Gaming, in brief

Reviews for Control Resonant came out on 18 September, six days before the game goes on sale on 24 September. [1][2]

It averages 84 on Metacritic and 85 on OpenCritic, two websites that collect critics' scores and average them. [1][8]

The first Control, from 2019, averaged 82, so the sequel has reviewed slightly better. [1]

Remedy, the Finnish studio behind it, has sold about 7.6 million copies of the first Control, according to the research firm Video Game Insights. [4][2]

That is more than twice Alan Wake 2, Remedy's big 2023 game, at about 3 million copies. [2]

In between, Remedy released FBC: Firebreak, a multiplayer game that GamesIndustry.biz calls ill-fated; its last content update came earlier this year. [2]

The sequel changes three big things at once. The hero is now Dylan Faden, brother of the first game's heroine Jesse. [2]

The setting moves from one strange government building to an open version of Manhattan. The fighting moves from guns to a shape-shifting weapon used up close, which Remedy has never done before. [2][4]

Rock Paper Shotgun called it the sequel to a liked yet slow-selling shooter, and said the gamble pays off. [3]

Critics split sharply. GameSpot gave it 9 out of 10 and IGN 8 out of 10. [1][6]

Eurogamer gave it three stars and said the combat has not really improved. [1][7] Polygon's own review says it fails at nearly all of its ambitions, and ComicBook gave it 2 out of 5. [4][1]

Kotaku's reviewer played it for 35 hours and called it the most demanding game Remedy has ever made. [5]

Christian Fonnesbech, a Copenhagen consultant who helps studios build game series, warned this week that swapping a series' main character is a big business risk. He says a character is the easiest part of a game to own in court. [9]

The switch was planned early on: Control's creative director Mikael Kasurinen wanted each of the first two games to follow one of the two Faden siblings. [8]

Players can make each fight easier or harder one setting at a time, from how fast enemy shots fly to the timing of a dodge, and its designer asks players to try each fight as designed first. [10]

It comes out on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X and S, Mac and PC, and IGN found the PC version runs reasonably well even on the Xbox Ally X handheld. [12][11]

Why it matters. The first outside sales estimates after 24 September will show whether the 7.6 million people who bought Control follow it to a new hero and a new way of fighting. [2]

Marvel's Wolverine, Sony's new superhero game on PlayStation 5, has sold about 1.9 million copies and made about $130 million, by the estimate of the research firm Alinea Analytics. [13] That is more than any other game Sony's own studios released this year. Marathon sold 1.8 million, MLB The Show 26 sold 1.5 million, Marvel Tokon sold 740,000 and Saros sold 510,000. [13] Wolverine averages 77 with critics, which Polygon calls one of the lowest scores for a Sony-made game in years. [13]

Why it matters. Alinea's Rhys Elliot says the character's popularity carried it, especially in the US, where 53% of its players are. [13] Sony's own games sold 58.4 million copies in its 2020 financial year and 28.9 million in 2024, about half as many. [13]

A court in Shanghai ordered a company to stop selling AI-made voice packs that copied 63 characters from Genshin Impact, and to pay miHoYo about $112,000. [14] miHoYo is the Chinese company that makes Genshin Impact. [14] The seller had also used pictures and story clips from the game in its adverts. [14] The ruling came on 30 June, the company dropped its appeal, and a Chinese news site reported it last week. [14]

Why it matters. It is Shanghai's first case of its kind, and it treats copying a game's voices with AI as unfair competition against the game's maker. [14] It does not settle the separate question of whether AI tools may be trained on game voices. [14]

Nex, the company behind Nex Playground, a small family console played by moving around, with no controller, raised more than $150 million. [15][16] The round was led by the investors Baillie Gifford and BAI Capital, and the bank JPMorgan added a credit line. [15] Families pay a quarterly or yearly subscription for more than 60 games, including Bluey, Sonic and Pac-Man. [16] Its active subscribers grew sevenfold in 18 months and are close to one million. [15]

Why it matters. Nex says the money pays for stock, shipping and sales in new countries: Germany later this year, then Japan and Korea in 2027. [15] It also made Jeff Shouger, a former Niantic, Zynga and EA executive, its finance chief. [15][16]

Black Salt Games, the New Zealand studio behind the fishing horror game Dredge, has set up a new three-person studio called Team Trifold. [17] It also started Saltworks Entertainment, which handles marketing, testing, translation, sound and publishing for three small studios in one Christchurch building. [17] Black Salt pays for Team Trifold's first game, Nothing Lost, out of Dredge's earnings. [17] New Zealand's government also returns part of what studios spend on development. [17]

Why it matters. Studios on that rebate grew their combined revenue 17% to $829 million. [17] Black Salt's producer Nadia Thorne says sharing staff lets each studio stay small instead of growing past what it needs. [17]

A sequel to Lollipop Chainsaw, a game from more than 14 years ago about a cheerleader who fights zombies with a chainsaw, was playable at the Tokyo Game Show this week. [18] Lollipop Chainsaw 2: Back2Back comes to PlayStation 5 in 2027. [18] It is made by Nada Holdings, Dragami Games, which made the 2024 remaster, and JP Games, led by the former Final Fantasy 15 director Hajime Tabata. [18]

Why it matters. The original writer and artist are back, but the film director James Gunn and the designer Goichi Suda do not appear to be involved. [18] Polygon found the demo had no voice acting at all. [18]

Netmarble, a South Korean game company, showed a demo of Solo Leveling: Karma at the Tokyo Game Show. [19] Solo Leveling began as a Korean web novel by an author called Chugong, then became a comic read hundreds of millions of times and an anime. [19] The game tells the 27-year war its hero fights off-page in the original story. [19] It comes to PC, iPhone and Android in 2026, with no date yet. [19]

Why it matters. Netmarble says Chugong read and commented on every character and every line of dialogue. [19] So the author keeps a say over a game another company is building. [19]

Takuro Hiraoka, director of Ascendance, the coming expansion to Monster Hunter Wilds, told PC Gamer that Capcom is changing how hard its endgame is. [20] Capcom set the base game's difficulty so that newer players would not be driven away. [20] Hiraoka says many players of the earlier Monster Hunter: World quit before the story ended because it got too hard too fast. [20] He says Wilds players then got better than Capcom expected. [20]

Why it matters. Hiraoka says a player who cannot finish a game they paid for is unlikely ever to come back. [20] So Capcom is trying to keep new players through the story while giving experts harder fights after it. [20]

A player reviewed Luminary on Steam after 24 minutes and called its only voiced character an awful AI voice. [21] It was Mikell, the wife of the game's creative director Keith Kolod, acting for the first time. [21] Luminary is a small action game in early access, meaning paid but unfinished, since 11 August. [21] It has about 350 Steam reviews, mostly positive. [21]

Why it matters. Keith Kolod says his game lives or dies by its Steam review score, and the studio has no funding and no publisher. [21] One wrong guess about AI now lands on a real person's work. [21]

The test version of World of Warcraft: Forever, Blizzard's new take on its 21-year-old online game, is now open. [22] Players who paid $30 for its new Skyborne elves can play part of it. [22] One mode keeps the old world, models and textures, but adds modern lighting and water. [22] Players are filling forums with screenshots of sunsets. [22]

Why it matters. Blizzard is selling its old world again, changing the light and water instead of redrawing the whole game. [22] Kotaku reports that the lighting, not the new elves or quests, is what players are talking about. [22]

Microsoft's Game Pass is a subscription that gives players a library of games, and until now it included some new games on the day they launch. [23] Polygon points to a new report that Xbox could remove those day-one releases entirely next year. [23] Microsoft has already put monthly time limits on cloud gaming, which streams games over the internet. [23] For now big games keep arriving: Ninja Gaiden 4 joined on 17 September and Gears of War: E-Day joins on 6 October. [23]

Why it matters. If it happens, big new Xbox games would no longer arrive in the subscription on the day they launch. [23] It is a report, not an announcement, and the article carries no statement from Microsoft. [23]