where every downed opponent feels like a victory just barely snatched from the jaws of defeat. For someone who’s delved all of Diablo 4’s dungeons already, that’s a lot more engaging than mindlessly plowing through armies with ease (though that can be a lot of fun too).

Exploring the early access portion of the land of Sacra makes for an extremely enjoyable time, whether you’re wading into rotting sewers filled with bandits or navigating ancient ruins where one false step will send you plummeting to your death (even if some of those spills are annoying). There’s an impressive number of enemy types packed into the small number of areas currently available, from diseased, split-faced rats to slimy, four-legged aliens who multiply when killed, and flying witches who teleport around the map and lob fireballs at you.

On top of that, there are lots of secrets to discover and hidden loot to claim, a surprising amount of things to climb, leap to, or precariously balance across that aren’t usually present in isometric level designs, and some really clever shortcuts that allow you to quickly get back to Sacra’s one and only safe haven, located in the center of the map, you’re given plenty of reasons to revisit areas and dig into every nook and cranny. The only issue is that, because you can’t move the camera as you explore, sometimes the fixed view makes it a little hard to tell what can be climbed on, or to understand the exact dimensions of any given narrow walkway you’re maneuvering through. That caused me to accidentally leap to my death on more than one occasion.

The RPG mechanics are similarly inspired, allowing for a ton of customization without locking you into a specific subclass or role that dictates your playstyle (at least initially). Since your build is largely determined by the weapons and armor you bring into battle, each of which comes with their own attacks, abilities, and stats, you get a nice layer of RPG mechanics to mess around with however you like. In one stretch I played as a lightly armored assassin with dual daggers that applied an elemental burn; later I switched to a katana and a shield that healed me as I blocked attacks. The buildcrafting is quite in-depth, and there are already so many combinations I had a hard time picking any one and running with it. That’s a good problem to have!

Unfortunately, which options are available are limited by how the RNG Gods treat you, since you won’t always get a decent weapon that aligns with how you want to play. Even worse, you might find a weapon you really like but not have the right stats to wield it, and since there’s currently no way to respec, you’ll eventually lock yourself into a certain kind of loadout playstyle and find all other loot basically useless, unless you’re willing to spend attribute points inefficiently just to change styles. For example, I started finding really great two-handed claymores that required lots of strength to use long after I’d committed all my skill points to dexterity. Theoretically you could hand this loot off to your other characters or to fellow players once co-op multiplayer is added, but most of the time it feels like a real bummer to get cool loot you can’t use. That can really pump the brakes on the fun of experimenting with different loadouts, especially after you’ve been playing awhile.

That’s not the only way in which loot can be unkind, either. No Rest for the Wicked falls prey to one of my biggest action-RPG pet peeves: a small inventory that constantly needs to be managed. Loot drops constantly, and even though your carrying capacities can be upgraded little by little, doing so is a slow process and you don’t gain access to real storage options until hours into the adventure, by which time I’d been forced to sell or abandon dozens of items I’d rather have kept. And since there are tons of different materials needed to level up, enchant, and craft weapons, you’re constantly being told to store up stuff you absolutely don’t have room to carry, which creates an infuriating dilemma.

That kind of thing might work in a game like Baldur’s Gate 3, where something has to stop you from looting every dinner plate you come across (and you have the option to trudge back to camp if you simply refuse to drop your prizes) but here it just doesn’t feel good to pause exploration every couple of minutes to juggle items in my inventory and make gut-wrenching decisions about what to leave behind.

You’ll also find yourself bogged down by the weird way in which healing items are handled. You have to craft them all from raw materials, and they aren’t replenished when you die. This means that if you encounter a particularly tricky part where you’re using lots of healing items and dying a lot, you’ll need to stop what you’re doing, retrace your steps through old areas to harvest herbs and mushrooms, then craft more potions before returning to whichever part was giving you trouble. And if you happen to take damage as you’re foraging and need to use healing items while making these supply runs, you’ll set yourself back even more. (Even Bloodborne’s biggest fans will usually admit restocking health vials is the worst part of it.) It would probably be a better idea to just make healing items more accessible, or make some of them replenish upon death, because it’s always an annoying chore to get through before I can get back to the task of avenging my most recent death.

When you aren’t fighting diseased abominations and stuffing baubles into your cute little fanny pack-sized inventory, you’ll find yourself in the cozy town of Sacrament where the goal surprisingly shifts to rebuilding the place, like you suddenly stepped into a Stardew Valley for goth kids. By bringing back materials to invest in the refurbishing of various local establishments and infrastructure you can turn the place into a veritable oasis of friendly vendors and scenic views, from a warm tavern and diner you can build near the town’s entrance, to an elevator in the center that can quickly ferry you from lowtown to the fancy upper level and back again. You can even purchase property for yourself, then spend way too much time decorating your place and filling it with the loot you don’t have room to carry. It’s very weird to find any of this stuff in such a dark, action-packed crusade, but this ended up being one of my favorite aspects. Every piece of wood or ore harvested from the world could be used to build a new facility, or to upgrade a vendor to expand their inventory and make life a bit easier. Plus, it’s just nice to take a break from the monstrosities trying to chop your head off to chill in your house and craft some furniture. Resting, if you will.

Once you beat the campaign, you’ll unlock a roguelike endgame activity that pits you against a dungeon filled with powerful enemies and enormous amounts of loot (assuming you have inventory space for it). This mode is a lot of fun and makes the early access version of No Rest for the Wicked feel much more substantial. Unfortunately, every run at this activity requires a consumable that you have to grind to earn, and because you’ll likely be using lots of healing items during runs as well, you’ll more than likely have to stop whatever you’re doing to grind out areas you’ve already explored to stock up on items you’ll need to power your future attempts. Between that and juggling my inventory, I found myself spending an awful lot of time staring at menus instead of practicing my perfect parry.

Another caveat is that, while it might be unsurprising for an early access game (or heck, a lot of full launches these days), No Rest for the Wicked has performance and tech issues to iron out. The frame rate is known to dip no matter how powerful your PC is (as evidenced by my own Ryzen 9 and RTX 4090), your character can get stuck in the side of a cliff until you spend some time dodge-rolling to break free, and sometimes massive parts of the environment (like a bridge or part of the ground) are invisible when you approach them until they awkwardly pop into existence right in front of you. Or sometimes they appear to be there when they aren’t: One time I dodge-rolled away from an enemy and went straight through the ground to die in the empty space below. But again, these are the sorts of things one would expect to encounter in early access and then watch as they’re ironed out as development continues, and none of them were such a big deal that I wanted to stop and play something else. Except falling through the map – that’s never fun.

It’s also important to note one of the major things unavailable in this version of No Rest for the Wicked: multiplayer of any type. While this is the very first thing listed on the roadmap of things Moon plans to roll out, its absence is acutely felt by those who, like me, really look forward to playing a game like this with friends. It’ll also be interesting to see how much the balance of combat is altered by adding allies to the mix, because right now the whole campaign feels very specifically tuned for solo play – I almost can’t imagine what a multiplayer version of these quests would feel like. But I’m intrigued to find out!

Justice League: Crisis on Infinite Earths - Part Two. The film will be released on digital, 4K UHD, and Blu-ray Tuesday, April 23.

If any DC Comics storyline merits a three-part, animated adaptation, it’s Crisis on Infinite Earths. The continuity-correcting crossover is a sprawling epic jam-packed with characters from many worlds. There’s a lot of material to work through, and a great many moving parts to juggle, so a trilogy avoids the compression and pacing problems that so often plague DC’s direct-to-video animated movies. But though Crisis on Infinite Earths - Part Two has ample room in which to work, it never actually creates the sense that these events matter. It’s a Crisis without any feeling.

Or history, for that matter. This Crisis adaptation caps off the most recent offshoot of the DC Universe Animated Original Movies brand – the so-called Tomorrowverse – whose previous entries had taken a slow-burn approach, focusing on younger, inexperienced versions of its well-known heroes. But 2020’s Superman: Man of Tomorrow, 2021’s Batman: The Long Halloween two-parter, and their follow-ups are shaky foundations for a Crisis. The lack of established lore and a wide cast of heroes was sorely felt in Crisis Part One, and little has changed in Part Two.

Even as it depicts a ragtag group of heroes fighting a losing battle to stave off the end of existence, the film struggles to create a sense of stakes. It doesn’t help that so much of Part Two is built around sequences of heroes defending anti-antimatter wave towers from rampaging supervillains or endless hordes of Shadow Demons. These scenes quickly grow tedious, making Part Two very much the bland connective tissue linking Crisis on Infinite Earths’ opening and closing acts.

It would help if the action scenes were more exciting in the animation and choreography departments. Instead, these battles are stiff and lifeless. I actually like the overall look and style of the Tomorrowverse, with its thick black lines and vivid, comic book-y colors, and the way all of these films share a unified aesthetic. But in motion, Crisis Part Two is stiff, flat, and unengaging.

For all its faults, Part One at least made the wise choice to anchor its story in the specific character of Barry Allen. While that resulted in a movie with too many nonlinear time jumps, it still had Barry’s emotional journey as a throughline. It belatedly established a sense of legacy for Barry as it explored the key moments of his relationship with Iris and their ultimate, shared sacrifice.

Part Two, by comparison, has no single focal point. This sequel can’t ever seem to decide which hero should be its main protagonist. Is it Jensen Ackles’ Batman, a loner exposed to worlds where he let others join his crusade? Is it Darren Criss’ Superman, still finding his place as the world’s greatest protector? Is it Meg Donnelly’s Supergirl, a refugee from a dead world given a second chance at life by the Monitor? Any of them could’ve been an effective protagonist. But because Part Two listlessly jumps from one subplot to the next without ever giving any one storyline the attention it deserves, no hero is able to shine the way Flash did in Part One.

The lead characters aren’t the only ones getting short shrift from Crisis Part Two – the film is bizarrely uninterested in drawing on the deep bench of heroes and villains at its disposal. There are exactly two cameos of note, and one of the characters has so few lines it’s a wonder the producers even bothered in the first place. Connecting the disparate corners of the DC multiverse is part of the joy in past tellings of Crisis on Infinite Earths – be it Marv Wolfman and George Pérez’s original comic, or the five-episode crossover event on The CW’s live-action Arrowverse shows. But that joy seems to have completely escaped director Jeff Wamester and writer Jim Krieg.

To be clear, cramming in cameos for the sake of having cameos is usually a fool’s errand, but in the case of Crisis, seeing familiar faces join the fight really does add something to the bigger picture. (Some of the most affecting scenes of The CW’s Crisis involve Brandon Routh reprising the role of Superman and the late Kevin Conroy finally playing Bruce Wayne in the flesh.) For a film that so consistently struggles to give us a reason to care, Justice League: Crisis on Infinite Earths - Part Two could’ve only benefited by including more iconic animated heroes in the conflict. We can only hope that Part Three’s reunion of Conroy’s Batman and Mark Hamill’s Joker is a sign of better things to come for this trilogy.