Ethan Gach

The Messy Princess Management Game I’m Still Playing Anyway

From the moment I saw NIS America’s The Princess Guide I was intrigued. The screenshots barely made any sense, but they looked gorgeous. Crisp, bold black lines, vibrant colors, and tons of incomprehensible but delicately arranged icons. After a few hours of actually playing the game, I barely understand it any better, but I feel…

PAX East has begun and Kotaku is here to check out the giant selection of indie games present and the best convention snack spread on the East coast. If you spot us (me) give a shout!

In Fallout 76‘s Brutal New Survival Mode, You’re Either Level 100 Or Dead Meat

Yesterday’s new Fallout 76 patch added a new mode called Survival, which is currently in beta. It’s separate from the main game, which has now been retitled Adventure, though players can still explore it using existing characters—which they’ll definitely want to do if they don’t want to get torn to shreds. I made this exact…

Star Wars: Battlefront II’s New Mode Is Fun, When It Works

Yesterday, Star Wars: Battlefront II finally received its long-awaited new game mode, Capital Supremacy. It offers a large-scale battle set in the Clone Wars era modeled after the original 2005 Battlefront II’s Conquest mode. While it can be exciting to play, it’s currently held back by matchmaking issues and the fact that there’s only one…

Enter The Gungeon’s final update, “A Farewell to Arms,” will arrive April 5 on PC, Xbox One, PS4, and Switch. It’ll add new weapons, items, another secret boss room, and two extra characters, the Paradox and the Gunslinger, perfect reasons to revisit one of this generation’s best roguelikes.

Anthem’s New Update Adds More Loot And More Bugs

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. Anthem gets a new update. The changes in the new update all look promising. Then, upon closer inspection, not all of the improvements are working as intended, and a few things that had previously been fixed are now busted again. Anthem’s been there before and after today’s…

Assassin’s Creed Odyssey Sword From E3 2018 Finally Added To Game

Five months after the release of Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, a legendary sword first teased during an E3 demo is now finally in the game. An update out today adds a new quest line called “A Friend Worth Dying For,” the reward for which is the serpent-headed kopis-style blade players have long been awaiting. YouTuber JorRaptor…

On the first episode of its new web series, ID@Xbox Game Pass, Microsoft announced that Killer Queen Black, Outer Wilds, and Blazing Chrome will all be available on Game Pass the dame day they launch. All of them are due to release sometime before the end of 2019. 

New Sci-Fi Shooter Generation Zero Is A Let Down

I expected Avalanche Studios’ new sci-fi sandbox shooter to win me over immediately. Set in Sweden in the ’80s after mysterious circumstances cause the nation’s robotic defense force to go haywire, Generation Zero’s setup seemed algorithmically designed to appeal directly to me. Unfortunately, it was all downhill from there. In the few hours I’ve spent…

Anthem Players Have Turned Avoiding Bad Loot Into A Game

Anthem’s most dedicated players spend almost as much time complaining about the lack of loot as they do grinding for it, so why are they now avoiding so many of the game’s shiny objects? Because most of them are useless junk that isn’t worth dealing with. The game limits the amount of loot players can…

Smash Players Are Begging Nintendo To Fix Donkey Kong’s Giant Punch

Donkey Kong is stronger than ever in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, but there are still two big glitches holding the super heavyweight fighter back from reaching his true potential. His fans are desperate for Nintendo to set things right. For a couple months now, players have been getting used to the latest version of Donkey…

Dota 2 Now Lets You Bet In-Game Currency On Pro Tournaments

This week Valve rolled out a new smartphone companion app for Dota 2 that makes it easier for fans to keep track of big tournaments, follow the progress of their favorite teams, and get access to in-game stats in real-time. But that’s not all: the app also lets players gamble. Not with real world money,…

Anthem, One Month Later

It’s been one month since Anthem released, though it feels like a lot longer. So much has happened: a lot of it bad, but also some of it good. Despite all of the game’s issues, it has a small but solid foundation for BioWare to build on. There are also a lot of frustrating things…

Sony is launching a new PlayStation video series called State of Play, the first episode of which is set to air March 25 at 5:00 p.m. on Twitch and YouTube. There will be trailers, gameplay footage, and new game announcements, making it sound an awful lot like a Nintendo Direct.

Seemingly Unbreakable Getting Over It World Record Turns Out To Be A Fake

In Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy, a man in a pot tries to climb a mountain with a sledgehammer. A Chinese speedrunner named Ccfst recently seemed to help that man climb the mountain faster than anyone before him, setting a new world record that struck some as impossible. The skeptics were right. Over the…

Nintendo Reveals The 10 Current Best-Selling Indie Games On Switch

Indie games make up a crucial and vibrant part of the Switch’s great library of games, as evidenced by yesterday’s Nindies showcase. At the Game Developers Conference event today, Nintendo shared which indie games have sold best on Switch up until now. While many of them are familiar faces, like Stardew Valley, a few new…

The super-twitchy, theory-crafting rich roguelike Wizard of Legend got a massive free update on every platform today. There’s a new Sky Palace stage, a new Council of Magic wizard, a bunch of new enemies, relics, and arcana, and an endless mode. The full patch notes are available here

What We Know And Don’t Know About Google’s New Gaming Platform Stadia

Google shared a lot of information about it’s new video game streaming platform at yesterday’s GDC presentation, and we’ve learned even more about the technology through interviews, like the one Kotaku had with Stadia boss Phil Harrison on Splitscreen. But there’s still a lot we don’t know. Google has not said exactly when it comes,…

Heroes of the Storm is ditching paid loot boxes. Announced in yesterday’s patch notes for the latest update, starting March 25, players will no longer be able to use Gems, the game’s premium currency, to buy loot chests. Instead, they’ll have to either earn them by playing or spending currency earned in-game.

Halo: Reach Will Bring Back Customizable Armor Sets When It Comes To PC

Halo community director Brian Jarrard said in an AMA on Reddit today that players’ existing progress from Halo: The Master Chief Collection on Xbox One—including all stats, achievements, Forged maps, and game variants—will carry over to the upcoming PC version. He also said that while nothing is guaranteed, the studio is exploring options for adding…