It is the present day and young Mr James Bond is having a horrible time in Iceland. The dewy-eyed SAS rookie's transport chopper has exploded, all his friends are face-down in the basalt sand, and a cosmopolitan band of armed men seem alarmingly determined to make sure none of them get back up. He's hypothermic, bleeding, and utterly ignorant as to who his enemies are and why they want him dead.

None of which matters, because even at a tender 25-or-so, he's James Bond, the most stalwart defender of His/Her (delete as appropriate) Majesty's interests the English public school system has ever produced. He's beating up the baddies, he's quippin', he's charming the feminine voice who took over his earpiece and claims to be from MI6. God, he's cool.

… Is what, I think, IO is going for with 007 First Light, which releases on May 27 and with which I got a few hours of hands-on time at a recent event in London. Is that what it achieves? Ah, well, that's dicier.

James Bond Jr

With all the usual caveats about preview events—being airdropped into a series of disconnected levels is not the best or most natural way to get to grips with a game—I did not walk away from my time with First Light feeling like I had played the next game from the studio which made the bonafide all-timer Hitman: World of Assassination. I felt like I had played a modest, sometimes archaic third-person action game with some neat but underdeveloped ideas. And a very annoying protagonist.

My time with First Light took me through three levels: the aforementioned introductory romp in Iceland, which functioned more or less as a tutorial; a second, more gadget-focused training level during Bond's first days as a rookie spy; and one full-fat level spread across stealth, infiltration, combat, a boss fight, and a vehicle sequence.

Rasmus Poulsen, First Light's franchise art director, calls the game a "more orchestrated experience" compared to IO's Hitman games. You aren't being dropped into a big clockwork sandbox and left to poke at it however you like; you're being shuttled between different modes of gameplay. A lite sandbox leads to a stealth section which leads to a gunfight which leads to a vehicle chase. A more traditional, cinematic experience than IO's most famous games.

"They go from large social arenas where you can manipulate and turn all these things to a more concentrated stealth bit… and then into, let's say, a linear chase or an action arena with all guns blazing. So in many respects, this makes it feel like a movie," says Poulsen.

Let's focus on that last level I played, then, which feels most representative of the rhythm IO is going for. Bond's on the hunt—evildoers are doing evil at a gala in Central London. All Britain's haute-monde is there: ministers, CEOs, hobnobbing journos. Bond has to blend in, sniff about for a way into the restricted security area, and find his man.

And he has various options to do that. It's a sandbox! Of a sort! A kind of miniature British redux of Hitman's Paris level, and I'll give IO this—the studio has clearly put a lot of thought into ensuring First Light's levels have multiple routes. Sometimes they manifest as, uh, literal routes: high and low paths, vents to duck into, a range of different triggerable distractions scattered about the level, and in sandbox sections they also appear in the form of different, Hitman-style mission stories you can overhear and pursue.

I ended up going after two simultaneously: trying to nab the press pass of a no-show journalist I overheard some PRs complaining about, and posing as a member of a government guest's security team, all to purloin the right keycards to get me into the soiree's restricted upper sections.

But it's a limited sandbox. For one thing, it's literally smaller—just one part of a level which also consists of cinematic combat and stealth sections. But you also have less room to interact with it. It might recall Hitman's Paris, but Bond's tools are more limited than 47's. The gadgets I had allowed me to fire an emetic dart at people to get them out of the way or interfere with electronic devices to create distractions. I could not, as Agent 47 might have been able to, create a distraction by obliterating half the shadow cabinet with an explosive duck, or draw a gun and start firing.

I never felt like I had quite the room to get creative that I do in a Hitman game, a feeling that's a little at odds with a series so defined by its hero's many wonderful and creative toys. I was snuffling about to uncover paths IO had laid out in advance, rather than combining my exotic tools to create paths myself.

An example: at one point I screwed up a mission story that would let me get a security keycard by attempting to bluff a guard rather than intimidating him, which left him staring directly at the key I was trying to snatch. I tried to use Bond's other tools to make up for the error, thwip'ing a dart into the guard's throat to distract him with a bout of vomiting, but he was immune. What I should have done, I found later, is gone down the semi-hidden path right near him that IO had put there precisely for people who made the mistake I did. Less sandbox, more multiple railways you can shunt between at will.

Those restrictions are unavoidable to an extent—007 is meant to be a good guy, after all. "He operates under a set of rules," points out Poulsen, "which means that he can't just explode an entire room full of innocents—that would be complete madness and feel terrible for the player.

"When you do a simulator," says Poulsen, "the simulation is the attraction. Here, the spectacle and the ride and the emotion is the attraction, right?"

Put up your dukes

Once I'd obtained my keycard, I was off upstairs and out of the sandbox. Now was the time of stealth. I was sneaking between offices, ducking behind bookshelves, and using my Watch_Dogs-style gadget view to highlight and trigger devices to lure guards out of my path.

Which might sound quite a lot like the stealth sections of other videogames you've played in your life. You are not wrong. 007's stealth, in what I saw of it, felt pretty underwhelming. Your enemies are dumb as a bag of hammers, at least on the standard difficulty I was playing on, and your means of engaging with them are restricted. You can knock them out from behind, distract them (including with your ever-trusty emetic darts), and sometimes use your gadget-view to turn objects in the world into traps.

Egregiously, I could not move my enemies once they fell unconscious, which felt so remarkably archaic in a 2026 videogame that I wondered if it was a bug. Fortunately, like I said, they're all profoundly inattentive. You can do really quite noisy takedowns, or even have full-on one-vs-three fistfights mere feet away from enemies who will remain blissfully ignorant the whole time. At one point I smashed a guard's head onto a desk and through a flower vase; his buddy on the other side of the room just kept staring at his monitor while the game UI congratulated me on containing the situation.

It's almost absurd enough to be funny, but as Poulsen told me when I spoke to him: "Many people in the [Hitman] universe are deadpan, which makes the absurdity quite humorous. For Bond, we have a world that is quite serious." When you're able to have a massive punch-up that goes completely undetected by other people in the same room? That seriousness is undermined a little.

Anyway, you will have fistfights. Elements of First Light's control scheme are remarkably squirrelly, and my particular nemesis is its "Dash to cover" button. On the Iceland level, this is presented almost as a get out of jail free card: tab RB to have Bond quickly dip out of sight and behind the nearest obvious cover—ideal for when you notice an enemy detection meter start filling up.

In my experience, it actually functions as a button that makes Bond sprint across half the room like he's trying to lay claim to a dropped five-pound note, completely disregarding nearby cover and, more often than not, ending up thoroughly spotted in the process.

That's not disastrous. The game never autofailed me for getting detected, and it sometimes is easier to just start throwing punches than it is to pick your way through a level. I'll say this for First Light: the melee combat actually feels good. It's weighty and embodied, and Bond will make use of bits of the environment contextually in ways that are actually kind of impressive, from a "Oh wow they actually animated that" perspective.

It's not complex—you hit the parry button when the enemies flash yellow, you've done this dance before—but I did enjoy repeatedly punching people in the face.

Shooting them? Less so. First Light makes great hay of Bond not being allowed to go weapons-free whenever he likes. Unless someone is trying to kill him, he can't kill them, but when they are trying to kill him, the game goes into License to Kill mode, meaning you can whip out guns and start blasting. But the guns feel a lot less well-realised than the fistfights. They're light and insipid in a way that suggests they aren't really the main course of what the game's trying to serve you.

Plus, the encounters I used them in felt like they could have been torn from most any third-person shooter of the last 20 years. You're popping headshots as enemies rise from cover, shooting explosive barrels when they clump around them, and sometimes popping multiple headshots to take down the odd heavily armoured enemy.

Oh, and when you're not punching or shooting, you'll also find yourself throwing a lot of stuff. Almost anything left lying around—folders, teacups, desk decorations—can be quickly grabbed and chucked at an enemy to put them in a takedown-able stun state. Which is fun!

Less fun: Bond will quip endlessly as you do this, inviting enemies to tea as he rams a cup in their face and whatnot. Some may find this charming: classic roguish and cavalier Bond. I felt like I was being forced to spend time with all the moneyed dickheads I tried to avoid at uni.

Bossman

The highlight of my demo was a part I didn't expect: its concluding bossfight. I have signed a thick sheaf of digital papers which mean I am limited in what I can tell you about this fight's narrative content, but fortunately it's the mechanics of it that I enjoyed.

In short: Arkham City's Mr Freeze fight is back, baby. Given its focus on creating a cinematic, movie-like experience with 007 First Light, I half-expected IO to conclude my demo with a Metal-Gear-style filmic punch-up. Instead, I got a stealth arena that required me to do three bouts of damage to my opponent by using gadgets and the environment to my advantage. Blind him with a floodlight and do a takedown, lure him into traps, that kind of thing.

It felt engaging and creative in a way that my previous 30 minutes of punching out half of London had not. And then, well, it ended, and I was back to gunfights and fistfights and a finishing sequence in which I plowed a garbage truck through a lot of Kensington—an Uncharted-style vehicle sequence where I didn't feel in control of much of anything.

Which might be symbolic of how I came away feeling about 007 First Light in general. On the surface, Bond might seem a natural fit for IO: all glitz and gadgets that make it feel like barely a skip away from the world of Hitman. But what I saw had me feeling that the studio has not leaned into its strengths, trading the absurd clockwork worlds of Agent 47 for a more tightly choreographed, linear, and "cinematic" game that IO has never been all that good at. The last time it tried was Hitman: Absolution. We know how that worked out.

An Xbox developer made a big whoopsie and accidentally gave players a free (but broken) version of the game that led to OG Fallout, but rather than snatching the lucky (but, again, botched) freebie away from gamers, the studio is simply giving people a way to play it properly.

"A couple weeks ago an error made Wasteland Remastered free on the Microsoft/Xbox Store, but what people snagged before we fixed the glitch can't actually be played," developer inXile Entertainment writes on social media. "So, we're giving them one that can."

The developer says players who were lucky enough to redeem Wasteland Remastered while it was temporarily available for free will soon have the non-working version of the game removed from their libraries automatically. Those same players should have a new, unbroken digital copy of Wasteland Remastered waiting for them in their Xbox accounts.

For those unsure of where to find the game, inXile Entertainment points people to the 'Offers & Credits' section of the Xbox page. "Hope you enjoy and see you in the Wasteland."

And for those not in the know, Wasteland is a top-down old-school role-playing game set in a very scrappy, post-apocalyptic, post-nuclear version of America. Sound familiar? Well, the game was first developed by Interplay Productions before the storied company used it as a basis to then make the first Fallout.

As inXile says, Wasteland is essentially "the grand pappy of post-apoc." It was Fallout before Fallout was a thing.

Interplay co-founder Brian Fargo then opened inXile Entertainment as an independent developer many years later and eventually wrangled the ownership of the Wasteland franchise away from Electronic Arts, leading to two more pretty excellent entries in the series. The studio and the rights to Wasteland were acquired by Xbox in 2018, shortly before Xbox bought the actual Fallout IP. The more things change...

InXile Entertainment's now working on a time-bending, steampunk-ish first-person game called Clockwork Revolution, which is shaping up to be one of the more exciting new games on the horizon.

Clockwork Revolution could be the most expressive Xbox RPG in years, with inXile aiming to "bring the level of reactivity from our isometric titles into something first-person."

Let's be real for a second: repairing weapons in games is not a fun activity. In fact, the only time I remember ever enjoying upkeeping my shooters was in Red Dead Redemption 2, when I got to lather them with gun oil and make them all nice and shiny. Is repairing weapons in Arc Raiders enjoyable? No, of course not—it's effectively admin.

It's ultimately just a number that goes up and down, but as our very own Evan Lahti argued to me, a necessary part of expending the resources we accumulate in a loot-centric game.

Well, Embark obviously felt that we weren't expending enough, because in the most recent Riven Tides update, it massively nerfed weapon durability with the following statement:

"The weapon economy has increasingly started looking more and more unbalanced, where players engaging in heavy PVP have to make a lot of difficult decisions around their weapons while the most friendly players have ended up in a chronic state of weapon accumulation. We want to balance this out so that all players are challenged by weapon attrition, as well as introducing new ways to combat it."

The key changes from the patch notes are:

• Common, Uncommon, and Rare weapons have increased durability loss per shot
• Durability on weapons you find outside locked rooms is reduced

There are positives, too, such as the fact that we now regain 25% weapon durability on upgrading one (something I've long wanted), and durability loss on weapons acquired from downed raiders is reduced.

It's not a bad idea in principle. Arc Raiders is a game about scrappy daredevils cobbling together guns from trash they find out in the world—it makes sense they would break quickly, but for me, the problem with these changes is threefold.

First off, is a "chronic state of weapon accumulation" really an issue? At this stage people have hundreds and hundreds of hours in the game (200 for me), but I feel like Embark abdicated any right to worry about what people hoard in their stashes when it made resets optional. Usually in a game like this, a forced reset would level the playing field, emptying those vaults, but it's way too late in the day to suddenly decide you want to make a half-hearted attempt to clear out said vaults.

If someone wants to keep 100 Bobcats in their stash, more power to them. Weren't we all just arguing last year about white weapons being way too powerful and people with great gear constantly getting ratted by Kettle and Stitcher-wielding PvPers? Rarer weapons have rarely felt worth it in the past, and it'll definitely put a damper on getting lucky and finding one when its durability on spawn is likely decreased now.

I'm also not really sure what the patch notes mean when they say "introducing new ways to combat it". What new ways? Upgrading a gun to repair it isn't any less resource-intensive than just repairing it. As far as I can see, we've been given no tools to mitigate durability loss.

If the concept is "crappy guns break faster", why not reduce durability loss on upgraded guns but make those upgrades cost a little more? That would be a sensible balance of investment and risk, and would incentivise players to upgrade their weapons versus using the basics. This would also lead to more valuable loot in the PvP pool. Why not add attachments that reduce durability burn rate as well, seeing as we have attachments that increase it and these will be a no-go for most players after these changes.

Why not make weapon durability provide interesting consequences, too? When you're on low durability, say, maybe your weapon can potentially jam, Far Cry 2 style? I genuinely think Embark has gone about these tweaks in such a confusing way that seems to incentivise PvP more than anything else. But ultimately, when I'm repairing my Anvil after every single outing, I'm not thinking "Yay, this is so much fun," I'm thinking, "Okay, so I have to pay a toll every run now".

Matt Firor has been in the MMO business since 2001, the days of Dark Age of Camelot, and ran The Elder Scrolls Online developer ZeniMax Online Studios until 2025. Firor resigned in response to the cancellation of in-development MMO Blackbird and the mass layoffs that followed.

Firor still plays The Elder Scrolls Online in secret, he told MinnMax in a wide-ranging interview, but his current obsession appears to be Crimson Desert—not an MMO, but certainly designed like one.

"It's fantastic," Firor told MinnMax's Ben Hanson. "For those game developers listening, or people who want to be game developers, the online tech side of MMOs is never discussed and it should be because it's usually the hardest part of the project." And that's the part Pearl Abyss was able to skip.

"Being able to make a singleplayer MMO is almost like cheating to me," Firor joked. "Why didn't anyone think of this before?"

For Pearl Abyss, though, it was almost accidental. Crimson Desert was originally conceived of as a prequel to MMO Black Desert Online, and it was going to be another MMO. It then underwent a slew of changes during development—contributing to a pretty haphazard feel—which included a pivot to pure singleplayer. The ghost of the MMO it was going to be is still very much present, though.

Firor, whose game design credits go all the way back to the '90s, said it reminds him of "the old days of gaming, where there's not a lot of hand-holding and not a lot of written material and nobody knows what's going on". He's been trying to play it blind, without looking anything up online.

"I still don't know what I'm doing," he said, "but I'm having so much fun. I've trained like 15 horses, but they all seem to be the same." The true Crimson Desert experience.

Desert Warrior, an action film starring Marvel's Anthony Mackie, is shaping up to be not just one of the worst box office flops of the year, but of all time.

The film, set in 7th century Arabia, follows Mackie's bandit on a mission to help a princess resist a villainous emperor.

Desert Warrior boasts a reported $150 million budget and was produced in Saudi Arabia. Rupert Wyatt directs (according to a report from Deadline, which has a deep dive on apparent behind the scenes issues, Wyatt exited then re-joined the film "amid creative fissures"). The film actually wrapped filming in 2022, but didn't have its debut at Zurich Film Festival until September 2025. It was released in the US on April 24 and distributed by Vertical.

So far, according to Box Office Mojo the film has grossed just $517,508 worldwide. Against its budget, that's a loss of approximately $149 million. That puts the film among some of the biggest flops in history (H/T Discussing Film).

The film hasn't performed well with critics, either, scoring just 25% on Rotten Tomatoes. "The film was shot five years ago and is only reaching theaters now, but it's likely to be swept away as quickly as desert sands," says The Hollywood Reporter, while Screen Rant's review reads: "Though no disaster, Desert Warrior is probably the last thing its producers wanted from their blockbuster spend: a mostly boring, mostly forgettable movie."

It's not all negative, though, with The New York Times writing: "Rather than extend the epic sweep of this picture into the cosmic ineffable, he [Wyatt] just wants the viewer bouncing along and rooting for its female hero. And the film succeeds admirably in this respect."

Along with Mackie, the film stars Aiysha Hart as Princess Hind, Ben Kingsley as Emperor Kisra II, and Sharlto Copley as Jalabzeen.

You'll soon be able to see Mackie suited up as Captain America once again in the upcoming Avengers: Doomsday, which lands this December 18. In the meantime, check out our guide to all the upcoming Marvel movies and shows.