The AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D Processor Drops to the Lowest Price Ever, Also Includes Crimson Desert

If you're in the process of building a new gaming PC, the AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D should be your top CPU pick, especially with the new sale going at Amazon. For a limited time, this CPU has dropped to $429.95 with free shipping, which is the lowest price I've seen since its launch. Even better, it comes with a free voucher code for the highly anticipated Crimson Desert game, which will be released on March 19. The AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D is widely considered to be one of the best gaming processors on the market and outperforms even pricier AMD and Intel CPUs.

The Gamer's Choice: AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D CPU for $430

Includes Crimson Desert

The AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D boasts a max boost clock of 5.2GHz with 8 cores, 16 threads, and 104MB of L2-L3 cache. What really makes it excel in games, however, is the 3D-V-Cache technology that's only found in AMD's X3D lineup. Despite being the least expensive processor in this stack, the 9800X3D performs nearly identically in games compared to its more expensive siblings. It has the fewest number of cores, but that doesn't matter for gaming. On Passmark, the 9800X3D has the second highest gaming score, trailing a mere 300 points behind the considerably pricier 9900X3D.

Note that there's a new 9850X3D that's now available. We reviewed it and, short answer, you're not missing out.

AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D Review by Jacqueline Thomas

"The AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D is extremely powerful in games, which makes it easier to recommend than other recent processors like the Intel Core Ultra 9 285K or Ryzen 9 9900X. Especially if you’re building a rig with a powerful graphics card, the 9800X3D is going to be the best way to get the most performance out of whichever GPU you pair it with."

Crimson Desert is an upcoming open-world RPG for the PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X platforms that will be released on March 19. The studio, Pearl Abyss, also created the popular MMORPG Black Desert. Whereas Black Desert was a free-to-play game with microtransactions and gacha elements, Crimson Desert will be a primarily offline single-player experience with a retail price of $69.99. Getting it for free with your CPU upgrade, then, is a great perk.

Eric Song is the IGN commerce manager in charge of finding the best gaming and tech deals every day. When Eric isn't hunting for deals for other people at work, he's hunting for deals for himself during his free time.

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Fortnite Responds to Fan Uproar Over V-Bucks Changes, as Players Say They'll Skip the Next Battle Pass and Cancel Subscriptions

Fortnite fans are in uproar over Epic Games' changes to the pricing and availability of V-Bucks, and now the game's developer has finally acknowledged the wave of negative feedback.

This week, Epic Games announced its biggest ever shakeup to how Fortnite's lucrative in-game currency is doled out, and how much it will cost to buy. In short, you'll now get fewer V-Bucks for your money, fewer V-Bucks in each battle pass, and fewer V-Bucks as part of the game's Fortnite Crew monthly subscription.

The response to these changes has been extremely negative, with complaints on reddit and social media criticizing the financial necessity of the changes, as well as their timing.

Fortnite's recent Chapter 7 relaunch was initially well received, though in-game issues, an ever-increasing amount of premium crossovers, and the sheer length of the most recent season has seen that excitement sour.

Chapter 7 Season 1 is the third-longest in-game season ever, and the first since 2022 to last more than 100 days. It has also featured crossovers with everything from Harry Potter to Kim Kardashian, though outside of a lengthy South Park tie-in, most of these collaborations have simply involved the ability to buy items from the game's shop.

And then there's the brief and blunt explanation for the price rises put forth by Epic Games, a video game developer which makes billions. Here it is in full: "The cost of running Fortnite has gone up a lot and we’re raising prices to help pay the bills." It's a blunt message from a video game developer known to profit enormously from Fortnite, stated with no further context on the game's running costs or current performance, to which many fans simply rolled their eyes.

I've been subscribed to Fortnite Crew since its launch in 2020, but today I've decided to cancel it after the news of the V-Bucks reduction & increase in pricing.

The news yesterday was my breaking point with Crew especially because I've been so dissapointed with how its been… pic.twitter.com/noKuJkJ6ID

— Rezztro (@Rezztro) March 11, 2026

"Here's the thing, I don't doubt the cost of running Fortnite has gone up," said Typical Gamer, one of the game's most prolific YouTubers, during a subsequent stream. "But other than that it's tough. We don't have all the inside knowledge of them running the company." Indeed, Epic Games has always shied away from discussing the sheer number of people and studios it utilizes to keep Fortnite's never-ending content machine constantly whirring.

"The community sentiment was truly that there was just collabs, on collabs, on collabs, and that's what Epic was focused on," Typical Gamer continued. "So for that to be the community sentiment and then for them to drop this, it's just not a good mix. And people are angry. They're really, really upset. Some people are saying they're not even going to buy the next season's battle pass in protest.

"If they had just waited a little bit, until after they'd made Save the World free-to-play, focused on the storyline and Fortnite's own characters, brought the storyline back and made a banger of a season... I think at that point you get a lot less community backlash. A lot of people are just feeling like it's a slap in the face after everything that's going on the last few months... But I do feel it's rare that Fortnite turns back this decision. The way they worded it, the way it's so blunt, it's like they just wanted to rip off the bandage and there's no going back."

Responses from fans on social media, meanwhile, have been less measured. "This is the ens***ification of Fortnite," wrote on player in a lengthy thread on reddit. "[Fortnite]’s not growing anymore so the scumbag C suite will try to squeeze as much money out of what is left by lowering the quality of the product (this season was total ass) and charging more for it (v-bucks price changes). So blatant, so predictable."

Other threads show players screenshotting the cancelation screens of their Fortnite Crew subscriptions, and making pledges not to play Fortnite's next season.

"Appreciate the posts in these threads today, everyone," wrote Epic Games staff member EmptyTux, responding after many hours to the many reddit threads on the subject. "There’s been a lot of feedback here not just about the V-Bucks changes, but sharing your feelings about Fortnite as a whole — especially on this current season. Can’t wait to show you next week’s update <3"

Today brought another teaser for that new season, which sees Fortnite's storyline truly kick up a gear. There's word of a fresh in-game story moment this weekend, and another Power Hour to keep players engaged and coming back ahead of next week's new season launch. But will all the players who walked away from Fortnite this week still be there, playing — and paying — as the battle royale soldiers on?

Tom Phillips is IGN's News Editor. You can reach Tom at tom_phillips@ign.com or find him on Bluesky @tomphillipseg.bsky.social

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Pokémon Pokopia Launch Sales Announced, Confirming It's Off to a Strong Start

Pokémon Pokopia has launched big on Nintendo Switch 2, and sold 2.2 million copies over its release weekend.

Across four days, the new Pokémon life simulation game shifted 1 million copies in Japan alone, despite supply constraints for its physical version being reported in several countries.

Indeed, such has been the game's popularity that Amazon recently raised the price of its boxed copy by $10, up to $80. Nintendo shareholders have also reacted positively to the game's performance, sending the company's stock price shooting upwards.

While 2.2 million copies is less than the 5 million already sold by Resident Evil Requiem, it's important to remember that this game is an exclusive for Switch 2 — a console which still has a relatively modest userbase.

Just over 17 million Switch 2 consoles have been sold so far, meaning just shy of one in every eight owners also now has a copy of Pokémon Pokopia. The game has already beaten the sales to date of Kirby Air Riders (1.76 million) and Metroid Prime 4: Beyond (less than 1 million on Switch 2).

The sales even compare quite favourably with those for Pokémon Legends: Z-A, the highly-anticipated franchise title which introduced a new menagerie of Mega Pokémon. That has sold 3.89 million copies to date on Switch 2 since its launch last year (though was also available on Switch)

With a big launch and a very positive reception from both players and critics alike, Pokopia looks like a new evergreen hit for Nintendo as more players take the leap to Switch 2. Could it eventually become the best-selling Pokémon spinoff of all time? It seems possible. N64 classic Pokémon Stadium currently holds that title with 5.4 million sales, though the combined sales of Pokémon Mystery Dungeon Red and Blue are slightly higher, at 5.8 million.

Looking to join in the fun for yourself? IGN's Pokémon Pokopia review returned a 9/10 score, and dubbed the game as "an enjoyable building and town simulator that capitalizes on the charming personalities of its monsters in a way that appeals to both the creative and collector alike."

If you're already playing, be sure to check out our list of all the Pokémon in Pokopia, and take a look at our Things to Do First in Pokopia guide to make the most of your first few days. To help you get started, we've also got a list of 17 things that Pokopia doesn't tell you, plus How to Raise the Environment Level and How to Raise Pokémon Comfort Level.

Tom Phillips is IGN's News Editor. You can reach Tom at tom_phillips@ign.com or find him on Bluesky @tomphillipseg.bsky.social

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'It Is More Fun to Destroy That Which Is Beautiful' – Nintendo Crammed More Than 340 Million Voxels Into Just One of Donkey Kong Bananza's Layers

Nintendo says it believes in the idea that “it is more fun to destroy that which is beautiful,” which is why it stuffed hundreds of millions of voxels into at least one of the layers in Donkey Kong Bananza.

Nintendo producer Kenta Motokura and programmer Tatsuya Kurihara peeled back the layers of last year’s Nintendo Switch 2 Donkey Kong game during a GDC panel attended by IGN earlier today. The hour-long session offered a deep dive into the crust of what made the game special, including information about its ties to Super Mario Odyssey and, of course, its destruction mechanics.

Outside of his love for bananas, Motokura says one of the first things that comes to mind when many others think about DK is that “his arms are big and strong” and allow him to do things most humans are incapable of. The Nintendo team kept this in mind when challenging themselves to deliver a unique experience with Donkey Kong Bananza, which eventually led to its core feature: destructable environments.

Voxels, which Kurihara describes as 3D versions of pixels, were used in Super Mario Odyssey for elements like snow and cheese. Following that game’s launch in 2017, Nintendo experimented with the technology (one famous example saw the team strap arms onto a Goomba) before completely destructible terrain became the core feature in Donkey Kong Bananza.

Kurihara describes the game’s Canyon layer, just one of its 17 nearly destructible levels, as “rather big,” saying that it contains roughly 347,070,464 voxels. Each voxel on any one level can contain properties that include things like density, wetness, destructibility, and more. Voxels materialize as terrain and NPCs, and are always moving, with individual voxels also carrying varying resolutions, too.

Motokura, Kurihara, and the rest of the team felt each detail packed into the voxels helped make exploring layers more satisfying. It’s a complex, dynamic system that Nintendo strived to bring to life. DK’s destructible sandbox takes elements from Super Mario Odyssey and brings them to a new level, but achieving these goals was easier said than done.

Building a foundation on voxels while maintaining 60fps proved difficult, especially when the project was originally in development for the original Switch. It wasn’t until the technological advancements offered by the Switch 2 that the team was able to build DK and Pauline’s journey to the planet’s core with more freedom.

"There were times confusion permeated the team. There were even times when I wanted to say, 'Oh, banana,'" Motokura said via translator, quoting DK’s Bananza catchphrase. “Even in those times, we understood each other's ideas and continued forth, like when Donkey Kong gives a thumbs up.”

Donkey Kong Bananza launched exclusively for the Switch 2 July 17, 2025. Its DK Island and Emerald Rush DLC added new locations to dig through and mechanics to uncover when it launched for $19.99 in September. We gave the base game a 10/10 review upon its release, calling it “a truly groundbreaking 3D platformer, with satisfying movement, powerful abilities, impressive destructible environments, and clever challenges.”

Photos by Rebekah Valentine/IGN.

Michael Cripe is a freelance writer with IGN. He's best known for his work at sites like The Pitch, The Escapist, and OnlySP. Be sure to give him a follow on Bluesky (@mikecripe.bsky.social) and Twitter (@MikeCripe).

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Oscars 2026: How to Watch and Everything Else You Should Know

We're just a few days away from the 98th Academy Awards. Ahead of this year's Oscars celebrating 2025 in film, we're here to share how you can watch, plus break down the nominees, host, presenters and performers, and what's new for the 2026 ceremony.

Going into the show, Sinners leads the way with a record-breaking 16 nominations, beating the previously held 14-nomination record tie between All About Eve, Titanic, and La La Land. One Battle After Another takes second place with 13 nominations.

Read on below for everything else you need to know about the Oscars.

When are the Oscars?

The Oscars will take place on March 15, 2026, from the Dolby Theater in Los Angeles at the new time of 7pm ET/4pm PT/11pm GMT. The broadcast is expected to run for three hours, but you can almost certainly count on it going long.

How can I watch the Oscars?

The Oscars will be be televised on your local ABC station. It will also be streaming live on Hulu. (We're still a few years out from the Oscars on YouTube.) If you're interested in the pre-show arrivals and red carpet interviews, ABC's coverage will begin at 3:30pm ET/12:30pm PT and E!'s will kick off at 4pm ET/1pm PT.

Who is hosting the Oscars?

Conan O'Brien – who also starred in If I Had Legs I'd Kick You alongside Best Actress nominee Rose Byrne – is hosting the Oscars for the second year in a row. O'Brien was announced as the 2026 host two weeks after the 2025 Oscars, saying in a statement, "The only reason I’m hosting the Oscars next year is that I want to hear Adrien Brody finish his speech.” To refresh your memory, Brody dragged on for nearly six minutes accepting the award for Best Actor for his role in The Brutalist.

"There'll be some explosions, CGI will be used," O'Brien told ABC News about Round 2. "I see this second Oscars as an opportunity to take things up a notch," especially now that he's well-informed on crucial standards and practices, like always keeping an Oscar statuette upright.

What's new at the Oscars this year?

The Academy Awards are rolling out a new category for the first time since 2001's addition of Best Animated Feature Film: Achievement in Casting will get its debut after being announced in 2024. The award will go to a casting director, but the criteria for winning sounds unexpectedly more complicated than someone who can put together a list of top-notch actors. The first-ever nominees are:

• Nina Gold, Hamnet
• Jennifer Venditti, Marty Supreme
• Cassandra Kulukundis, One Battle after Another
• Gabriel Domingues, The Secret Agent
• Francine Maisler, Sinners

The next new category will come at the 2028 Oscars, when the Academy finally acknowledges stunts as the bone-breaking art form it is.

Who is presenting at the 2026 Oscars?

Presenters include: Will Arnett, Priyanka Chopra Jonas, Robert Downey Jr., Anne Hathaway, Paul Mescal, Gwyneth Paltrow, Chris Evans, Kumail Nanjiani, and Maya Rudolph. Last year's winners Adrien Brody, Kieran Culkin, Mikey Madison, and Zoe Saldaña, as well as 2025 nominee Demi Moore, are also among the group of presenters. Javier Bardem and Chase Infiniti, who starred respectively in F1 and One Battle After Another but did not receive individual nominations, will also present. (Infiniti's omission in the Supporting Actress race is considered one of the big snubs of this year's awards.)

Who is performing at the Oscars?

The telecast will include two major "moments" that the show producers are calling "more than just performances — they expand into cinematic tributes that celebrate the relationship between music and storytelling and why these films resonated so deeply with audiences around the world." These are "Golden" from KPop Demon Hunters and "I Lied to You" from Sinners, both nominated for Best Original Song this year. (The other nominated tracks — "Train Dreams” from Best Picture nominee Train Dreams, “Dear Me” from the documentary Diane Warren: Restless, and “Sweet Dreams of Joy” from the documentary Viva Verdi! — will not be performed live.)

The singing voices behind Huntr/x — Ejae, Audrey Nuna, and Rei Ami — will perform "Golden," accompanied by "a fusion of traditional Korean instrumentalists and dance, celebrating the folklore and cultural inspiration that anchors the story behind this animated blockbuster."

Sinners' breakout star Miles Caton and singer-songwriter Raphael Saadiq will perform "I Lied To You," officially described as exploring the "role music plays in the film’s storytelling for a cinematic live moment." (Hopefully that means it attempts to replicate the electric, glorious fever dream of the film's scene the song comes from.) Blues musicians Buddy Guy and Bobby Rush, rapper Shaboozey, ballet dancer Misty Copeland, and actresses Li Jun Li and Jayme Lawson will join, along with musicians Brittany Howard of the Alabama Shakes, Eric Gales, Alice Smith, and Christone “Kingfish” Ingram.

Josh Groban and the Los Angeles Master Chorale will also perform, we'll speculate during the In Memoriam segment.

What are this year's Oscars nominees?

Read on for the nominees in some of the top categories, but you can check out the full list of nominees here.

Best Picture:

• Bugonia
• F1
• Frankenstein
• Hamnet
• Marty Supreme
• One Battle after Another
• The Secret Agent
• Sentimental Value
• Sinners
• Train Dreams

Best Actor:

• Timothée Chalamet, Marty Supreme
• Leonardo DiCaprio, One Battle after Another
• Ethan Hawke, Blue Moon
• Michael B. Jordan, Sinners
• Wagner Moura, The Secret Agent

Best Actress:

• Jessie Buckley, Hamnet
• Rose Byrne, If I Had Legs I'd Kick You
• Kate Hudson, Song Sung Blue
• Renate Reinsve, Sentimental Value
• Emma Stone, Bugonia

Best Director:

• Chloé Zhao, Hamnet
• Josh Safdie, Marty Supreme
• Paul Thomas Anderson, One Battle after Another
• Joachim Trier, Sentimental Value
• Ryan Coogler, Sinners

Which nominees are expected to win?

Though the ballot is a lot of the same movies being celebrated in many categories, a clear winner hasn't pulled ahead in many of the key races, with a few exceptions. KPop Demon Hunters definitely has Best Animated Feature Film in the bag. Best Actress will probably go to Jessie Buckley as Shakespeare's grieving wife Agnes in Hamnet, despite the earned fervor around Rose Byrne's performance in If I Had Legs I'd Kick You. The screenplay awards will repesctively go to Ryan Coogler and Paul Thomas Anderson for Best Original and Best Adapted. Outside of that, other categories are a coin toss, usually between One Battle After Another and Sinners.

Though Timothée Chalamet was practically the presumptive winner in Best Actor as a ping pong hustler in Marty Supreme a few months ago, taking the early win at the Golden Globes, that stance has position has cooled; the SAG Award went to Michael B. Jordan for his twin brothers, Stack and Smoke, from Sinners. Another key win from the Actor Awards was Amy Madigan taking the trophy for Supporting Actress as Aunt Gladys in Weapons, which people have taken as an indicator of an impending Oscars win over Teyana Taylor's revolutionary Perfidia Beverly Hills in One Battle After Another.

What's the controversy this year?

There are two, kind of. First of all, this is the first year where AMPAS voters must attest to having actually seen all of the films they're voting on, a new rule imposed for the first time (!!) a few months after last year's awards. (Voters can log this after watching films through the Academy screening app, which would automatically track whether or not something has been played, or click a box that pledges they've seen it in a theater or by other means.)

The other one, closest to the ceremony and therefore the one that will live on in the Discourse up until the event, is the fact that Timothée Chalamet dissed opera and ballet, in the context of concern about the state of movie theaters.

"I admire people — and I've done it myself — who go on a talk show and say, ‘Hey, we've got to keep movie theaters alive, y'know, we've gotta keep this genre alive," he said during a Variety and CNN town Hall with his Interstellar co-star Matthew McConaughey. "And another part of me feels like if people want to see it, like Barbie, like Oppenheimer, they're going to go see it and go out of their way to be loud and proud about it. I don’t want to be working in ballet or opera or things where it’s like, ‘Hey! Keep this thing alive,’ even though no one cares about this anymore. All respect to the ballet and opera people out there. I just lost 14 cents in viewership. I just took shots for no reason.”

"That's not a shot, I hear what you're saying," McConaughey responded.

The video clip started going viral late last week, nearly two weeks after it was originally posted — after the window for Oscars voting had closed on March 5. It won't directly impact his chances, but it's enough to rile patrons and providers of the fine arts: Many institutions, including the Metropolitan Opera, the English National Opera, and the Royal Ballet and Opera, posted rebuttals on social media praising their artisans or making a case for him to come to a show. Plenty more have fired back, calling his take shades of "disrespectul". The comments made their way to The View and Saturday Night Live's Weekend Update, where Colin Jost quipped that Chalamet “made the comment on a press tour for his movie about... ping-pong.”

Adam Bankhurst is a writer for IGN. You can follow him on X/Twitter @AdamBankhurst, Instagram, and TikTok, and listen to his show, Talking Disney Magic.

Leanne Butkovic is an Editorial Project Manager at IGN, where they've also written about movies, TV, and games.

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Azure Latch Codes (March 2026)

Last updated on March 11, 2026 - Checked for new Azure Latch codes.

Want some codes for extra cash to spend on animations, styles, emotes, and more in Azure Latch? Or should that be Delay Latch? Anyway, we've got you covered. In this article, you'll find all the currently working codes for the game, so be quick to redeem them and bag that cash.

Working Azure Latch Codes (March 2026)

• QUIET - Rewards
• BROTHERNOAH - Rewards
• MYANIMEFANSMAN - Rewards
• SORRYFORDELAY - Rewards
• KIYORAUPDATE - Rewards

All the codes above have been tested as working at the time of submission. However, codes with unknown expiry dates may stop working at any time. Spotted a new code we haven't included or tried one only to find it's expired? Let us know by reporting them here.

All Expired Azure Latch Codes

These codes are now expired:

• almostkuronatime - $25,000
• waiterwaitermorenelisagichanges - $20,000
• happylatehalloween2025 - $20,000
• merrychristmas2025nov - $20,000
• MoreOnionRings - $20,000
• 11v11Comeback - $20,000
• RankedRelease - $20,000
• Oops - $20,000
• SleepingGenius
• GimmeOnionRings
• 11v11Preparation
• RightOnTheMoney
• ChemicalReaction
• Sorry4RandomShutdownAgain
• JumpAllMyCells
• PartTwoOfTwo
• StillHalfBaked
• NoMorePest
• MASTERYQUEST
• MetaGenius!
• TheGeniusOfAdaptability
• KunigamiRework!
• ThankYouForBeingPatient
• RevivalPatch
• sorry4rollback
• CompensationForTheShutdown
• ThankYouForStayingWithUs
• WeAppreciateYouAll
• SorryForTheBugs
• YukimiyaUpdate
• SorryForInconvenience
• WeeklyUpdate
• ThanksForBeingPatient
• FollowDastOnRoblox
• 100kInterested
• SorryForLongWait
• ChigiriUpdate
• FollowDCJToo
• FollowVoaj77
• TheMonster
• GAGAMARUPUNCH
• QOLbroQOL
• TheKing
• AMMISTHEOWNERNOTLEFTRIGHTTH
• DelayLatch
• Jakethesnake
• THXFORFOLLOWERS
• ACEEATER
• THXFOR2M
• RINRELEASE
• sorryfordelay
• RINSOONTRUSTME
• sorryforlatency
• SAEREWORK3TIME
• SorryForRollback

How to Redeem Azure Latch Codes

1. Before you can use Azure Latch codes, you'll need to be a part of the community, so load up Roblox and join the twi game group
2. Then jump into Azure Latch and find the Menu button at the bottom of the screen
3. In the Menu options, go to the far right tab to find Rewards
4. Enter the code and press Redeem to get that cash!

Why Isn't My Azure Latch Code Working?

Codes are often case-sensitive, so to avoid any errors, we'd recommend copying the codes directly from this article into the redemption bar in Azure Latch. We test them all before we upload them here to make sure they're valid for you.

If you have copied them from here, and they're still not working, it could be one of two things. You may have accidentally copied over an extra space, so be sure to check for that first. The other option is the code may have just expired.

How to Get More Azure Latch Codes

We check for codes daily, so you can visit this article to see when new Azure Latch codes are released. There's also a dedicated Discord Server, that you can visit to look for code announcements yourself.

What is Azure Latch in Roblox?

Whether you're a fan of anime or sports games, Azure Latch is likely to be a game you'll want to check out. The 5v5 football game is another Roblox experience that takes inspiration from the popular manga and anime series Blue Lock. For this one, however, you'll get super abilities that you can use to make those tackles, passes, and goal attempts a bit more exciting.

Lauren Harper is an Associate Guides Editor. She loves a variety of games but is especially fond of puzzles, horrors, and point-and-click adventures.

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WWE 2K26 Review

If it’s Wrestlemania season, that means it’s also time for a new WWE 2K game. Over the last few years, this series has been on its most impressive run to date, and WWE 2K26 is a solid enough next chapter in that story. I don’t regret the time I've spent running the ropes in this year’s ring, but with another milquetoast Showcase mode and the growing tendrils of monetization wrapping itself around the experience like an anaconda vise, it’s starting to feel like the golden age for 2K wrestling games might be coming to an end.

2K26 hasn’t learned many new moves since last year, mostly just tweaking existing base mechanics. The biggest slam to the system is an adjustment to stamina, adding a condition called “winded” to superstars who run out. While winded, your stamina wheel turns from yellow to purple, and you can no longer run or use reversals until it empties and goes back to normal. This adds more risk-reward to all of the offensive and defensive actions you do in the ring that cost stamina.

What we said about WWE 2K25

A couple of microtransaction-fueled missteps aside, WWE 2K25 is really the best wrestling game since… WWE 2K24, which was also pretty great. It looks fantastic, still feels good, and there’s a lot of it, including small but welcome updates like intergender matches or bigger updates like the new MyRise and Showcase modes. It’s an upscale wrestling buffet, if you will: It’s pretty scrumptious, there's a wide selection of dishes on the table, and you could spend an awful lot of time in the squared circle if you’re not careful. Speaking of, I need to get back to it. I have some more Showcase things to unlock, Universe is calling my name, and… well, you get the idea. - Will Borger, March 13, 2025

Score: 8

Read the full WWE 2K25 review.

It also creates a solution to the 2K series issue of how powerful the reversal system is (you are basically unstoppable if you’ve become the Tribal Chief of pressing one button on time, every time) by making it cost stamina to do and penalizing you for running your stamina into the red. However, it doesn’t address the problem of how the reversal prompts are unintuitive and sometimes at unpredictable points during a move’s animation, making picking the system up feel impossible without hours of ring time and muscle memory development. It also creates a new issue that penalizes players for getting good at the janky system in the first place. To play around this, you might opt to go for pins or submissions you normally wouldn't attempt in order to wait the debuff out. That is an interesting way to make matches mimic the real life pace of TV wrestling, but does feel like a violation of the aggressive spirit of a wrestling game. You win some, you lose some, I guess.

Other adjustments are nice to have but don’t change the flow or feel of matches significantly. Harkening back to the series’ pre-Visual Concepts days, collision physics have been changed slightly, so throws and bumps are less trapped in canned animation sequences and interact with objects around them. A body suplexed into the ropes will actually bounce off in a more appropriately reactive way instead of attempting to clip through them. Throw an opponent onto the ring stairs, and they’ll properly crunch around their hulking metal block. This doesn’t have any obvious mechanical advantages, you don’t do noticeably more damage to opponents if you drop them on a chair vs the mat. But it is entertaining and enhances the slapstick nature already inherent in any given match to sometimes Looney Tunes levels.

Some adjustments are nice, but don’t change the flow of matches significantly.

Another blast from the past are the additional match types added in 2K26: I Quit, Dumpster, Inferno, and Three Stages of Hell. That last one is essentially a gauntlet where you choose three different match stipulations and wrestle through them, two-out-of-three falls style. The Dumpster match is functionally no different than the Casket or Ambulance matches, where you have to weaken opponents enough to shove them in a box they don't want to be in. The Inferno match returns from the Smackdown vs Raw series with a more straight forward play path: Doing moves increases the temperature gauge, and once it's at max, you must expose the enemy to the flames to win. This was cool, but also isn’t that special once the new car smell has burned away.

I Quit is arguably the best of these new options, basically elaborating on the submission match, but instead of the normal mashing minigame, players that are being forced to say I Quit must pass a series of checks hitting the right spots on a gauge enough times to continue on. These spots get smaller as you take more damage, and opponents can add blockers to make the task that much harder, which they can earn the same way they earn finishers. This is a really clever idea, just complex enough to be engaging and tactical without being too much to deal with.

This year’s Showcase, themed around the highlights and lowlights of CM Punk’s two-pronged WWE career, was a disappointment. It suffers from most of the same problems that these modes always have, like the gaping holes in history that it has to ignore for corporate reasons, or the awkward ways it tries and fails to recreate major moments in real matches as gameplay moments. The former is a problem not just because of wrestler contract woes – Bryan Danielson won’t be on the playlist since he’s with a rival company these days – but also its wholesale refusal to engage at all with why CM Punk left WWE for over a decade. I'm sure it's a legal minefield and also a bit of a bummer to discuss some of those details for all parties involved, but they make no real attempt to address it at all, and it feels a little insulting to the intelligence after a while. There's also no mention of CM Punk’s most infamous/influential moment, when he went off script during the now legendary “Pipe Bomb” promo, which seems like the kind of oversight that’s punishable by going one on one with The Undertaker.

The 10+ year gap he’s had in his career is already a spectre that really haunts this mode, as it makes the pickings for memorable moments to relive slim. They try to address this with a little kayfabe, Punk engaging in a metanarrative between matches to use the “Slingshot Technology” that Showcase employs to meld matches and real footage as a sort of time machine. That allows him to both undo some losses in his own career, embody Bret Hart to prevent the Montreal Screwjob, and indulge himself in a bunch of “what if” dream matches. These make up half of the Showcase and definitely feel more like busy work than cool experiences, even though they are right in line with the toybox nature of wrestling games to begin with.

Showcase suffers from most of the same problems these modes always have.

This year’s MyRise follows The Archetype, a former top star returning from a long layoff to try to get their groove back. It’s an more streamlined story overall, with fewer big beats across its six chapters but some more consequential decisions to make in each, usually to change your alignment from heroic fan favorite to callous villain (and possibly back again). The plot of The Archetype’s journey has the kinds of twists and turns you might expect from a main character on any given stretch of episodes of the TV shows, filled with overcoming impossible odds, having victory snatched from you though dastardly betrayals, and so on. The writing and voice acting throughout is consistent for the series, which is to say largely mediocre but not offensively so.

Though it’s shorter than past MyRise’s, grinding largely meaningless matches to get from plot point to plot point still feels like wasted time. The process is more transparent than last year, now instead of just doing a bunch of matches until they say you can move on, you have a goal to earn 12 stars in however many matches it takes you to do so (you can earn up to five per match). These help build your attribute points to make your superstar stronger, but no good story-based attempt is made to make these matches feel like anything other than homework. Speaking of story, the adherence to the regular WWE storytelling formula is nice but I really missed the weird and silly stuff I often associated with this mode. Last year's game featured resident wrestling jester R-Truth unlocking the secrets of traveling the multiverse. In games passed, your wrestler might have a whole side quest based around finding a cursed amulet that gave you wrestling demon powers.

These sorts of things seem relegated to The Island, the weird, Street Fighter World Tour-esque multiplayer hub world that lets players create their own wrestlers and participate in open world RPG-style quests while also competing with each other on leaderboards, which is at least a more coherent game mode out of the gate this time. It embraces and builds on the fantastical nature of last year’s version, leaning into mysterious powers of The Island of Relevancy, now being divided up by three different factions all fighting to gain its magical powers. This sort of pro wrestling RPG nonsense is something that I would be all over on paper, but the original Island’s poor writing and janky pacing put me off.

This year makes an attempt to address that. Having a better map to navigate and being fully voiced are steps in the right direction, but the stories being told are just as bad and boring. Your characters start with minimal cosmetic options and way more stats to manage than in any other mode, all because of the profit incentive inherent in this mode, which requires you to spend a lot of time grinding in-game experience to unlock options or level up while also enticing you to tap out and just buy yourself a shortcut with real money. You could ignore the cosmetics, sure, but if you want to get anywhere on the multiplayer leaderboards without spending hours grinding, I don’t see how it's possible without opening your wallet. This dawned on me pretty early, and I haven’t been back since.

Battle Passes make their debut in 2K26, and they leave a lot to be desired. There is a lot to earn split between free and premium pass tracks. Many of the free rewards are arenas, superstars, championships, and cosmetics you would have usually bought from an in-game store with free currency in previous games (or would have just been available out of the gate), while the premium track features a lot of MyFaction related goodies and a handful of extra wrestlers, with this first season themed around the stars of AAA. These replace the wrestler DLC drops of old, and I can see them being a frustrating replacement – not simply because it means you’ll need to grind matches in order to unlock things you’d just buy previously, but also because unlocking new tiers seems to take a lot of work. I spent around 25 hours between random exhibition matches, finishing Showcase mode, one full playthrough of MyRise, and a couple of hours on The Island, and I’ve only made it to tier 14 of 40. At the end of the track are unlockables, like what would have been the late Bray Wyatt’s last costume and a really cool move that I would have loved to give to a custom wrestler, but I fear I simply don’t have the endurance for that grind, or the patience to accept that I even have to.

Some of the more niche modes like Universe and MyGm are still good, with small improvements that don’t shake things up too dramatically but are certainly nice to have. You can now draft rosters against a computer controlled GM in Universe mode, and can do so really whenever you want, adding a dynamic way to shake up your rosters if things are starting to get stale. MyGM expands seasons to 50 weeks (and adds more PLEs to compensate), more match types, etc. The key change I found really spiced all this up the most was that you could book intergender matches and feuds, as well as book wrestlers in matches and promos on the same card. That means nothing to people who don’t care about this, but GM heads know that it opens up a lot of new options for promoting matches and maximizing your potential for fan and money gains from week to week. Great little shining additions to modes that are hiding away in corners.

from IGN Video Games https://ift.tt/zx3P0uk
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