Crime 101 opens in theaters on Feb. 13.

A few minutes in to Crime 101, with the streets of Los Angeles whipping by, a tense, thudding soundtrack gnawing at you while carefully laid plans are set up with unassuming close-ups only to be paid off in full-circle moments, you might start to think that you’ve seen this movie before. If you find yourself enjoying the cross-cut montage of the main characters crossing paths on the 101 and the evocative LA-at-night atmosphere, you wouldn’t be entirely wrong in feeling a little deja vu.

Like an entry level college course from which the film takes its name, Crime 101 is proficient in all the right elements of a heist movie. Director Bart Layton and the stacked cast led by Chris Hemsworth, Mark Ruffalo and Halle Berry do what they can to take some chances around the periphery, veering from the formula in a few interesting ways. But like a high-end thief who strays from his MO, the movie ultimately pays for it in the end.

Crime 101 doesn’t actively do anything bad. In fact, the film tries to do a handful of interesting things, but only does each of them half as well as it could have with a little more focus. The pull of familiar heist movie tropes, the cat and mouse of Heat or the “one last score and I’m out” of… well, Heat again, proves too strong and too thoroughly reproduced in Crime 101 for the variations to comfortably fold in. It all adds up to a pretty standard heist flick featuring some flourishes to the formula that feel more out of place than like a creative riff on the genre.

For example, Chris Hemsworth’s Mike Davis is an awkward, almost cripplingly shy man who, at times, seems to be neurodivergent. It’s definitely a departure from Thor or any number of the comedic supporting roles he’s shone in over the years. He’s a charismatic presence on screen no matter who he’s playing and his performance here works in the moments where he struggles to connect with a would-be love interest or when he scrubs himself down before a job to avoid leaving DNA evidence behind. However, the characterization gets a little lost when he shows no compunction about car chases or shaking down insurance executives.

Mark Ruffalo’s Detective Lubesnick and Halle Berry’s broker Sharon, even Hemsworth’s thief, all suffer under the unjust treatment of awful bosses and the same dead-end sense of futility. Both Sharon and Detective Lubesnick wear the bitterness well, but are dismissed by their superiors in ways that are equally frustrating and formulaic. The trio also share a clarity as to who the real villains are in their world, leading to no small amount of Robin Hood style class warfare, with the film dipping a toe into a thread of wealthy white people buying and hoarding Black and Native American art while stopping short of a proper eat-the-rich kind of theme.

The real problem is none of this is allowed to be what the movie is “about” because Crime 101 is so determined to fall in line with the crime thriller genre that the flourishes feel more like bugs than features.

On the upside however, Barry Keoghan is an energetic little blast of a character. His version of the dangerous wild card thrown into the mix brings a rabid energy to the proceedings. He’s desperate to prove himself, bouncing back and forth between a skilled criminal and a clear psychopath.

Nick Nolte (now with 100% more gravelly-voice) does his thing as the elderly fence / father figure to Mike, but doesn’t get much else to play with outside of what the elderly fence / father figures usually get to do in movies like this.

Frankly, one of the real highlights is a one-and-a-half scene cameo. Jennifer Jason Leigh, in her screentime with Mark Ruffalo, helps make a tragic scene grounded and hilarious as an argument erupts about how much of a “beach guy” Lubesnick may or may not be. As far as scene partners go, they’re a pair I’d love to see more of.

By the end of the movie, though, the scales are tipped toward familiar crime movie tropes as opposed to the variations on the pattern. There are interesting ideas at play throughout the film that get swapped out like one getaway car for another in service of a plot that’s less compelling than any one of them.

Ultimately, there really isn’t anything wrong with Crime 101. That might be its biggest problem, though.

Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie is in select theaters now.

Half the fun of watching guerrilla productions like Jackass or Borat is the thrill of a flimsy artifice couching publicity stunts as if they’ve been pulled off “for real.” The camera, visible or otherwise, follows eager protagonists who ensnare an unsuspecting public into infantile shenanigans – a tradition dating back to the 1948 debut of TV prank show, Candid Camera. In the most technical sense, Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie exists in that same vein, making it a delight to watch with an audience. However, it’s also a time-travel movie incorporating footage from earlier versions of the concept, forcing the story to twist around itself with head-spinning proficiency, leading to one of the most absurd, laugh-out-loud comedy films in years.

How exactly do you employ a sci-fi conceit while blurring the lines between real and unreal in a mockumentary where messing with actual people is the point? If you’re Canadian comedians Matt Johnson and Jay McCaroll, who play fictional avatars of themselves and enact hare-brained plans to get hired at a music venue, well…you just do. The result, born from the duo’s against-all-odds creative ethos, is a jaw-dropping blast that constantly raises the same core question as Alfonso Cuarón’s 3D space scorcher, Gravity: “How the hell did they make this?”

For the uninitiated: The legacy sequel, directed by BlackBerry director (and Matt and Mara actor) Johnson, follows his and McCaroll’s short-lived Viceland TV show from 2017-2018, Nirvanna the Band the Show, itself a sequel to their independent web series Nirvanna the Band, which ran from 2007 to 2009. You don’t need to have seen either one to watch the new movie, since it opens with footage they shot on cheap handycams in 2008, introducing us to the duo’s core dynamic: A hyperactive, fedora-sporting Johnson ropes the more laid-back McCaroll into trying to score a music gig at Toronto bar & restaurant the Rivoli under the copyright-skirting moniker, “Nirvanna the Band.” This is despite them never having actually written a song, or even contacted the venue’s management. After a mini-episode’s worth of buffoonery, the film skips forward to 2025 and finds the makeshift musicians in a state of arrested development. Johnson – who behaves largely the same, but has put on some weight – is still trying to convince a now-haggard McCaroll that his next plan will actually work, at the risk of a potential creative schism.

This (re)introduction to the characters also serves to convince new viewers to stick around for the ride. It’s hard not to, when Johnson’s latest ploy involves the publicity stunt of parachuting off Toronto’s iconic, nearly 2,000-foot-tall CN Tower, a scheme whose absurd logistics are funny enough until, shockingly, we actually see Johnson and McCaroll con their way up to the top of the structure for real. This dizzying feat – shot by off-screen comrades with hidden HD cameras – doesn’t go exactly as planned (in reality or in the fiction), but it’s pulled off with enough panache that any computer-generated seams are completely invisible, buying loads of goodwill from anyone who might still need convincing.

Nearly 20 years into trying and failing to play at the Rivoli, McCaroll is at the end of his rope. However, Johnson’s ultimate, galaxy-brained ploy is yet to come – traveling to the year 2008 by turning the pair’s RV into a Back to the Future-style time machine fueled by a long-defunct Canadian novelty drink. Before they know it, the duo finds themselves in an earlier version of downtown Toronto populated by Goth fashion, billboards for The Dark Knight, and – most impressively of all – younger, wide-eyed versions of themselves, accomplished through a combination of body doubles, ingeniously-edited archival footage, and meticulously recreated sets. The scenes where the older and younger pairings almost come into contact, combining old and new footage shot nearly two decades apart and skillfully spliced together, are a fist-pumping triumph.

The movie’s mischievous plot involves not only fetch quests to try to return to 2025, but the hilarious horrors of alternate timelines and even stranger publicity ploys whose staging blurs the lines between fiction and reality. All the while, the story’s emotional core pivots around the now forty-something Johnson and McCaroll coming within inches of their past selves, and in the process, reflecting on this timeline’s Obama-era, iPhone 3G optimism – not to mention the limitless promise of being able to self-distribute video content for the first time. This is in sharp contrast to their many regrets and failures during the intervening years. Much like the recent Jackass Forever, it’s a prank film about the passage of time, told with the same scrappy DIY sensibility as the original web series, albeit with Johnson employing more crash zooms and rapid movements to emphasize both comedic and dramatic moments.

Will this peek into the past finally convince McCaroll that he’s better off without his over-enthusiastic, man-child bestie? In Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie, quite literally anything is possible, including the production improvising entire plot developments around a real shooting outside the home of Toronto rapper Drake. It’s ambitious and audacious, to say the least.

Each roguish set piece remains grounded in the emotional dynamic of its leads, who – despite their jejune conduct and sensibilities – imbue these broad, middle-aged-loser versions of themselves with genuine pathos. The movie’s mockumentary style, whose aesthetics are hilariously adjusted for each era, harbors both the daring realism of an elaborate hoax as well as the gooey “aw, shucks” melodrama of two men realizing how much they need each other. It’s a pitch-perfect medley of styles and a nonstop hoot with a crowd.

Cold Storage will be released in theaters on Feb. 13.

For those who have enjoyed certain types of horror-comedy hybrid films through the years, there’s something comforting about Cold Storage from the start. On-screen text at the opening, which turns an ominous backstory about the remnants of the Skylab space station and what it actually brought down to Earth into a purposely jokey over-the-top display, makes it clear that there’s a “we’re having fun here!” approach.

That tone continues in the film’s prologue, as an investigation into ghastly deaths in a tiny Australian town caused by a piece of Skylab evokes 1990’s wonderful Tremors, both with its desert setting and its heightened, funny tone accompanying its horror movie scenario. It’s not full farce or self-parody, but it’s winking just enough, buoyed by some clever visuals from director Jonny Campbell, particularly when it comes to depicting what happens to the oh-so-dangerous fungus discovered at the scene and the passage of time that follows.

Cold Storage loses some momentum after its great opening, feeling more hit and miss comedically as we pick up 18 years later, when two employees at a 24-hour self-storage warehouse – Travis (Joe Keery) and Naomi (Georgina Campbell) – come into contact with this fungus. The substance has been secretly sitting in hidden levels underneath them; their place of work just so happened to once house a military base. The specific horror-comedy vibe the filmmakers are going for is a tricky one to maintain, and there are beats that don’t quite hit the mark as we get to know Travis, Naomi, and a few other characters that will be significant over the long night they’re about to endure.

Still, there’s a lot to appreciate throughout, starting with the film’s leads. Stranger Things fan favorite Keery and Barbarian star Campbell make for an appealing central duo, with the proper amount of charisma and chemistry to sell the bantering ‘opposites attract’ dynamic between Travis the ex-con and Naomi the aspiring veterinarian. They also have one hell of a pivotal third major player in the form of Liam Freaking Neeson as Robert Quinn, a now retired military veteran we first meet in the prologue.

Robert gets a heads-up that things are going awry at the storage warehouse and goes to help, even as Travis and Naomi begin to find out just how much trouble they’re in. Again, this film’s tone doesn’t require Neeson to go full Naked Gun as far as sending up his tough guy image to an extreme level, but it does let him show different, gently funny and humanizing sides to his usual action persona, including the fact that Robert has quite a bad back from a previous injury. Yes, this is something begging to be significant in the third act, and thankfully, the film pays it off in a very entertaining manner.

Cold Storage is produced and written by David Koepp, adapting his own novel. Koepp has an interesting Hollywood career; he’s a go-to screenwriter for massive studio movies from franchises like Jurassic Park, Mission: Impossible, Spider-Man, and Indiana Jones, but in between those sorts of films, he’s also frequently writing (and sometimes directing) smaller, quirkier projects. And while some of them have been misfires, there have been some notable highlights there as well, including 1999’s compelling ghost story, Stir of Echoes, and last year’s terrific Steven Soderbergh-directed spy film, Black Bag.

Cold Storage finds Koepp operating outside his usual style with something much more heightened and winky. This is a movie about a fungal outbreak that turns those it infects into zombie-like creatures; it’s also about the long locked up remnants of a previous outbreak accidentally being unleashed, leaving some out-of-their-depth average-joe employees to deal with it. So if there was a shorthand I’d use for this movie, it would be “The Last of Us meets The Return of the Living Dead,” and in that regard, while it doesn’t match either of those projects at their best, it’s still quite fun in its own right.

Koepp and Jonny Campbell add some nice flourishes that keep the film from feeling like a carbon copy of other zombie-adjacent stories (though there are plenty of familiar elements, of course), including the fact that those infected will eventually just plain explode out of nowhere. That allows for moments that are both surprising and jolting, and also darkly funny and plenty gory.

In the midst of all this, subplots involve an elderly woman (Vanessa Redgrave, reuniting with her Mission: Impossible screenwriter Koepp 30 years later) coming to the storage place intending to kill herself with a gun; Naomi’s ex showing up after a household accident, also carrying a gun; and an inside job plan by Travis and Naomi’s boss to rob the storage place that night. Is it pretty silly that all of these things happen to be going down at this isolated location on the very same night as a potentially world-ending outbreak is simultaneously beginning beneath their feet? Sure, but the jokey, easygoing tone of the movie allows you to let it slide more than you might otherwise.

Still, there are times where Cold Storage falters. As a Prometheus apologist, I will say this movie really pushes things in terms of having multiple characters – including those who should definitely know better – lean in close to something clearly horrible and dangerous occurring in front of them. There’s also just a tiny bit more sentiment included near the very end than what feels right for the overall feel of the story. The movie’s budgetary constraints are also felt in some of the visual effect shots, which are not always the most convincing.

But TV veteran Jonny Campbell, whose credits include episodes of shows like Doctor Who and Westworld, frequently overcomes that budget obstacle with some stylistic shots that are less beholden to sell complete reality. This includes a great sequence showing how the fungus is passing between insects and animals, where the camera hurtles forward and visually leans into everything looking more like CGI animation rather than photorealism.

Lending solid support is Ellora Torchia (Midsommar) as a military analyst contacted by Neeson’s Robert who ends up being his Al Powell-like new buddy feeding him crucial info even though they’ve never met in person. There’s also a very likeable, endearing performance by Lesley Manville (Maleficent) as Robert’s old comrade-in-arms who also comes out of retirement to try to help save the day.

Mario Tennis Fever has the soul of a GameCube game. Its wacky, over-the-top take on tennis is at its best when you have four friends together on the couch. And for the first time since the GameCube era, series developer Camelot has delivered an entry that feels feature complete on day one, with the most unique characters, solo and multiplayer modes, and silly gimmicks we’ve ever seen crammed into a Mario Tennis game. Sadly, that doesn’t mean it’s all good content, as the single-player adventure once again comes up woefully short in terms of both its length and quality. But when playing locally or online, Fever’s tight, responsive controls and crazy abilities result in a chaotic party game that’s a lot of fun in short bursts.

The headline twist this time around are the mighty Fever Rackets, which dominate the action. There are 30 to choose from, and each comes with a unique special ability that can swing the game in your favor. Those powers are activated by pulling off a Fever Shot once your gauge is full, and they range from offensive, like planting a rotating Fire Bar straight from Super Mario Bros. on your opponent’s side of the court, to defensive, like creating a shadow double of yourself to cover more ground. They can also block your screen with ink, litter piles of banana peels on both sides of the court, or grant time-limited buffs, like making your shots curvier for the next 20 seconds.

The Fever Rackets are a blast to experiment with, and their inclusion adds a different flavor to each match. At their best, they force you to think about all the special quirks in play. If I place a slippery sheet of ice on one quadrant of my rival’s turf, we both know I’m probably going to try and hit my next shot right at it to force them onto the uncomfortable terrain. Or… will I? Shot placement in tennis is full of mindgames, and the Fever Racket’s transformative effects enhance that dynamic.

There are also checks and balances to each that are fun to uncover. The Bullet Bill Racket transforms the ball into a wicked fast line drive that appears overpowered at first glance, until you learn it can be easily neutralized by playing up close at the net. And when both players use this racket, it can result in a hilarious, rapid Bullet Bill rally that usually ends with a demoralizing body shot. Mixing and matching racket types to see what happens is great, which is why it really bothers me that there’s no way to randomly select your Fever Racket for either human players or CPU opponents, as it would be fun to try to make the most of the cards you’re dealt. You can randomly select characters and courts, just not rackets, so that feels like a prime candidate to be added in a post-launch update.

Some Fever Rackets are definitely stronger than others, but Mario Tennis Fever adds a smart mechanic to somewhat balance them out. When a player initiates a Fever Shot, most offensive effects don’t take place until the ball hits the ground, leading to a tense back-and-forth volley where both players desperately try to hit the ball before it bounces. You have to be confident in choosing which one to bring into the match and when to unleash it, because the wrong decision can see your opponent sending your big shot right back at you.

On the flipside, Fever Rackets can also make things feel more luck-based at times, especially in doubles. Four separate powers in play can lead to courts that are completely covered in mud, fire, and unregulated chaos, similar to playing Super Smash Bros. Ultimate with all items cranked to the max. When your health hits zero – which forces you to sit on the sidelines in doubles or move at a slower speed in singles – it often doesn’t feel like your fault because of how unavoidable taking damage becomes. Even your doubles partner’s Fever Shot can hurt you. This isn’t necessarily bad; Fever just leans harder into the party game side of things than its predecessor, Mario Tennis Aces, which almost resembled a competitive fighting game with high-level mechanics like bar management and perfect blocks.

Rally Time

To account for all the mayhem that Fever Rackets entail, the actual tennis is a bit simpler. The overall speed is slightly slower and floatier, last-second dives for the ball make mistakes less punishing, and the court is a little smaller, meaning it’s easier to reach cross-court shots and keep a point going. I understand this choice: Aces’ intense pace combined with Fever’s increased madness would probably be too much to keep up with. On one hand, I miss the more hardcore version of tennis Aces provided. I played that game online for years because of its high skill ceiling and rewarding mechanics – it was a truly inspired take on the sport. On the other hand, Fever is way more fun to invite friends over to play for a casual game night since it’s easier for newcomers to pick up. It’s worse as a competitive tennis game, but better as a party tennis game. Plus, most modes let you use a high-speed ball that leads to a more upbeat rhythm, even if it doesn’t entirely resolve my disappointment that Aces’ thrilling trick shots, racket health, and time-bending abilities have been replaced.

That said, it still feels really good to anticipate where the ball is going, get in position, and release a fully-charged topspin shot, complete with great, punchy sound effects. Camelot has been refining the same control scheme of drop shots, lobs, and angled smashes for decades, and it’s still fun to return to, especially with CPUs that actually put up a fight at higher difficulties and the largest roster the series has ever seen. There are 38 characters to choose from, each with their own stats and unique traits. Newcomer Baby Waluigi has been a breakout star online, but I’ve actually gravitated towards the overlooked Baby Wario, whose powered-up topspin shot helps me control the pace of each point. I’m also happy to see the Donkey Kong Bananza redesigns of DK and Diddy Kong show up.

The character models are probably the best-looking part of Fever, with detailed clothes and facial animations, like the texture on Luigi’s shirt or even more bristles in Mario’s mustache than before. However, it doesn’t blow me away visually as a Switch 2 exclusive. Its cartoony art style looks good, as Mario games generally do, but it doesn’t feel like a significant leap forward. It targets 60 fps and usually hits that, but I noticed a few times in splitscreen doubles matches where it dipped before the ball was served. At least it’s always consistent when it matters most during the point, even with all the wild Fever effects on screen.

Keeping in line with Fever’s GameCube spirit, you have to unlock a bunch of characters, rackets, courts, and special costumes by clearing specific challenges, playing a certain number of matches, and progressing through the Adventure mode. Recent Mario sport games have tied progression and unlockables to online play, so it was a welcome sight to boot up Fever for the first time and see I had plenty to chase that wasn’t tied to my internet connection. That is, until I booted up the Adventure mode and discovered what I was in for.

Baby Fever

If you’re primarily looking forward to Mario Tennis Fever because of its single-player Adventure mode, I’m sad to share that it’s easily the most underwhelming part of this package. Mario, Luigi, Peach, Wario, and Waluigi get transformed into babies, and Mario must regain his tennis skills to save everyone, for some reason. It starts out promising, with a few gorgeous early cutscenes that throw Mario and friends into unexpected situations. Camelot upholds its reputation for surprisingly great cinematics like this, but the Adventure mode only goes downhill from there.

The first 90 minutes of this disappointingly short three-and-a-half hour campaign take place at a tennis academy, where Baby Mario undergoes painfully drawn-out, simplistic tutorials about the basics. You complete fairly one-note minigames to increase your stats, mash through text that reiterates each shot type, and partake in ridiculously easy qualification matches to move up the ranks. Throughout, you are also quizzed on your tennis knowledge, like one stumper where I was asked which character type was known for its speed: all-around, defensive, or speedy. Take a guess. This is clearly meant for young kids playing their first Mario Tennis game, and “Tutorial” would’ve been a more appropriate name than “Adventure”. It would be more enjoyable if the writing was funny or clever, but the characters all say very vanilla things that essentially only exist to teach you how to play. This is a far cry from Golf Story, which remains the gold standard for how to do a proper campaign in an arcadey sports game that combines strong writing, interesting challenges, and off-the-wall diversions, all of which are missing here.

You eventually leave the academy to progress through a comically small world map. This part of Adventure strongly resembles Aces’ campaign, where you use your tennis skills to fight a handful of bosses and solve very light puzzles. There are a few challengers to find, but there’s a surprising lack of tennis matches in this tennis campaign – and just when I felt like things were ramping up, it was over, so I shrugged and moved onto the other single-player offerings.

Tournament mode is a staple of Mario Tennis, and this is unfortunately one of its worst forms. Playing through three separate brackets to win trophies is fine as always, but Fever introduces an announcer in the form of a Talking Flower from Super Mario Bros. Wonder who never stops commentating. He reacts to every single shot, and I felt like I’d heard all of his voice lines multiple times before even wrapping up my second tournament. It gets grating very quickly, and I can’t imagine even kids would enjoy the nonstop commentary. The Talking Flower is turned on for all modes by default, but thankfully you can disable it everywhere… except in Tournament and Adventure.

The runaway best single-player mode is Trial Towers, a new addition that reminds me of Super Smash Bros. Melee’s Events. Each trial throws a specific setup at you, like a match where your Fever Gauge is always full or a battle of three babies against a giant Bowser, and it’s up to you to figure out how to exploit the setup and win a brief five-point match. There are even optional, difficult achievements for completionists, like winning without taking damage, or never losing a point. It’s a lot of fun working your way through each challenge, and incorporating this concept into an Adventure mode with unique characters and an interesting story should be the way forward for this series.

As always, Mario Tennis Fever shines in multiplayer, and there’s plenty of flexibility in that department. You can compete online in ranked matches split, between singles and doubles, either with Fever Rackets or without them. Winning boosts your point total as you work to improve your letter grade, with rankings scheduled to reset at the start of each month. I was only able to play online for a couple hours before launch, but my experience was smooth. In addition to playing with up to four people locally, you can bring two people from one console into a private online lobby and set up any type of casual match you’d like.

When you want something besides the standard tennis, you and your friends can pick a special match like the motion-control-focused Swing Mode, the traditional Ring Shot mode where you compete to score the most points by hitting the ball through rings floating above the net, a pinball court that uses bumpers and paddles, or a court that introduces Mario Wonder’s Wonder Effects like floating hippos. These range from decent distractions, like carefully aiming your Fever Shots at Piranha Plants to grow the size of your opponent’s court, to completely uninteresting, like repeatedly lobbing and dropshotting the ball just out of reach of a mindless CPU opponent upwards of 30 times in a row.

It doesn’t take long for even the best special modes to get repetitive, and I found myself quickly going back to the standard tennis matches. Thankfully, that specific mode has more than enough to shake things up thanks to the large roster of characters and rackets, but it ends up feeling like too much of a good thing. Fever is still a lot of fun in briefer sessions, but when I think of the breadth of worthwhile content found in Nintendo’s other recent multiplayer options like Kirby Air Riders or Super Mario Party Jamboree, Fever comes up a bit short. After 20 hours, I already feel like I’ve had my fill, and I see it as more of a fun distraction to play for a few minutes here and there while my group warms up for something else rather than one that’s going to get a serious amount of playtime.

Time, the old saying goes, is a flat circle. We go round and round, repeating forever. The same events, the same choices, the same conclusions. All of this has happened before, and all of it will happen again. Romeo is a Dead Man, the latest from developer Grasshopper Manufacture and director Suda51, posits a different question: what if time was a sphere? The events might change, but all roads still lead to Rome. It’s a fascinating idea, but also one you shouldn’t rack your brain trying to figure out. This is a time travel story: spend too long trying to piece things together, and you’ll be making diagrams out of straws. In a convenient example of form as function, Romeo is a Dead Man is as fractured as a game as the universe Romeo navigates within it. To tell you the truth, I’m still trying to figure out if I liked it several days after beating it. But I can’t stop thinking about it, and how its form mirrors its narrative. And that’s not nothing.

Our tale follows the titular Romeo Stargazer, a sheriff’s deputy in the small town of Deadford (you’re going to notice a pattern with the naming conventions pretty fast, if you haven’t already) in Pennsylvania (okay, not that one).There’s not much to Deadford: it’s known for a potential alien landing site and its “dead” tomatoes. One day, Romeo discovers an amnesiatic woman named Juliet lying in the road. She begs him to kill her, but Romeo’s a good lad (and kind of a doofus), and he falls in love with her instead, despite the super questionable confluence of their names. “No good will come from falling in love with a woman you found in the middle of the road,” his grandfather, genius inventor Benjamin Stargazer, warns. And you know what? He’s right! You wanna be star-crossed lovers, kid? Because this is how you become star-crossed lovers.

Anyway, they fall in love, agree to elope, and then Romeo gets attacked by a weird creature and dies, but his grandfather saves his life with a super cool helmet, then also dies. Romeo becomes Deadman, space time is shattered by a mysterious incident, and Juliet disappears. The latter two might be connected. Now sustained (and powered-up) by his grandfather’s tech, Romeo is recruited by the FBI’s Space-Time Police and tasked with bringing space-time criminals to justice, tracking down Juliet, and figuring out what, if anything, she has to do with all this. He also gets a bitchin’ jacket that his dead-but-also-not-dead grandfather has somehow transported himself onto. Ol’ Ben also technically invents time travel in the future, making him a literal grandfather paradox. Wild.

That’s a lot, huh? Listen, this is a Suda51 joint. Weirdness is the name of the game. If I tried to explain all of it to you, I’d probably look like a dude with crazy eyes and a wall of notecards and newspaper clippings connected by red string. The truth is that, even after finishing Romeo is a Dead Man’s 15-hour story, I’m not sure I understand all of it – and hey, neither does Romeo. Talk about feeling like the main character. But for whatever reason, it’s stuck with me. That all of this is conveyed through a combination of cutscenes, comic book pages, and other weird but cool methods as you get deeper in probably didn’t hurt.

Like the Fragmented Universe Romeo finds himself in, Romeo is a Dead Man is a game made up of a lot of very disparate ideas. Missions start on the Space-Time Police’s ship, The Last Night, which is a 2D, sprite-based world where you can hang out with the crew – they’re a weird group that includes Romeo’s mom and sister, as well as FBI Space-Time agents with names like BlueMountain, TheBlack, and RedBrown; one tells you that Deadman is a lame name. From there, you scan the universe for anomalies, pilot The Last Night to them (you mostly pick a destination and hit the gas), blast away at the dimensional monstrosity blocking wherever you need to go with a weapon called Eternal Sleep, and then ride Romeo’s motorcycle across a bridge of light to to your destination. I can’t emphasize enough how ridiculous all of this is, especially when your ship says “FBI” on the side in big bold letters.

Once you’re where you need to be – which could be Deadford City Hall, a cult enclave in the ‘70s where you run around with a delightful zombie named Jenny, or a haunted asylum, among others – you’re playing a 3D action game where your job is to track down a space-time fugitive and bring them to space-time justice, which usually means fighting a lot of zombies and other monsters who are also here for… reasons. Romeo has access to four melee weapons and four ranged weapons. You’ll have to unlock every one but your starting chainsaw-sword and pistol, but the process is pretty quick. I had them all after the opening mission. Once you do, that’s it. There are no more worlds to conquer, weapon-wise.

Melee combat is your standard combination of light attack, heavy attack, and dodge that seems to have taken over every modern action game, and I'm kinda wondering why game designers hate blocking so much (unless it’s a parry). The cool thing about Romeo's melee combat is that you can chain light and heavy attacks together in any order. It’s not particularly deep – weapons don’t have move lists, and there's nary an Izuna Drop (or anything similar) in sight – but it does feel good, especially against the smaller Rotters. I enjoyed every weapon in Romeo's arsenal, whether it was his standard sword, the combining-and-separating Arcadia or the gauntlet-based Juggernaut, which allows Romeo to pretend he's a boxer… or Dante from Devil May Cry. Even the big, slow sword is cool.

Against the bigger, badder enemies, you'll want to sheathe your blades and get your hands on some superior firepower, mostly because those enemies come with flower-shaped weak points. There are no bad ranged weapons here: pistol, machine gun, shotgun, they all work great and pack a punch, though I was particularly fond of the rocket-launching Yggdrasil. When something absolutely, positively has to die, accept no substitutes. You may have to reload after every shot, but Romeo's wearing Solid Snake's bandana no matter what smoke wagon you're making guys dead with. “Don’t worry, infinite ammo” baby.

I admit that I'm kind of mixed on Romeo is a Dead Man's rogues’ gallery. There are a decent number of them, yeah, and the varying nature of their weak points is nice, but Grasshopper shows you all of its cards pretty early on, and by the end you'll have seen these cats a lot. That said, I do really like things like the Jellies, which force you to disperse their oozing exterior with a melee weapon before you can do real damage to the body beneath.

Either way, killing enemies builds blood, which can be spent on Bloody Summer, a very strong attack that also regenerates some of Romeo’s health. Each weapon has its own version of this move, and you can also use it while dodging or jumping for some variety. It’s a good way to dish out the hurt and manage Romeo’s health without dipping into his limited healing items.

Bafflingly but perhaps unsurprisingly, Romeo is a Dead Man borrows elements from the Soulslike genre. (If you were ever looking for a sentence with a 100% success rate in the “typing this made Will sad” category, there’s a winner.) Space-Time Pharmacies serve as save and fast travel points and restore your health and healing items, but also respawn any enemies you’ve killed. There’s no penalty for dying; you don’t drop the currency you’ve earned from killing enemies. Instead, you actually roll a roulette wheel that provides buffs to things like attack, defense, blood gain, and so on, courtesy of Romeo’s mom. Without other consequences, respawning enemies can make death and saving annoying in what is a fairly linear action game. I guess you could argue that it might fit thematically with each death or use of the Space-Time Pharmacy creating a parallel universe or something, but mostly it just feels weird and makes certain segments repetitive.

Even the bosses aren't immune to repetition, and you'll see the same mini-bosses multiple times. The space-time criminals that cap off each stage are one of one, but even these fights aren't total home runs. There’s a couple of really good ones, like the hard-charging Death Changeling, but you have seen these archetypes before and some are… less good. Sorry, Fused Reanimated, but instant kill attacks are never fun. The reality is fighting bigger enemies (and bosses) often means exploiting their weak points with your guns, leaving melee weapons in a kind of weird limbo. Romeo is a Dead Man's combat isn’t bad, per se, but I do wish there was more to it.

Thankfully, Romeo isn’t alone, or at least doesn’t have to be. You can find seeds scattered throughout spacetime that allow you to grow Bastards (yes, this is what they’re actually called) aboard The Last Night. Bastards are friendly zombies that can be summoned in combat and do things like serve as sentry cannons, heal you, shoot chain lightning, fire weakness flowers at baddies, and even run at enemies and explode. They’re cool to have around and incredibly useful – though Romeo is a Dead Man does a poor job of emphasizing that; I had to fuse a bunch together late game to get some strong enough to help me out because I’d largely ignored them until then (and growing them is its own process I will get into later).

The places you’ll do all this fighting are pretty grand. They’re largely not remarkable spaces in and of themselves, but what’s cool is subspace. Romeo, being a space-time cop, can access subspace, which is another dimension parallel to the one he’s in. But he can't do it whenever he wants. He has to find TVs showing a dude eating steak and saying weird and sometimes cryptic things to him, and he can enter subspace from there. Subspace is generally made out of neon rectangles that form paths and structures beneath your feet, but because subspace is parallel to real space, it kind of sits on top of the normal environments. The long and short of it is that paths blocked in real space might not be in subspace and vice versa, and you’ll often have to find your way to another TV to get around roadblocks in whatever dimension you’re in.

Solving puzzles in subspace will open up new paths (and new TVs to reemerge into the real world from), and finding keys in subspace will open blocked paths in the real world. I enjoyed seeing how these dimensions fit together, and subspace is usually combat free, so it’s a nice change of pace. The only downside is that subspace looks very samey, so it can be easy to get lost if you need to backtrack or forget what TV you came out of. Thankfully, Romeo is a Dead Man clues you in by having the guy inside the TV say something new once you find a new TV. Thanks, chief.

If you need a break or want to upgrade Romeo, you can head back to The Last Night from any Space-Time Pharmacy. In addition to the cool sprite art and crew, The Last Night is also home to a shop where you can buy food, materials, and equipable pins that up your numbers. You can also tend to your Bastard garden (you gotta plant those seeds, you know?), cook stat-boosting curry with Romeo’s mom, and refine space debris into weapon upgrade materials.

The best part of The Last Night is how tactile it is. You want a new Bastard? You gotta manually go to the garden, have Luna (Romeo’s sister) appraise your seeds, plant them, and then come back and pull them out of the ground when they’re done. If you want to upgrade them, you have to fuse two together manually. Wanna fight a boss you’ve taken down again? You have to talk to a specific guy. You want curry? You have to play the minigame to make it every time. My favorite example is the little arcade game that you play to level Romeo up, spending the currency you collect to travel what is essentially a ghostless Pac-Man maze. How you do it is up to you, but you have to do it. There’s no “oh, just level me up” option. Even something as simple as taking on optional challenges for rewards (decent stand-alone dungeons where you fight through to the end and so on) requires traveling to them physically. Romeo is a Dead Man forces you to live in its world.

Some folks will consider this repetition for the sake of it, but a lot of Romeo is a Dead Man happens over and over again. Each night, he has a nightmare and spills the drink on his nightstand when he wakes up. Each time you find a new fugitive, you perform the same series of actions to defeat the Dimensional Seer blocking your path forward and get to where they are. Each time you take a space-time criminal down, the credits roll. This is a time travel multiverse story; the point is that the same events are going to happen a lot. They’ll change, but the destination is the same. Remember the sphere? In the end, you always end up in the same place. By forcing you to engage with the repetitive nature of its world, Romeo is a Dead Man tells its story through its gameplay. It’s rad. Does it always work? No. I never found much use for the curry (and many of the other supplemental items). But I'm kind of eager to dive into New Game+ and see if it changes anything, because… well, multiverse time travel story, right? If time really is a sphere, it might not matter, which might make Romeo's use of New Game+ even cooler.

The Logitech Pro X2 Superstrike is a game-changer. By ditching the microswitches that have been used in gaming mice for decades, Logitech’s new model delivers noticeably snappier left and right clicks and fascinating new tuning options. It won’t make you a pro player overnight, but it narrows the gap like never before – and it looks essential for actual esports players, whose intense interest in the X2 massively accelerated its development.

Logitech G Pro X2 Superstrike – Design, HITS and Shape

The Pro X2 Superstrike gets its super powers from what Logitech calls HITS, or a ‘Haptic Inductive Trigger System’. It’s a fancy way of saying the X2 uses an analog sensor to detect how far each main mouse button has been pressed, while a haptic motor beneath rumbles to signify that a click has been recognised, aping the normal tactile feedback you’d expect with a surprising degree of fidelity. Mechanical gaming keyboards have used analogue sensors like this for nearly a decade, but they still relied on the physical movement of a switch to signify a key press – so Logitech’s solution feels like a mixture between this and the haptic feedback Apple has been building into its MacBook trackpads since 2015.

The benefits are easier than I expected to feel in person.

First, you can set the X2 to react to a button-press after just 0.1mm of travel, rather than the 0.6mm commonly seen in gaming mice using traditional optical or mechanical microswitches. That near-elimination of physical movement hugely reduces input latency – the ‘up to 30ms’ quoted in Logitech’s marketing materials is an order of magnitude more than the speed-up you see from polling rates jumping from 1000Hz (1ms) to 8000Hz (0.125ms), for example.

The benefit here is fairly obvious: if you come around a corner in Counter-Strike 2 and spot another player just as they spot you, your bullets will be recognised by the server a few ticks before they start firing back, all else being equal, which makes it a lot easier to kill rather than be killed.

Secondly, the X2 supports rapid trigger, another feature brought over from mechanical keyboards. This is a mode where, rather than button presses and releases being detected based on physically moving past a set threshold, they’re detected based on a change of direction. For example, if you wanted to right click as fast as possible to move your champion and dodge spells in League of Legends, you would ideally be somewhere in the middle of the mouse button’s travel distance, quickly moving up and down without waiting for the mouse to fully reset. On a traditional mouse, this would only work just around the 0.6mm actuation point, but on the X2, this works anywhere, making the technique much more consistent.

The move from a traditional microswitch below the left and right mouse buttons to the Haptic Inductive Trigger System has required some internal adjustments, with a thinner chassis and base plate, titanium screws and a ventilated PCB. These changes trimmed 7g from the initial 68g prototype, allowing the mouse to hit a final kerb weight of 61g - just a gram heavier than the Superlight 2.

Elsewhere, surprisingly little has changed from the Superlight 2 to the X2. Logitech’s new mouse possesses exactly the same shape as its forebear – it’s a medium-sized, gently-sloping symmetric potato, in contrast to the miniaturized Superlight 2c or ergonomic Superlight 2 Dex. It’s not surprising that Logitech is sticking with a proven ‘safe’ shape that works for the vast majority of hand sizes and grip styles to start off, and I’m sure we’ll see the same Superstrike tech in a compact or ergonomic design at some stage. The side buttons also remain of traditional stock, and feel a little odd next to the nearly silent main mouse buttons.

The X2 Superstrike also gets a bit of an external glow-up, with black left and right buttons and some extra wordmarks contrasting nicely with an otherwise white body. Of course, this is Logitech we’re talking about, so I expect to see a magenta version – or another tasteful alternative color scheme – before too long.

Logitech G Pro X2 Superstrike – Gaming Performance and Battery Life

It’s rare that you can plonk down a new gaming peripheral and feel a difference before you’ve even hit the loading screen of a game, but that’s exactly what I got with the Superstrike. Just clicking on the play button in Steam feels more snappy and immediate; it’s the same tight and connected feeling you might experience when using a high refresh rate gaming monitor for the first time.

In-game, the difference is more profound. I wouldn’t say that it felt like cheating, exactly, but there’s a thrilling sense of ease when it comes to clicking heads in a Counter-Strike 2 or Battlefield 6 deathmatch. Single-hit kill weapons like the AWP or AK-47 in Counter-Strike feel deadlier than ever before, and spray-and-pray guns like SMGs still feel pretty hooked up. Of course, you’ll still live or die based on your map knowledge, muscle memory and general awareness – a healthy course of CS2 matches proves that there’s plenty more I need to practice to get good – but having a rapid left click feels like a valuable way to even the odds.

Notably, the Superstrike also doesn’t need de-tuning to feel totally natural in other games, either. After selecting the fastest actuation settings and enabling rapid trigger, I was expecting a rough time surfing the web or clicking on static targets in strategy game Battletech, but I didn’t experience accidental misclicks or other issues whatsoever. That was a pleasant surprise, and led to an extremely easy adaptation process.

While the Superstrike represents a night-and-day difference versus the Superlight 2 when it comes to gaming, its battery life figures are competitive with the older mouse. The G Hub software does warn you that increasing the amount of haptic feedback can reduce longevity, but I used the mouse at 1000Hz with haptics set to 3/5, and the mouse easily lasted through around 20 hours of testing while dropping from 75% to just under 50%. Logitech quotes 90 hours of constant motion for the X2, versus 95 hours for the Superlight 2, so if the predecessor was fine for you, this will be too.

Logitech G Pro X2 Superstrike – Software and Connectivity

Like the Superlight 2, the Superstrike uses Logitech’s G Hub software for settings adjustments, with no web option available just yet. Here, you get all of the same options as before – sensitivity, key binds, polling rates, and so on – plus the new tunable left and right mouse buttons.

The new HITS settings include actuation distance (how far you have to press for a click to register), rapid trigger sensitivity, and haptic feedback strength. There’s not a huge amount to tweak, but you can independently set up HITS on each of your left and right mouse buttons and share your settings with a single code, in case you want to mimic the setup used by a pro (or your friend Ross). I also appreciated the inclusion of a live read-out of your button presses, so you can see exactly how far you’re pressing down and choose your settings accordingly.

The best thing you can do in the settings to understand the mouse is completely disable the haptic feedback. Instantly, the X2 feels like a dead fish, even though it still clicks exactly as well as before – underscoring the magic that Logitech's engineers have achieved here with the artificial tactile response.

Connectivity is also the same as the Superlight 2, with wired USB and 2.4GHz Lightspeed wireless being the only options – Bluetooth has been excised in that nearly limitless push to cut weight and less useful features for the competitive gaming crowd.

Will is deputy tech editor for IGN, specialising in PC hardware, sim racing and display tech. He has been publishing about games and technology since 2001 (age 12). Will was formerly Deputy Editor at Digital Foundry. He is currently playing MechWarrior 5: Clans.

Wuthering Heights opens in theaters on February 13.

Three years after Wuthering Heights was first published under the pen name Ellis Bell, Charlotte Brontë, the sister of its true author, Emily Brontë, issued a correction in its new edition. "The immature but very real powers revealed in Wuthering Heights were scarcely recognised," she wrote in 1850. "Its import and nature were misunderstood."

That sentiment holds up with the arrival of “Wuthering Heights”, writer-director Emerald Fennell's fast and loose adaptation of the beloved book. I now understand why she opted to put the title in quotation marks, because this is by no means a faithful homage. It's shallow fan fiction that has more in common with E.L. James's Fifty Shades of Grey than Brontë's unflinching portrait of obsessive love, vengeance, the violence of class, racism and generational trauma. If, as Fennell has said, this is her teenage recollection of Wuthering Heights, then it speaks more to the white affluence of her upbringing than Brontë's novel.

The writer-director dispenses with the book's beginning and end, as well as multiple characters who fully contextualize the toxic atmosphere of the eponymous estate. Instead, she opens with black and the grunting sounds of a man. Is he having sex? No, he's being strangled to death in a contrived public hanging scene, gleefully watched by young heroine Catherine Earnshaw (Charlotte Mellington), as other kids laugh at his "stiffy" and the camera follows some common folk engaging in promiscuity. This sets the highly sexualized tone for the rest of the film, charting Cathy's sexual awakening from child to "spinster," as her father, Mr. Earnshaw (Martin Clunes), calls her, once Margot Robbie takes over the role.

There's been valid criticism of the whitewashing of "dark-skinned gipsy" orphan Heathcliff, a role shared by Owen Cooper and Jacob Elordi, who washes up at Wuthering Heights via Mr. Earnshaw – no longer the novel's loving adoptive parent but redrawn in, from the book, Hindley Earnshaw's revolting, drunken likeness (Hindley being his son, who doesn't appear in the film). But Robbie's casting is equally ill-fitted. The novel's Catherine is a dark-haired, dark-eyed teen, whose unruly stubbornness and violent love that she shares with a similarly-aged Heathcliff speaking volumes for their juvenile nature.

Robbie looks amazing for 35, but here her age works against the authenticity of Catherine's youthful recklessness. She struggles to exude the naivety of a teen who thinks she can have her cake and eat it, by having both Heathcliff and the social status of wealthy Edgar Linton (Shazad Latif), after he moves into the nearby Thrushcross Grange and proposes.

Robbie and Elordi are obviously very attractive people, and with the number of steamy sex scenes shoehorned in, you'd be forgiven for thinking this amounts to palpable chemistry. But it all feels too forced, like a sales bin, smutty romance novel come to life, working too hard to hide the erasure of Brontë's far more complex ideas about the hell of societal convention.

That's due in large part to the script, which ignores the Gothic supernatural elements and too often paraphrases Brontë's earnest, expressive dialogue in key scenes. Fans hoping to hear Catherine's "If all else perished, and he remained" speech will be left wanting. It also strips away the compelling social commentary about Heathcliff's ethnic ambiguity and sanitizes the brutality of his revenge narrative, softening Heathcliff's aggressive cruelty into something coldly charismatic. His Yorkshire accent isn't bad, but Elordi's performance recalls his Euphoria character, Nate, more than Brontë's antagonistic antihero.

Supporting players like Nelly (Hong Chau) and Isabella Linton (Alison Oliver) fare better. While Nelly's backstory is changed from servant to bastard companion, Chau affords Nelly a quiet composure as a vulnerable witness to (and sometimes meddler in) Catherine and Heathcliff's destructive romance. As Edgar's ward (she's his sister in the book), Oliver nails Isabella's sickly sweet innocence. Even as the film weirdly pushes Isabella to evoke the spirit of Brontë's Catherine, she brings a deviant edge to her infatuation with Heathcliff. It's a wonder they didn't just cast the Irish actor as the lead.

The same could be said for Latif, who, as a mixed British-Pakistani actor, better fits the profile of Heathcliff. The novel even describes him as a "little Lascar," the name for a sailor from the Indian subcontinent. Where Brontë's Edgar is laced with snobbish hostility towards Heathcliff, thus becoming a mighty catalyst for the low-born lad to exact revenge against him, Latif's iteration barely registers. He rarely engages with his rival and, as with the silk wallpaper modelled after Catherine's skin, serves merely as window dressing. His color blind casting ticks the box for diversity, but Fennell gives him little character to work with.

Her approach to the class divide feels somewhat hackneyed, too. The lilt of the Yorkshire accent is relegated to the lower class, where Fennell throws in sexual deviancy as a marker, too. Film and TV frequently stereotype the Yorkshire accent this way, but the Earnshaws aren't landed gentry; they didn't require posh accents like the Lintons to reinforce the upstairs-downstairs dynamic.

Cinematographer Linus Sandgren does capture the tumultuous beauty of the Yorkshire Moors and the stormy atmosphere of the Heights estate, but the production design of Thrushcross Grange is jarringly anachronistic. It becomes a Gothic Barbie Dreamhouse (derogatory), with the costuming, though beautiful, more in keeping with an Alice in Wonderland film. Throw in Charli xcx's pulsating original songs and Anthony Willis's overwhelming score, and you've got a bombastic world that does more to distract than solidify the emotional journey of these iconic literary figures.

I don't believe all book-to-screen adaptations need to be carbon copies. And maybe if you haven't read the novel, "Wuthering Heights" will work for you. But I must have read a different book in my teens than Fennell, because her vision obscures my memory of it – as it will for many Wuthering Heights fans out there.

Full spoilers follow for Primal Season 3, Episode 5, “The Dead Cast No Shadow,” which is available on Adult Swim and HBO Max now.

We’re at the halfway point of this season, and all of our main cast members are now reunited: Mira, Fang, Fang’s little ones, and of course, Spear. Or rather zombie Spear.

But look, zombie Spear is Spear deep down, even if it’s not obvious at first. And this episode is about Mira figuring that out, after their surprising reunion at the end of last week, even if it’s proving more difficult for Fang to come to terms with this new incarnation of her best friend.

Mira always sort of represented the best of the best of us, even by anachronistic pre-history standards, and so while it’s clear that she knows this is a (somewhat) revived Spear, she also seems willing to accept him for what he is now, even if he can’t quite form words or, well, sit down without some difficulty. (Also, his arm literally is falling off by episode’s end.) But, where it counts, he’s still the Spear she used to know, namely when putting himself on the line to save those he loves. That’s what got him in this whole being an undead zombie situation in the first place, after all.

And so in “The Dead Cast No Shadow,” when the threat of the week arrives – detestable baboon-type things – Spear wastes no time doing whatever he needs to in order to protect his people. This is clear in the neat moment when he has to go back and try two or three times to run up a tree in order to throw himself across to another tree branch. He gets it eventually, but he wasn’t giving up until he did (which certainly can’t be helping with the whole body falling apart situation).

As for Fang, look – who can blame the old girl for being confused and upset by this reunion? When Spear basically retells his story, in pantomime, of what’s happened since his resurrection, right down to the grasshopper funeral he performed two weeks ago, it’s sad to see how close and yet how far he is from being normal again. But it’s also a howling, disturbing freak show, so it’s no wonder that Fang would back off – and want to keep her babies away from Spear as well. Fang is an animal, don’t forget, and zombie Spear surely doesn’t have the same scent that living Spear did. He looks different too, and he’s threatening in his manner at times. Fang’s guard is up.

The close-ups of Mira and Spear as they try to reconnect are so expressive that it’s that much sadder when Spear can’t comprehend that Mira is carrying his child. When he scrawls all over her dirt drawing of a pregnant woman, it’s disappointing for Mira and the viewer, but also… what is Spear drawing exactly? It seems like it’s more than just scribbles.

By episode’s end, this family is fully reunited, if dysfunctional, with Fang still suspicious of the new Spear. But her pups love him, plopping down in his lap to cuddle – what other sign of approval do you need? – and Mira has accepted his new state, for now anyway. And yet, it still feels like things are going to come to a head between the former partners Fang and Spear…

Questions and Notes From Anachronistic History

• Pour one out for the last two members of Mira’s rescue party from her village who were big into magic and rituals, but not great at staying alive. They were primed to become the sort of Abbott and Costello of this season, but alas, they didn’t make it.
• Blueface and Redhead, aka Blue and Red Jr. – that’s what I’m calling Fang’s pups for now on, or at least until we get official names for them – are hungry all the time, and it’s hilarious.
• Spear out-hunting Fang is reminiscent of that Season 1 episode when Fang kept out-hunting Spear shortly after they met.
• Does it seem like the animals we’re encountering in Season 3 are a bit closer to modern creatures than in previous seasons?

After last year’s swashbuckling Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii triumphantly hoisted the black flag, this year developer Ryu Ga Gotoku has set its sights on elevating the Yakuza series’ black sheep. While well-received critically upon its original 2009 release, Yakuza 3’s sluggish combat and uneven story pacing has seen it age about as well as leftover sashimi, leaving it to linger at the back of the pack while the Like a Dragon series has pushed forward into exciting turn-based twists and experimental spin-offs. Yakuza Kiwami 3 & Dark Ties, then, is a much-needed retooling that ratchets up the fun factor of its fighting and smooths out most of its unwanted story creases, resulting in an enjoyable return to the largely underused island setting of Okinawa – even if not all of its changes and additions were powerful enough to uppercut me off my feet.

Although it received an HD remaster in 2019, I must admit I haven’t revisited Yakuza 3 since it first debuted on PlayStation 3 because I couldn’t bear the thought of once again battling my way through its annoyingly block-happy hordes. The bulk of Yakuza 3’s enemies were so stubbornly resilient to Kazuma Kiryu’s attacks that getting further than a few hits into a combo was a struggle; instead of gleefully breaking jaws, Yakuza 3’s fighting felt more like painfully pulling teeth.

Thankfully, that has all changed with Kiwami 3, which dramatically speeds up enemy encounters and endows Kiryu with two flexible fighting styles to cover all his thug-bashing bases. His default stance is classic Dragon of Dojima, a mix of satisfyingly weighty combo attacks and wrestling-style grapples that hit harder than a shotgunned can of Suntory Highball. As entertaining as that is, however, I found myself largely relying on his secondary stance, which arms him with eight different weapons. Those range from the baton-like tonfa to inflict stun, a pair of scythes to inflict bleed, brass knuckles to break guards, a shield to deflect blades and bullets, and a pair of nunchucks to regularly look like a total badarse with.

It’s a versatile and violent fighting style that transforms Kiryu into a lightning-fast, leisure suit-wearing shinobi, and it’s supremely intuitive to pick up. There’s no manual weapon switching or inventory management to fiddle with, since everything in his sharp-edged arsenal is triggered by a seamless combination of tapping and holding the three main attack buttons, allowing you to go from slapping a group of gangsters with a wooden boat oar to flinging a pointy pair of sai at their throat without even the slightest pause in the action. The original Yakuza 3 may have ultimately had more weapons to choose from, but given how quickly they would break I rarely bothered to actually use them, and thus I found Kiwami 3’s Swiss Army Knife-style fighting stance a vastly improved method for dealing out wanton destruction using the contents of a Ninja Turtle’s toy chest.

Kiwami 3’s combat doesn’t just feel smoother and more satisfying, it looks a lot flashier too. As was the case with the previous Kiwami remakes, Kiwami 3’s visual design has been boosted to bring it inline with the more modern entries, from the vastly improved character models to the firework-like particle effects that spark off Kiryu’s furious fists. This aesthetic overhaul extends to the environments too, and I was particularly pleased to explore the remodelled slice of Okinawa that features heavily in Kiwami 3’s opening half, since it’s a region that’s rarely been revisited in subsequent Yakuza and Like a Dragon adventures. Its sun-kissed coastal town vibes contrast nicely with Kamurocho’s hustle and bustle, making it akin to Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth’s Hawaii – albeit on a significantly smaller scale.

What’s the Story, Morning Glory?

While Kiwami 3 broadly retains the same outline of the original game’s story, which centres on a spiteful turf war in Okinawa, the developers have treated the plot like a street thug and given it a good punch up. In the original Yakuza 3, certain chapters confined Kiryu to the Morning Glory orphanage he runs for lengthy periods of time, presenting precious little beyond slowly paging through text-based conversations with its pint-sized residents. Thankfully, Kiwami 3’s structure has been reshuffled to make these sleepy seaside sections entirely optional beyond an initial set of mandatory tutorials, meaning you now have the choice of either taking the time to forge bonds with these little Okinawan Oliver Twists, or just hurrying back to black-belting the Pocari Sweat out of every mobster yakuzin’ for a bruisin’ in the world outside the orphanage’s walls.

If you’d have given me the option of skipping these slice of life segments in the original Yakuza 3 I’d likely have taken it, yet surprisingly in Kiwami 3 I found myself growing more invested in the plight of Morning Glory’s munchkins than I ever did before. That’s thanks to a smart use of snackable mini-games that transform humdrum domestic chores into stimulating diversions. You can complete the kids’ algebra homework against the clock, go spearfishing for flounder and then transform those ingredients into a meal in an energetic burst of Cooking Mama-inspired culinary chaos, or, my personal favourite, steer a sewing machine needle around a Super Hang-On style circuit made of fabric in a delirious bout of high-speed hemming that regularly left both me and the handcrafted tote bag onscreen in stitches. As I ticked off each enjoyable household task, I found myself bonding with these little wide-eyed waifs in a more organic manner. That meant the stakes felt appropriately heightened later on when Kiryu’s criminal past inevitably catches up with him.

That’s not to say that Kiwami 3 completely sharpens the original’s storytelling, and there are still some of the series’ signature attention span-stretching conversation cutscenes present here – including one marathon meeting room exposition dump in its ninth chapter that’s so comically drawn out it actually gives you the option of taking regular breaks for Kiryu to stretch his legs by walking around a tiny office he can’t leave. There’s also a surprising twist in Kiwami 3’s post-credits epilogue that will likely raise a few eyebrows among series purists (though was really neither here nor there for me), but by and large Kiwami 3’s main story has been reworked for the better and it kept me hooked for the 17 hours it took me to reach its cathartic, combat-heavy climax.

Japanesey Rider

Elsewhere Kiryu goes from playing daddy to slaying baddies in Kiwami 3’s other major addition to its main story, Bad Boy Dragon. This biker gang-based riff on the Devil Flags subquest from Pirate Yakuza tasks Kiryu with rescuing new recruits from bullies on the streets, splitting them into squads, and accompanying them into large scale clashes against other rival leather-clad clubs, from the easybeats of Okinawa’s streets to the more fierce fighters from Tokyo’s Night Terrors outfit. In between battles you can hold gang rallies to boost the XP of your members, customise your gang colours, and invest in special attacks to unleash in a scrap, from humble hand grenades to spectacularly silly stampeding bulls.

However, Bad Boy Dragon’s novelty wore off far sooner for me than Pirate Yakuza’s equivalent seafaring mode did, because Kiwami 3’s gang-based brawler is considerably more repetitive by comparison. Whereas Pirate Yakuza featured a healthy mixture of cannon-based naval warfare and on-land scraps, Bad Boy Dragon is mostly just a series of samey skirmishes held in copy-and-pasted warehouses that quickly blur into each other. Despite the fact you’re in a biker gang, there’s very little actual biking to be done – you can’t get stuck into Road Rash-style battles on Tokyo’s expressway like in Lost Judgment, for example. Kiryu’s chopper is strictly used to rapidly ferry him between the four squads under his command before resuming the button-mashed biker beatdowns. Bad Boy Dragon ultimately feels a little half-baked – if you’re going to build a mode around biker gangs, you really need to go the whole chrome-covered hog.

Still, even though I parked Kiwami 3’s biker mode fairly early on, I found plenty of other things to do outside of the main story. In one moment I’d be struggling to deliver towering ice cream cones through streets lined with waddling sumo wrestlers, while in another I’d be customising my 2007-era flip phone with dangling tchotchkes to boost Kiryu’s health and damage. Later I found myself posing as a host at a cabaret club and disappointing the customers with terrible jokes, as well as indulging in optional mainstays like karaoke and the baseball batting cage. Sure, at this point a lot of these amusements have been repurposed more than the fabric of Marge Simpson’s pink Chanel suit, but I was pleased to find that collectible Game Gear games have been included for the first time in the series – even if it is a bit odd that handheld Sega classics like Columns and Sonic Chaos can only be played back at Kiryu’s hideout rather than pulled out of his pocket on the fly. (Perhaps that’s a tacit admission that the Game Gear’s godawful battery life made portable play too impractical?)

Admittedly I was surprised to find the substory count in Kiwami 3 had been whittled down to 31 from the original game’s 100 or so, but then I remembered how many of Yakuza 3’s optional quests were just clones of the same small handful of ideas. Kiwami 3’s substories focus on quality over quantity, and I have no objections to that approach.

The Ties that Grind

Outside of its remodelled main campaign, Kiwami 3 features an entirely new story mode called Dark Ties, which puts the player into the shoes of the sharply dressed and amusingly sardonic antagonist, Yoshitaka Mine. Dark Ties explores Mine’s first steps into the Tokyo underworld, his reluctant alliance with the lecherous Tojo clan heavy Tsuyoshi Kanda, and the complex motivations behind his devastating actions in Kiwami 3’s main campaign. It also allows us to let loose with his ferocious ‘shoot-boxing’ fighting style, which blends fast flurries of punches with acrobatic flip-kicks and the ability to pinball off one enemy and completely redirect your attack towards another to seamlessly continue your combo. He can also unleash devastating ‘Dark Awakening’ special attacks, such as spiking an enemy’s skull into the ground and dragging their faces along the pavement like a bloodied bowling ball.

Mine is limited to the one fighting stance, however, and his skill tree is stumpier than a yakuza’s left pinkie. That’s because his quest simply doesn’t last long enough to allow room for any real evolution of his abilities. Dark Ties has been marketed as a fully-fledged game in its own right, but that seems slightly disingenuous given it only features three chapters versus Kiwami 3’s 12, restricts the action to the same Kamarucho setting that Yakuza fans know better than the calluses on the back of their face-mashing fists, and pits you against just two bosses in two fights a piece.

To be fair, it still took me just over five hours to roll credits in Dark Ties, but that runtime didn’t feel as substantial as it sounds since Mine’s mode regularly gates its story missions behind the arbitrary completion of agonisingly menial tasks. During Dark Ties’ prolonged middle chapter in particular, the advancement of Mine’s story is dependent on performing good deeds for Kamarucho locals in order to slowly boost the reputation of his unlikeable cohort Kanda. A few of these are genuinely entertaining, like being asked to pose as a bouncer outside an adults-only club and evaluating the clientele, but the bulk of them are boring chores like legging it to the nearest convenience store and back so that you can bring a hungry man a bento box.

Tasks like these are made all the more arduous given that Mine isn’t equipped with the same segway-like Street Surfer that Kiryu can whip out on a whim to speed things along in Kiwami 3. I wanted to enjoy Mine’s calculated ascension towards the top of the Tojo clan, but for extended periods, Dark Ties made me feel less like a dragon and more like a dogsbody.

Mine does have one ace up his pinstriped-suit sleeve, however, and that’s the dungeon-brawling roguelike minigame unique to his adventure. Dubbed ‘Survival Hell’ – despite the fact that ‘Roguelike a Dragon’ was sitting right there – this strictly-timed dash for cash and collectibles takes place across five underground arenas, each consisting of four floors of increasingly challenging goons and culminating in an imposing boss fight. Die during a run and you lose it all, but each floor has an optional exit point should you wish to bank your winnings early and invest them into buffs like special weapons and CPU-controlled bodyguards to better your chances of survival on subsequent runs. It’s compelling, chaotic, and stuffed with countless surprises. Having rolled credits on both Kiwami 3 and Dark Ties, Survival Hell is the one feature of either story that is still calling me back for more.

Scarlet opens in IMAX on February 6 and in wide release on February 12.

Hamlet is one of the most adapted stories of all time, and for good reason; there is something deeply human about the tale of a young man destroyed by the need to avenge the gruesome death of his father. More than 400 years after Shakespeare wrote the tragedy, in a much changed world, there’s still something relatable about the young Prince of Denmark’s obsessive, grief-driven vengeance.

But what is an adaptation for if not reimagination, recontextualization, and the addition of titanic dragons that rain literal lightning judgement down on those below? Scarlet – an animé adaptation of Hamlet from Oscar-nominated auteur Mamoru Hosoda – is not afraid to get playful with its source material, and the film is the better for it. Here, Hamlet is a girl named Scarlet (voiced by Mana Ashida). Still a medieval princess growing up in Late Middle Ages Denmark, Scarlet spends her youth as all young people should – playing in the dirt, and basking in a parent’s love.

However, for those who know anything about the source material, this innocence cannot last. When Scarlet’s father, the King of Denmark, is coup-ed by his own brother, Claudius, with the help of Queen Gertrude, Scarlet goes full Arya Stark. She trains as a swordswoman, driven by a furious thirst for revenge. Her plot is interrupted by her uncle’s own machinations, who poisons his niece with little fanfare before she can take him out herself.

Unlike Hamlet, which stretches the above series of events (or some variation thereof) over four-plus hours, Scarlet speeds through the aforementioned plot in the first 20 minutes or so. The film has other ambitions – namely, the exploration of the beautiful and deadly Otherworld, a mysterious desert land where dead from across the ages go before they pass on to somewhere else. Scarlet wakes up in this liminal space after her poisoning, and is no less focused on revenge; when she hears Claudius is also in this place, she sets out to kill him once again.

But the Otherworld is populated with other souls on their own journeys. Scarlet almost immediately crosses paths with Hijiri (Masaki Okada), a present-day EMT who seems set on helping everyone he meets in the Otherworld, even when they are trying to kill him. The unlikely pair journeys across the unforgiving desert, crossing paths with bandits and musicians, children and elderly. A massive, mountain-like dragon sometimes descends from the atmosphere to strike the unworthy down with storms of lightning.

If that last part sounds spectacular, it is, and this is a film that is worth seeing on a big screen if possible. From The Girl Who Leapt Through Time to the Oscar-nominated Mirai and Belle, Hosoda has proven himself a master at making the mundane feel epic and the fantastical feel real. The lightning giant is just one example of the visual grandeur of this animated world, which treats dynamic fight sequences, musical performances, and quiet, resilient moments trudging through a sandstorm as equally important.

Mamoru Hosoda doesn’t get nearly enough credit for the ambition of his themes. In its original form, Hamlet is a story with an intentionally claustrophobic court setting. The inward-looking nature of its powerful characters, most especially its youthful and actively grieving protagonist, places any of its observations about the nature of humanity on a very personal level. Even when we call it politics, it is about the interpersonal drama of the Danish court.

In Scarlet, our princess swordswoman is very much driven by the same toxic, murderous family dynamics as the film’s source material, but by expanding the setting to this Otherworld, Hosoda is also expanding its theme. When Scarlet is asked to reflect on the understandable selfishness of her suffering, it is done through interactions with people, communities, and civilizations from across time; dear Hamlet never had such a resource of scope. The result is a deeply personal story that, through the visual grandeur and texture of this land between life and death, resonates on a societal level too.

Scarlet has a deep empathy for its world, which is to say that it has a deep empathy for our world. This kind of gentleness can often be mistaken for a lack of realism, but Hosoda’s script is not unaware of humanity’s many cruelties. Rather, it suggests that we must fight anyway, in the small ways that we can, and that – maybe – across generations and centuries, something might come of it. Some viewers might find that thesis depressing, but I think there’s something hopeful about it; judging by the way Hosoda balances the film’s bloodshed with humanity’s potential for culture, caring, and community, I think the filmmaker might think so too.

The Strangers - Chapter 3 is in theaters now.

There was a moment while watching The Strangers - Chapter 3 that I realized there really was just nothing going on under the hood. Not only in terms of this movie, but of this entire Renny Harlin-directed trilogy. Despite comprising over four hours worth of story over three installments following the same protagonist, very little has been narratively accomplished, and no core ideas have been thematically clarified. This realization came to me during a scene where Maya, our hero played by Madelaine Petsch, witnesses the main antagonist viciously murder someone she should theoretically care about. But she has zero reaction whatsoever. No tears, no anguished screams of “No!” or “How could you?”, just a blank stare as yet another one-note character is snuffed out in this exasperating excuse for a trilogy.

At the end of Chapter 2, Maya managed to kill Pin-Up Girl, one of the three main villains. Those villains would be the Strangers in question, a group of masked serial killers who like to knock on doors and chop up people with axes. Scarecrow, the leader and only male of the group, ended the last movie looking pretty upset about this turn of events, so you would think this movie would involve Maya and him speeding towards a thrilling battle to the death, right? Well, no, actually, that’s not what happens at all.

In fact, the first meeting between Maya and her main enemy involves him finally being unmasked, as they have a surprisingly calm conversation inside a chapel and acknowledge that they’ve each killed someone the other one cared for (Maya’s fiancé Ryan bit the dust at the end of Chapter 1). Scarecrow tells Maya to leave town, but this is a horror movie, so instead of doing the sensible thing, Maya sticks around for one more go-around with the bad guys before we’re finally free of this nonsense.

Setting aside that Maya has a perfectly good escape vehicle that she unceremoniously wrecks by not paying attention while she’s driving (really), or that the body count across three movies has gotten so high that you would think this town would warrant being declared a national emergency, there is simply nothing left to do with these characters within the scenario they’ve been established in. But Harlin and screenwriters Alan R. Cohen and Alan Freedland seem to know this, which is why The Strangers - Chapter 3 does involve a fresh conceit, that being that Maya is recaptured almost immediately after leaving the chapel since Scarecrow and Dollface have plans to turn Maya into the new Pin-Up Girl. You know, because when you kill a serial killer, you become a serial killer. That’s how it works, right?

At the very least, it’s the first novel spin this trilogy has had on the Strangers premise, but it doesn’t register because the characters involved are too thin to support it. In my review of Chapter 2, I remarked that Maya had become somewhat more textured by her experiences in the first two films, but Chapter 3 goes out of its way to give her nothing to do. She has virtually no dialogue outside of her first and final scenes, and while Madelaine Petsch felt engaged in the middle film when she was fighting and fleeing from her tormentors, here she spends almost the entire movie with a vacant expression that’s not informed by what’s going on around her. It’s as if everyone involved had grown tired of the whole deal after filming three films back-to-back, and while that’s certainly understandable, it doesn’t excuse the movie being as boring to watch as it appears to have been to make.

That lack of creative investment spills into every aspect of the production. New characters are introduced and promptly dispatched before we learn anything about them. Characters from the first two films who had Obviously Evil signposts over their heads are revealed to be obviously evil. There are more backstory scenes showing us the origins of Scarecrow and Dollface that don’t have any real bearing on the present day events. Even the kills in this one feel marred by fatigue. If you’re not going to bother getting us emotionally invested in your characters before killing them, at least make the kills appreciably gory so they can be enjoyed on a popcorn entertainment level. But this movie is weirdly low on blood despite having an absurd number of deaths; you’ll find much more blood (and a much better movie) if you check out Sam Raimi’s Send Help this weekend instead.

I don’t like slamming movies this way. I go into every one hoping it’s something I can enjoy on some level, and I'm an avid fan of the horror genre. But this is the worst installment in a trilogy of movies that I sincerely have nothing substantially positive to say about. While I was expecting a movie lacking in ambition or nuance based on its predecessors, Harlin and company have turned in a finale that is bereft of urgency, tension, or even baseline thrills. The Strangers - Chapter 3 may not be the worst horror movie I’ve seen in a theater, but it might be the laziest.

Gaming in 2026 feels like a mad scramble to get what you need and not much else, lest you have to pay over the odds for it. The Lenovo LOQ 15 AMD Gen 10 feels like an entry-level gaming laptop very much of its time. Its modest processor and GPU aren’t going to blow you away, but its hardware and overall design might just be what you need to get gaming at 1080p, without breaking the bank.

Lenovo LOQ 15 – Design and Features

The LOQ 15 isn’t about to win design awards. Just like its predecessor, the Lenovo LOQ 15 has a clean design without the extra frills that more expensive gaming laptops seem to require these days. . It’s functional, with a solid feel to it and the ability to smoothly and easily close the lid one-handed.

The port selection includes a USB-A, USB-C, and a 3.5mm headphone jack, on the right-hand side, and a couple of extra USB-A ports and an HDMI output on the rear. There’s also an Ethernet port if you want to play games where stable Wi-Fi isn’t readily available. There’s no high-speed USB4 or Thunderbolt 4 or 5, but unless you’re planning on transferring RAW image files or UHD video from an external device, that’s not likely to be something you’ll miss. Three USB-A ports are plenty for a keyboard, mouse, and webcam, or other external device, and the USB-C port is great for recharging your phone or connecting external storage devices. Keeping the majority of the connections on the back ensures the cables are tucked out of the way too.

Though the onboard Wi-Fi 6 is hardly cutting-edge, it’s plenty fast for everyday office work and gaming.

At just over 5 pounds, the LOQ 15 isn’t the most portable laptop, but it’s lighter than most gaming laptops and it’s not a chore to carry around – I can’t see it causing much strain being carried around in a backpack either. It’s big enough that I probably wouldn’t want to game on my actual lap, but it’s portable enough that gaming on a train or plain table isn’t outside the realm of possibility.

Lenovo cites RAM and storage upgradeability as a benefit for this laptop, and indeed it is. It’s just a shame RAM is so expensive that actually doing so anytime soon in a budget gaming laptop seems unlikely. The 16GB is fine for most games, but there are some AAA games that demand 32GB for anything beyond low settings, so you may find some experiences limited until you can upgrade.

The model I reviewed comes with a 512GB SSD, which is fine for indie libraries, but while testing a handful of AAA games I often found myself having to uninstall something just to install the next game – though that’s something most people won’t have to deal with. The 1TB model isn’t a big cost upgrade, just adding an extra $100 if you customize the build yourself, so before AI-inspired shortages send that northwards, grab the larger model while you can.

The display is reasonably bright at 300 nits, and its 144 Hz refresh rate is welcome for more casual games and esports – though don’t expect this laptop’s entry-level GPU to be putting out triple digit frame rates in AAA games.

The keyboard is a real contender for one of my favorites in recent memory, with a solid feel and satisfying light click-clack as you type away. There’s 1.5mm of travel, and none of the keys feel crammed together. One of the advantages of a laptop this size is you can let your fingers roam a little more, and Lenovo takes full advantage of this with its keyboard design. There’s only white backlighting, but as long as I can see the keys in the dark, I’m not too concerned with what color they are.

Audio is what you would expect from a more affordable gaming laptop with a mere pair of 2W speakers. There’s basically no bass to speak of and at higher volumes there’s a distinct drop in clarity. The support for Dolby Atmos is a welcome addition if you’re movie watching, but you are 100% better off listening through headphones as you’ll find the experience much improved.

The Lenovo Legion Space software the laptop ships with is somewhat useful, in that it can help you manage power profiles for the laptop’s various components, and it gives you an insight into their utilization, temperature, etc. It’s a handy tool but one that likes to radiate from the taskbar with notifications aplenty every time you boot it up. I don’t need it, I doubt most users do, but it’s there.

What I really wish wasn’t, was the McAffee antivirus trial which had almost expired by the time I got the laptop up and running. I feel like I’ve been haunted by trials of this antivirus for 30 years and they’re still coming. Windows Defender is plenty for most - and anyone who wants more, will want to choose their own. “Free trials,” like this, are more annoying than anything else.

Lenovo Loq 15 – Performance

As much as looks are important for a gaming laptop, performance is still king. That’s not to say that I went into this expecting the Lenovo Loq 15 to be the kind of gaming laptop that dominates the competition; It’s an entry level gaming laptop, after all. But for an affordable device with entry-level components, it was perfectly capable of playing everything I threw at it.

All tests were conducted at 1080p resolution, with maximum settings, and where available, with DLSS set to quality.

In synthetic tests the Lenovo LOQ 15 put out perfectly serviceable numbers. It’s around 30% slower than the Alienware Aurora 16X we reviewed recently, but costs 40% less, and its real-world gaming results are even more impressive.

In Call of Duty Black Ops 7, the Lenovo laptop managed 78 frames per second which looks buttery smooth on the 144Hz high refresh rate display. Cyberpunk 2077 was naturally more demanding, but we still managed to get 49 fps with ray tracing at Ultra settings. We were even able to achieve a playable 32 fps when using RT overdrive, which for an entry-level mobile GPU like the RTX 5050 feels like an impressive achievement.

Unfortunately we couldn’t get the benchmark to finish with Frame Generation enabled - it just crashed towards the end of the benchmark every time I tried running it. Hopefully, it’s just a weird anomaly on our test system, it remains an option for improving performance even further despite the sky-high detail settings.

Metro Exodus: Enhanced continues to be a demanding game for even modern GPUs and the Lenovo LOQ 15 was only able to manage 37 fps there. Very playable, but not the smoothest of experiences when the action picks up. Total War: Warhammer III was much more playable, though, with 84 fps on average for a very smooth gaming experience, despite using Ultra settings.

Assassin’s Creed Shadows is one of the newest games in our benchmark list and it shows: The game looks utterly gorgeous. Even on an RTX 5050 we were able to manage 38 fps without frame generation, and 66 fps average with it enabled. I did encounter a strange blocky artifact in the benchmark for this game during testing, but it wasn’t present in the main game itself, so I’m taking that as a weird quirk of the benchmark than any real issue – one worth mentioning just in case, though.

All of that gaming power does come at the slight cost to noise levels. When plugged in and on high performance mode, this laptop does get rather loud and I wouldn’t want to game on it without headphones. But that’s hardly a huge ask. And if you don’t mind taking a slight hit to performance and playing in more balanced power modes, the noise levels are no way near as distinct.

General performance in Procyon was decent – comparable to some other AMD laptops we've reviewed recently like the Razer Blade 16, despite its newer and higher-end CPU. However it’s very clear Intel holds an advantage in these kinds of benchmarks, so consider that carefully if you’re primarily interested in this laptop for general office work.

Battery life, unfortunately, wasn’t amazing. It’s not terrible, lasting just over five hours in our Procyon battery test. But that’s more comparable to high-end gaming PCs with more powerful processors and big, hefty GPUs. The Lenovo LOQ 15 has a small battery, and that helps keep weight and size down, but it’s not the kind of machine you’ll use on the go for a full day of work or play.

I found the Lenovo LOQ 15 AMD a pleasure to use day-to-day. It’s light enough, and I particularly appreciated that despite being an entry-level laptop when it comes to gaming, it’s far from entry-level in style and design. The lid opens and closes easily with one hand, the design is sleek whilst still giving little nods to its gaming chops, like the honeycomb air intake grills on the underside.

The somewhat limited battery life wasn’t an annoyance day to day, but getting a little battery anxiety around a full work day on a brand new laptop isn’t ideal. This is one laptop you’ll want to keep the charging brick handy if you’re planning a long session.

There aren't a ton of games that I've happily put more than 100 hours into as quickly as I have with Mewgenics. This feline-flavored, turn-based, roguelike tactical RPG takes place on a 10x10 grid, with mostly traditional classes like Fighter, Mage, Hunter, Tank, and Necromancer, among others. What sets it apart, aside from the cutesy macabre art style that slathers its creative zones with blood and poop, is that so many of the skills and attributes that your team will end up with are randomized and for the most part out of your control. That all but ensures no two runs will play out the same way, forcing you to improvise and play the hand you're dealt. Combined with the absolute mountain of content here – so much that I'm still seeing entirely new enemies, skills, mutations, and loot pop up after more than 150 hours – it's been able to draw me back in time and time again by dangling the possibility of an absolutely wild team coming together and bulldozing through the boss who turned my last party into kibble. I still haven't seen the final ending after all that time (this game has several) but I can't imagine I'll be tired of it before I do.

Mewgenics is a game about cats, but it's not necessarily going to appeal to people who passionately love them because it's a dark comedy that treats them as meat to be put through a grinder. The name itself is a play on eugenics, a morally appalling practice of selective breeding that has historically led to things like forced sterilization to remove undesirable traits from the gene pool, so you know going in that it's going to be a little spicy. If you've played any of Edmund McMillen's previous work (here he's collaborating once again with Tyler Glaiel), such as the infamously difficult Super Meat Boy or the infinitely replayable Binding of Isaac, you'll have a sense of the type of humor to expect. It's delightfully gross and endlessly weird at every turn.

Even knowing that, as a long-time cat owner myself, I was perhaps a bit too conservative with just how unsympathetic and detached you're expected to be. I probably took longer than I should've to unlock crucial upgrades for my house because doing so requires shipping dozens of cats off to live with a set of goofy weirdo NPCs, never to be seen again. One of the most important and flamboyant, Tink, will only take newborn kittens, and in exchange he'll give you tools that provide more information on how to breed more kittens – and he needs a lot, so you have to get accustomed to parting with them right away. Other characters want older cats, mutated cats, injured cats, or cats who've been on runs to specific places in order to improve stores or add new rooms to your house, among other things. Traditionally an RPG like this is about nurturing your characters and developing them until they become more powerful, but Mewgenics requires a different way of thinking: cats with low or unremarkable stats are lost causes who will weigh your squad down, so you're best off spending them like currency and keeping only the picks of various litters.

Selectively breeding your cats takes place in the fairly simple house screen, a 2D side view where your cats chaotically mill around while you arrange furniture pieces that you find as loot or buy from a shop, inventory Tetris-style. The goal here is to improve stats like Stimulation and Comfort in order to get your cats in the mood to produce high-quality offspring and improve the chances they'll come out with favorable mutations. Those can be things like a messed-up tail that makes their basic attacks inflict burning, or fur that gives them more health regen when they're wet, or leech eyes, among tons and tons of others that are all represented visually on your increasingly weird-looking cats.

(You also have to clean up cat poop daily to keep your Health stat up by simply clicking on piles of various shapes and sizes. It's a bit of a chore after a while, especially when it gets crowded and you have to move cats out of the way to get to it – somehow, of all the furniture items I've gathered, I've never seen a single litter box.)

When everything's arranged to your liking, you hit the End Day button and your cats will choose their own mates based on who's in a room with them, as well as their own genders, orientations (yup, there are gay and bisexual cats), and libedos. Then, out come the kittens after some bizarre cat humping and gooey birth animations that take obvious pleasure in being unsettling. (You can tone that down if you need it to be safe for work.) Optimizing this to produce the most powerful cats possible while also avoiding too much inbreeding (which, as Tink will tell you, isn't cool even though it has the word "breeding" in it because it causes birth defects) is tricky – but you can't really fail at this part because, even if you lose all your cats, you can just start again from scratch using the randomized strays who show up every day.

The real challenge is in finding the traits you want and ensuring they're passed down to new generations without too many side effects, and that definitely takes some planning. Mewgenics doesn't make it super easy, since there's no way to view all your cats in a list or spreadsheet – you just have to tediously cycle through them one at a time. You do unlock some tools to label them (and view their gnarly family trees), but when you have 40 cats roaming around it can be a pain to find one with the stats and abilities you're looking for when you go to put together a four-cat party (or fewer, if you want to live dangerously and level them up faster) for an adventure.

Building your team is another area where Mewgenics is unconventional and unpredictable because when you're picking cats and assigning their classes you can't see what all of their starting abilities will be. You'll get their base stats, mutations, and basic attacks, and sometimes they'll come with a spell or passive ability from one of their parents' classes, but it's not until you lock in their class that you'll learn what you're really working with and if they'll synergize well. Considering that each of the 12 classes has 75 abilities that might pop up (even after all this time I'm still seeing new ones), I get the same thrill from this reveal that I do from picking up my hand in poker or seeing the modifiers on a daily run in Slay the Spire or Monster Train 2: sometimes it's good news and I'm excited to see where it takes me, sometimes it's not and I brace myself for a thrashing and hope for a surprise turnaround if I can survive long enough to level them up and unlock some better skills.

What's inconvenient at this stage is that while you can see what items you have available in your house inventory before you set out on an adventure, and after you lock in your classes you're taken to the equipping screen to deck your cats out with up to five pieces of potentially build-defining gear apiece, you cannot see those items when you're actually picking your classes and your starting abilities are first revealed. That might be fine if you have a fantastic memory, but for the rest of us it's frustrating to not be able to check if I have a good piece of gear to boost the stats of my summoned familiars at the exact moment I'm deciding if I should go with an animal-friend Druid or a robot-building Tinkerer, or if I should go with a Fighter or a Tank instead.

It's tricky to keep track of what you have on hand because gear in Mewgenics doesn't last forever. You can expect to get three, maybe four runs out of something before it breaks, and that's assuming you don't wipe and lose everything you took with you and picked up along the way (except for your choice of one item from several that a helpful weirdo saves for you after a failed attempt). If weapons breaking in recent Zeldas rubbed you the wrong way, you probably won't enjoy that aspect of Mewgenics, but I actually do like the way it prevents me from relying too heavily on any one strategy. You can get something incredibly powerful and play with it more than once, without letting that item define every run you'll do from that point on.

Taking gear on only two or three runs may not sound like much, but that's more than the actual cats get. Another reason you can't count on the tricks you used in the previous run working just as well on the next, even if you use the same classes and gear, is that each cat only gets one adventure in which to level up and develop their skills. (You'll be able to use them in combat one or even two more times during special battles where major monsters attack your house.) That was tough to get my head around at first, because I'm accustomed to my RPG party members sticking around, at least until I get them killed.

Maybe this is why you're not allowed to name your own cats, and instead they come pre-named from a pool of (I estimate) a billion different silly possibilities: Mewgenics doesn't want us to get too attached. After a while I stopped paying much attention to their names except to chuckle at them, preferring to think of my squad members as their classes rather than individuals. Only the ones I ended up using as my primary breeding stock really stuck with me. (Man, talking about this game makes you say some weird stuff.)

When you head out to one of the three acts' adventure maps, which are all drawn in a jerkily animated, charmingly childlike style, you start with a single path that then branches off into two, each of which has two completely different stages packed with their own unique sets of enemies – so many you definitely won't see them all even after several runs. You'll definitely want to mouse over them and read their descriptions before diving into battle, because some of them have some extremely nasty tricks up their sleeves – including a few that can instantly and permanently kill a cat or infect it with a parasite that takes up a gear slot. The stakes are already pretty high given your cats are permanently injured every time they get downed, and can be outright killed if their body is destroyed by attacks or eaten by zombies, so you don't want to get surprised if you can help it.

Each zone is also stocked with multiple bosses that range from powered-up versions of your own classes to huge, nasty monsters with their own creative game-changing mechanics, and one that's basically just an evil Kirby. Yes, a few of them are annoying (I avoid going to Act 1's Boneyard unless a quest demands it because that boss is a total jerk), but on balance they're excellent battles that often make me think differently about how to manage my team's turn order and abilities.

One thing that stands out to me about the structure of Mewgenics' runs – aside from how they can take as long as two hours once you've unlocked all the zones (and some secret ones) – is that unlike most roguelikes, you rarely get to make decisions about the path you take between battles. You mainly get to choose between the default path and a harder one with better loot and one more battle to level up a cat in, and then very occasionally between two types of rewards (usually an equipable item or a piece of furniture for your house). That makes the between-battle encounters feel a little less interesting than in a lot of similar games, especially when the random encounters turn out to be basically a coin flip where you're picking between a red pill or a blue pill, or pushing a button vs pulling a lever without any indication of which will give you a bonus and which will give you a debuff.

There are, of course, some more in-depth, multi-stage encounters where you're picking between a set of options in a choose-your-own-adventure story where your chances of success for each one are determined by a cat's stats. However, since the cat whose stats you're working with is chosen randomly, there are two layers of luck involved before you get a shot at a good outcome. It often feels completely random, but that's alright because so much of Mewgenics is doing the best you can with circumstances beyond your control.

During combat, there are so many different things in play that the interactions between cat mutations, passives, spells, gear, environmental modifiers, and enemies can get crazy complex, and figuring out exactly what happened – or predicting what will happen – can be like investigating a crime scene (often with just as much blood splatter). Why did that enemy pingpong between two trash bags, with each bounce doing one point of damage, until it died? How did one of my cats just straight-up eat a boss without me even telling it to move? Or, why did that giant Daddy Shark get to take another move and insta-kill my Cleric when I'd carefully placed him just outside what should've been his projected attack range? (That one stung.) All of those answers are in there somewhere if you know where to look and study the rules carefully. In one of those cases, it was related to – you guessed it – poop. The map does get chaotic when there are a lot of enemies and fire or plants or ice on the screen, but thankfully there's a tactical view that usually clears things up… mostly.

Most of the time, if you think something might work, it will. Water and ice spells and spells will put out fire, water will conduct electricity and zap everything standing in it, that sort of thing. However, sometimes its rules aren't super logical: a couple I've noticed is that robots are susceptible to bleeding, poison, and parasite infestations, and the Butcher class's innate meat hook weapon can't actually hook meat unless you luck into the right upgrade for it. But again, most of the time it works like you'd expect it to.

I do love when a powerful team dynamic emerges as you earn new skills (your choice from a random selection of three) or raise one cat's stats after every battle. Recently I had a squad with a Monk who could toss out meat pickups that typically just heal the team, but when combined with a Butcher who can turn all of those meats into minion fly familiars and a Druid who can boost those flys' stats and turn them into killing machines, it became a way to raise an army in a single turn. On another run I had a Cleric whose health regeneration applied to the whole team and an item that let me continually boost that regen multiple times per turn, allowing my Necromancer to run wild with a high-damage attack that also drained half of his own health. There are countless examples like this, and while you won't win the lottery with a great combo every run, they happen more than often enough to make me excited about what might be next.

What's a little frustrating when I'm planning out my moves in a tough fight where every action matters is that there's no way to access a cat's full character sheet while you're in a battle, so you can't see their list of mutations or all of their equipment's full effects when you need that information the most. It's almost all represented visually on your cats, at least, but you have to remember, for example, what a cat having a second head growing on its butt means. When the rules are changing so dramatically from run to run, I would love to be able to reference all of them at any time.

[Editor's Note, February 9: Shortly after publishing this review, the team behind Mewgenics let us know that they planned to make tweaks in response to some of Dan's "requests," as well as other feedback. For example, a few UI updates already arrived ahead of launch, including being able to see mutation info on the level-up screen and during combat, being able to look at your other cats during level-ups, and being able to see cat genders from the backpack screen.]

As if all of those variables weren't enough, Mewgenics throws yet another curveball at you when it sends you on one of its story or side quests. Those all revolve around a unique and powerful item that changes the rules in a big way and telling you to take it to a specific zone. One of the most memorable gives you a five-second time limit for every action – and if you don't make a move, the AI will take over and move for you. (I was glad I wasn't playing that one on my Steam Deck because the controls there are serviceable, but not nearly as quick as with a mouse and keyboard.) Another shook things up by giving my cats random selections of abilities from every class when they leveled up, creating powerful hybrids that are usually rare. There are tons of these available, though it's kind of a bummer that if you fail a side quest you don't get a second attempt at that unless it randomly comes up again once you've paid enough cats. The story itself is pretty silly and light – don't expect any Hades-style epics here – but good for a few yuks as you do the bidding of an incompetent mad scientist.

Another area where Mewgenics is truly exceptional is in its sound and music, which are fantastic in both big and subtle ways. It comes with a collection of original and hilarious songs that accompany each level and culminate in major boss battles that are designed to loop for as long as a battle takes, and there are multiple variations on each that include instrumental versions – your cats will even meow along to them sometimes. (My favorite is probably "Where's That Smell Coming From?") And those meows come from a vast selection of different randomly selected voices, including some celebrity cameos.

One of the best touches, though, is the crowd sounds. Mainly you'll hear this after beating a battle: there's cheering and clapping with varying enthusiasm based on how quickly you pulled off your win. That's fine, but the best part is the shocked gasps when one of your cats is killed in action. That gets me every time – and trust me, I've heard it a lot.

Lastly, Mewgenics has a fun and surprising approach to the practice of "save-scumming," where you quit out of a battle you've messed up and restart it with knowledge of what not to do. I won't spoil what happens, but there are consequences if you abuse it. Thankfully, you do get some flexibility in case of a power outage or spouse demanding you stop playing that game you've been playing for 150 hours and do the dishes, and it's kind of implicit that you have permission to save-scum once per run – and yes, I use it regularly.

This review contains full spoilers for this week’s episode of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms.

“Are there no true knights among you?!” Dunk bellows at the assembled nobles late in this week’s episode, titled “Seven.” With the last-minute arrival of Prince Baelor Targaryen, who will fight on Dunk’s side against his own kin, Dunk would seem to have his answer. And, boy, does he sure need the help.

“Seven” is the gloomiest, literally and figuratively, episode so far, with the colorful palette of the previous episodes replaced by a muddy, grim aesthetic. And with the exception of one brief exchange between Dunk and Raymun Fossoway, there’s none of the playful banter or humor that’s been a highlight of the previous episodes.

That’s because “Seven” is what would be considered Plot Point 2 in a movie script, the part of the story close to the end where the hero is at his lowest point and with seemingly no way out of the jam he’s in. (Next week is the second-to-last episode of the season.)

Dunk must confront his fate after coming to Tanselle’s rescue in Episode 3 and beating up Aerion. The reasonable Baelor understands why Dunk did what he did, but he still assaulted a Targaryen prince so he must face some punishment (Baelor has already prevented Dunk from simply being executed).

Baelor reads Dunk his rights, if you will, and the latter faces Aerion, Maekar, and their lords to demand a trial by combat. But, of course, Aerion finds a way to weasel around it by calling for a trial of seven, an ancient custom where each side enlists seven knights to fight each other and the gods will decide who wins. (Even Maekar thinks his son is just trying to wuss out of fighting Dunk one-on-one by employing this tactic.)

Unfortunately, Dunk doesn’t know enough knights, let alone six good ones, willing to help him. Eventually, thanks to Egg, he assembles six knights – we should’ve known it was too good to be true that Ser Steffon Fossoway would keep his word! – and it’s not until Baelor’s arrival that a trial of seven can commence. Bertie Carvel instills in Baelor a kind but firm authority and a compassion and honor missing from many other Targaryens.

Another big highlight of “Seven” is seeing Egg in his full Prince Aegon regalia. The opening scene where Egg apologizes to Dunk for deceiving him is moving, especially when Egg tears up as Dunk scolds him. He was just a kid who wanted to go to the tourney so badly that he hatched a half-assed scheme to be anyone’s squire after his drunken brother Daeron decided to sit it out.

Speaking of Daeron, the one gift he does seem to possess beyond his capacity for alcohol consumption is prophetic dreams. He’s dreamt of Ser Duncan the Tall with a slain dragon, which adds an additional layer of morbid curiosity to the fortune teller’s grim prophecy about Egg’s future in Episode 3.

Other observations:

• Egg’s horrifying story about Aerion threatening to castrate him so then he’d have a sister he could marry. Those freakin’ Targaryens, man.
• Dunk’s vision of Ser Arlan shrugging was hilarious.
• Tanselle – who did a fine job repainting the sigil on Dunk’s shield – has fled, so there goes Dunk’s one romantic hope.
• Animal lover Dunk petting the mouse in his cell window and later talking to his horses.
• Aerion demeaning a nobleman by making him climb under the table to fetch his walnut.
• It was nice to see armorer Steely Pate have another good scene with Dunk.
• Ser Lyonel knighting Raymun Fossoway. Congrats on your promotion, Raymun!
• That big jerk who humiliated Dunk before the nobles by farting.
• Daeron knows he’s a coward who will end up in a hell without wine for lying to Maekar that Dunk kidnapped Egg.
• The Game of Thrones theme kicking in at the very end. Let’s gooooo!

Warning: This review contains full spoilers for The Pitt Season 2, Episode 5!

We’re now five episodes and a third of the way into The Pitt Season 2. Most other shows these days would have rounded the halfway mark by now, but that’s the joy of watching something that hearkens back to the pre-streaming era of television. There’s still plenty of room left on this runway. Even so, the tone of the series is definitely intensifying as the situation at the Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center grows more dire, resulting in what is easily the strongest chapter of Season 2 to date.

Episode 5 is great about addressing some of the niggling problems with previous installments, most notably when it comes to the relative lack of focus on Patrick Ball’s Dr. Langdon. As I’ve said before, if this season were to have a main focal character, it should be Langdon, but he’s been purposely relegated to the sidelines by his old mentor. But now Langdon is back in the thick of things, and we start to see the simmering tension between him and Noah Wyle’s Dr. Robby start to boil over.

It’s great watching that mostly silent feud play out in Episode 5, as Robby does everything within his power not to talk to Langdon or be in the same room with him. You can easily sympathize with both men. Robby’s angry dismissal of Langdon was one of the standout scenes of Season 1, and it’s easy to recall the sheer pain and disbelief he felt in that moment. But at the same time, Langdon has paid his dues, and you can understand his frustration at being flatly rejected by a thoroughly unsympathetic Robby.

That all comes to a head in the final moments of Episode 5, as Louie (Ernest Harden Jr.) fittingly becomes the catalyst that forces both men to work together. There’s been the sense all along that the affable Louie’s long string of luck is about to run out, and that finally happens here. Not a bad cliffhanger on which to end the week.

Elsewhere in the ER, Dr. Santos (Isa Briones) is really the star of the show in Episode 5, as the series takes a slightly more humorous approach to her particular plight. The running gag of Santos getting one or two sentences deeper into her dictation, only to be interrupted again by Whitaker (Gerran Howell) or Ogilvie (James Howell), never gets old. But it’s also nice seeing her on the backfoot so much this season, after Season 1 really played up her crusading, righteous doctor side. Paperwork is the bane of us all.

By the same token, it’s fun to watch the insufferable know-it-all Ogilvie continue to get his just desserts. Last week it was almost killing a patient with a reckless extraction; this week, it’s being forced to clean out an elderly woman’s impacted colon.

Ogilvie’s fellow student Joy (Irene Choi) also gets a nice little bit of added attention in this episode. Up until now, Joy has been a fairly one-note character. She’s the scowling, disaffected med student who (understandably) can barely tolerate being paired with Ogilvie. But we get a chance to see a different side of the character when she swoops in to offer a solution to the family shuddering under the burden of crushing medical debt. It’s a happy ending to a depressing subplot, and one that tells us a lot more about who Joy is and why she’s seemingly so detached from it all.

Finally, this episode makes some inroads with Dr. Al-Hashimi (Sepideh Moafi), a character who so far has been played a little more antagonistically than I’d like. She’s the newcomer disrupting the carefully oiled machine that is the ER, and we’ve been left to sympathize with Robby on that front. But the two characters share a strong scene together where Al-Hashimi rightfully berates Robby for treating her like an underling rather than a colleague. It’s subtle, but it helps turn the character in a more favorable direction. Hopefully, that trend continues in the coming episodes.

Dell wants the Alienware 16X Aurora to be your star mid-range gaming laptop, and it mostly succeeds in that role with its strong RTX 5070 performance and gorgeous 16-inch, 2K display. But after spending enough time with it, its keyboard gets too tiresome to game with, and I clung to my gaming headset even when playing alone. Already, those flaws mixed with a high price tag are tough to swallow. However, the 16X still gets the job done (and in style), so it might still be worth taking a look.

Design and Features

Just because it’s smaller than the Area-51 doesn't make the 16X Aurora sleek — it’s still a chunky beast, but I’m not mad about it. The indigo colorway spreads like a silk sheet over the Aurora’s anodized aluminum lid. I love this color way more than what the Area-51 is wearing (teal), which is ironic because that’s the more expensive one.

The curved edges around the lid, hinge, and sides give a soft approach, which is a refreshing break from the usual edgy gamer look. With little-to-no flex over its iridescent Alienware logo, this gaming laptop is hella sturdy. It stacks up to 14.05 x 10.45 x 0.76~0.92 inches and 5.7 pounds.

Popping open the hood revealed more of the same sleek colorway, this time on a magnesium alloy frame with a nice satin finish. There’s a curved palm rest for comfort and ease of lifting the lid. Meanwhile, the keyboard is neatly packed in the center, but supports only one-zone RGB lighting, which looks cheap. The touchpad sits just underneath, somewhat smaller than I expected, and the bezels on the display look a bit thick due to the angled lip.

A neat feature about the underside is there’s a thick slab that props the laptop up, with vents all around it to ensure good airflow. More laptops need better cooling designs like this — there’s nothing more annoying than an underside that gets scorching hot because you positioned it on the wrong surface.

Configurations

The Alienware 16X Aurora is a classic mid-range gaming laptop, but it comes in pricey compared with other rigs in its category. But that’s what you get when you’re looking to buy from a premium brand like Alienware. Here’s what’s packed in the unit Dell sent me for review:

This review unit costs $1,999 (seen for $1,649), which is up there for an RTX 5070 gaming laptop. It also comes in an RTX 5060 version for $1,549. But if you’re looking for something cheaper than that, you need to lose the “X” in the Aurora 16X (yes, really).

The 16X Aurora comes in two GPU variants, including the RTX 5060 and RTX 5050, and both opting for an Intel Core 7-240H processor. They cost around or under $1,000. But wait, what does the “X” really lose you? Well, you drop to a 120Hz display with lower brightness, a 720p webcam, and you lose the Thunderbolt 4 port. The latter two are pretty insignificant, but losing the display is tough.

Display

While I will continue to rant about Alienware needing to offer OLED or Mini-LED options for their gaming laptops, the Aurora 16X’s IPS display is quite stunning.

This display is plenty bright, rated at 500 nits, and offers a crisp 2560 x 1600 resolution, so I could admire the sharp strands of hair on Naoe Fujibayashi’s head in Assassin’s Creed Shadows. Making my way through Hijacked in Call of Duty: Black Ops 7, the brown wood planks contrasted well against the milky white ship, which was dreamy enough to get me killed by some jabroni running out of the cabin.

With Nvidia G-Sync to reduce screen tearing and the 240Hz refresh rate, getting in car chases across Night City in Cyberpunk 2077 felt satisfyingly smooth as I drifted back onto the highway. However, keep in mind that if you want to use the full breadth of the 240Hz refresh rate, you’ll need to turn down the graphics quite a bit. An RTX 5070 can’t get you quite that far on the highest settings – especially at 1600p.

Everything In-Between

There’s a decent number of ports to get your essential peripherals all connected to the Alienware Aurora 16X, even if you don’t have Bluetooth accessories. There’s a Thunderbolt 4 slot for fast connectivity (great for external storage) as well as an additional USB Type-C port. You also get two USB Type-A ports and a headphone jack to connect legacy devices. Then there’s an HDMI 2.1 slot to connect to an external display, and an Ethernet port to speed up your internet speed. But with Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4, you shouldn’t have to worry much about connectivity.

The keyboard is comfortable thanks to the cushy palm rests, but the key travel is a bit short. It’s okay to type on, but it’s not satisfying to use when gaming. I wish the keyboard was a bit higher on the deck. The angled palm rest makes it feel like my hand is sliding off when in the WASD position. And the touchpad is in a similar boat where it’s unpleasant to use – it’s too resistant, stiff, and small.

Laptop webcams are almost never good, and the Alienware 16X Aurora’s 1080p shooter is no exception. It’ll get you through video chatting with friends, but between the grain imposed over the image and the washed out colors, I wouldn’t try to stream with this thing.

Dolby Atmos isn’t enough to elevate the speakers beyond middling. The dialogue in Cyberpunk 2077 sounded crisp, but combined with the gunfire and techno music, it felt more like a muddled mess. It gave me a headache listening to it for a short while. I highly recommend gaming with headphones.

Performance

The Alienware 16X Aurora delivers all the performance you expect from an RTX 5070, hitting solid numbers even in the highest settings on intensive AAA games. However, you may struggle in certain areas, especially if you’re averse to supersampling technology.

Before I got to the crunchy numbers, the Alienware 16X Aurora suffered from some serious stuttering while gaming. I updated my graphics drivers and Windows 11, and yes, turned it off and on again. I took a peak at the Alienware Command Center (Settings > Performance) and saw that Hybrid Graphics was enabled, which allows the laptop to switch between integrated and discrete graphics to save on battery life. I disabled that with the MUX Switch and games ran fine after that.

I reached out to Dell for some insight, and a representative tried to replicate the issue on a different machine, but didn’t see the stuttering. I have experienced issues with hybrid graphics on other gaming laptops, so it might not be a problem on 16X Aurora, but if you run into it, you now know what to do.

Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 ran smooth as I started rinsing fools through a Japanese feudal castle and a war-torn Alaskan town. The benchmarks reflected that great performance, too, proving that the Alienware Aurora 16X can handle competitive games at the highest settings. However, as I mentioned earlier, the Aurora isn’t taking full advantage of its 240Hz screen. If you want higher frames, you need to turn the graphics down.

On a more intensive test, the Alienware 16X Aurora cleared 30 fps in Cyberpunk 2077 at its native resolution set to Ray Tracing Ultra. However, Ray Tracing Overdrive proved to be too much for it, and that tracks with most mid-range gaming laptops. But if you run it at 1200p, you’ll get playable frames at the highest settings.

With no upscaling technology, the 16X Aurora’s RTX 5070 did decently well on the Metro Exodus benchmark, scoring close to 60 fps at 1200p on the highest settings. But it failed to get past the 30 fps threshold at its native resolution.

In games like Assassin’s Creed Shadows, you can see the benefit of frame generation technology. At Ultra High settings on its native resolution, the Alienware 16X Aurora jumped from unplayable to an average of over 50 fps.

Battery Life

Gaming laptops typically don’t last very long in the battery life department, although they’ve improved over the years, with laptops like the Razer Blade 14 hitting over 7 hours. But the Alienware 16X Aurora isn’t a 14-inch gaming laptop with reduced power output. Its chunky 16 inches lasted only 3 hours and 20 minutes on Procyon's Office Productivity Battery Life Test. (This is with hybrid graphics enabled.)

The Alienware 16X Aurora isn’t going to get you very far when gaming on battery alone, not to mention the fact that the performance will tank as well. I highly recommend keeping the Aurora 16X plugged in at all times.

Spoilers follow for Star Trek: Starfleet Academy Episode 5, “Series Acclimation Mil,” which is available on Paramount Plus now.

So here it is – the Benjamin Sisko episode that Starfleet Academy has been teasing since at least as far back as last summer. The notion of returning to the mystery of what happened to Avery Brooks’ legendary Deep Space Nine captain is a daunting undertaking for the fledgling Starfleet Academy, but fortunately the episode’s writers (Trek vets Kirsten Beyer and Tawny Newsome) don’t attempt to alter or add to Sisko’s story – which after all was essentially completed with the end of DS9 – but rather use his legend to expand on one of the new show’s main characters, Sam (Kerrice Brooks).

I mean, that’s literally how the episode starts off as “A Story About Me” is scrawled over the “A CBS Studios Production” title screen. Make no mistake: “Series Acclimation Mil” is about Sam, not Sisko. The episode is even named after her!

And while the story involving Sam is another of the coming-of-age type tales that Starfleet Academy is interested in, one where the holographic student finds some semblance of independence from her overbearing “parents,” there’s no denying that merely evoking the name Ben Sisko is a big pull, and that as a result anything short of the return of Brooks in the role can’t help but feel a bit anti-climactic.

As all the episodes of this first season have done so far, “Series Acclimation Mil” focuses on one of the series’ leads, and in so doing finally gives us some information about who and what Sam is. We knew she was a photonic being, aka a hologram, but now we know that her real mission at the Academy is to serve as an emissary for her “people,” who come from a world called Kasq and were enslaved by organic beings “a long time ago.” As a result, they now fear that interacting with non-photonic lifeforms will mean a return to the slavery of their past, and so they’ve sent Sam to feel things out and figure out what the deal is with these organic types.

The thing is, her overseers are basically jerks who don’t get her or understand the outside world in the same way that Sam has already come to do in her short time at the Academy. So basically she’s the same as any student who goes off to college and realizes their parents are totally out of it. Join the club, kid.

The episode is shot in a pretty unconventional way for Star Trek, with Sam talking directly to the camera at times and doing some impromptu dancing, while on-screen graphics illustrate some of what she’s discussing and distinctly non-Trek music pops off in the background, all of which will surely infuriate the Very Angry crowd who either specialize in the monetization of hate or just plain don’t understand what Star Trek was ever about (or maybe are just bots). Whatever the case, I liked the unique presentation of this episode, though I do suspect that if the aim here is to have it speak to young audiences, it will read as more “cringe,” as they say, than anything else to that very same audience.

Of course, the real reason Sam is talking to the camera is that this is all supposed to be the message she sends Sisko at the end of the episode. Speaking of which, if they couldn’t get Avery Brooks back, then Cirroc Lofton returning as his son Jake is the next best thing. The holographic recording of Jake talks about his dad the way he knew him, as a man, a guy who loved baseball, a chef, but most of all as a dad… the lessons and example of which Jake pulled from when he eventually became a dad himself. This father/son relationship was always one of the most important on Deep Space Nine, and the fact that Beyer and Newsome lean into it with their script is just perfect, as is Lofton’s return. Sisko’s relationship with his status as Emissary of the Prophets was always an uneasy one, and it only makes sense that Jake would remember his dad as the man he was, not the god he would become.

Meanwhile, the B-story involving the War College’s Chancellor Kelrec (Raoul Bhaneja) is amusing in and of itself, especially since it gives Tig Notaro and Robert Picardo something to do this week, and certainly the reveal that he feels that Holly Hunter’ Chancellor Ake betrayed Starfleet when she resigned years earlier is interesting.

But back to Sam, the return to Sisko’s old stomping grounds to party, resulting in the hologram getting drunk, leads to various hijinks that just stop short of becoming annoying. Starfleet Academy has proven adept at weaving its various characters’ ongoing story threads into whatever else is going on each week, and just when drunk Sam is about to become too much, we cut to Caleb and Tarima flirting outside the bar, or tensions with the War College kids escalating (again).

The culmination of the episode is sweet, as Sam visits with Jake through some Magic Science and comes to realize that just as Sisko did 800 years earlier, Sam has to make her own life choices for herself as much as she can. It’s the “We’re Not Gonna Take It” of Star Trek resolutions, thank you Dee Snider, and it works beautifully, culminating in words spoken by Avery Brooks himself (if not recorded for this actual episode) as the image of Sisko can faintly be made out in the clouds.

Questions and Notes from the Q Continuum:

• When that DS9 theme music kicked in… man.
• Tawny Newsome didn’t just co-write the episode, but that’s also her as the Starfleet instructor who turns out to be the latest incarnation of Dax.
• I’m surprised Robert Picardo’s The Doctor, as a hologram himself, hasn’t been given more of a stake in Sam’s story so far. Although his advice about moving on after loss is telling…
• While it doesn’t seem that Sam’s “people” were created by humans or the Federation – presumably Sam has been made to look humanoid/human to fit in better – their history of enslavement does sound familiar, as we saw on Star Trek: Voyager how a whole army of holographic doctors had been forced into hard labor when they became obsolete.
• Those War College jerks!
• A theremin? Why not!
• “Bajoran kids don’t play.”
• They don’t even show images of Sisko anymore on Bajor because they believe he’s transcended human form… and probably because Avery Brooks would have to be paid for it?
• Why would the Sisko Museum have Benny Russell’s typewriter if Benny had only existed as a dream/vision/whatever?
• Jake’s novel Anslem does have its roots in the original DS9, having first been mentioned in the all-time great episode “The Visitor.”
• The bar formerly known as The Launching Pad was in fact the site where Sisko fought a Vulcan, specifically Solok, the a-hole who he'd also battle in a baseball match in the episode “Take Me Out to the Holosuite.”
• While I said earlier that this episode doesn’t really change Sisko’s story in any way, that is perhaps not entirely true. After all, if Dax and Jake don’t have the answers regarding what happened to Sisko after he ascended to the Celestial Temple, then presumably nobody does? Which means Sisko never did come back… even though he promised in the DS9 finale that he would. But then again, maybe Dax and Jake just aren’t talking…

The QN90F Neo QLED is Samsung’s highest‑end LCD TV for 2025… at least below the stratospherically priced 8K models. I've got the 65" version in for testing, currently selling for $1599, which carries over the same quantum dot technology and much of the design and performance of last year's QN90D, but there have been a few notable changes: a small bump in max refresh rate to 165 Hz (up from 144 Hz), and last year's glossy screen has been replaced with the matte anti-glare coating directly from the S95F OLED. Whether the latter is an improvement is up for debate. Fullscreen and HDR brightness also gets a small but welcome boost from last year's model – I measured more than 2300 nits on a test slide and real-world HDR highlights can easily hit 1100. Samsung also touts its NQ4 AI Gen3 processor, but I don't usually comment on these because Samsung (and other manufacturers, to be fair) rarely, if ever, provide performance metrics for its chips, and besides, the specific processing chip inside these TVs seems to have a nebulous, at best, connection to how they perform in our own, real-world testing.

And our testing reveals that, much like last year's QN90D, the QN90F really struggles with blooming. A combination of Samsung's local dimming algorithm and the physical construction of the backlight produces blocky, grid-like zones that are ruinous to dark scenes. This shouldn't happen. At this price level, or even cheaper, Hisense and TCL offer more and better controlled backlight zones, and Samsung's own QD-OLED models, like the S90F, offer substantially better all-around performance at a like-for-like price. Yes, the QN90F is colorful and bright, but there's much more to a top-of-the-line TV for gaming, and Samsung's LCD offering is falling too far behind to recommend.

Setup, Design, and First Impressions

Unpacking, maneuvering, and assembling the stand for the 65” QN90F was relatively straightforward. Four screws hold the stand on the base plate and another four screws attach it to the TV. The stand itself is a hefty chunk of metal, satisfying to hold and reassuringly sturdy, and it does a good job of minimizing wobble.

It’s hard for manufacturers to differentiate their TVs via their physical design, especially from the front – they’re all big gray rectangles – but I love the look, feel, and weight of the QN90F. It’s sleek and thin without being OLED-dangerously-thin. The first thing that caught my eye (and not my fingerprints), though, was the matte screen coating, unusual for a TV, which I’ll touch on later in the review.

The power cable is closer to the center of the TV, which is a great change from every other TV having power and IO on completely different sides of the display. I still think the power cable is a bit too short, especially once it's routed through the clever channels built into the back of the display. The rear of the TV is plastic, but it doesn't feel cheap.

IO is excellent, as it should be at this price point. Samsung includes 4 full-bandwidth HDMI 2.1 ports, all supporting 165 Hz at 4K. Great news if you’re hooking up multiple consoles. Additionally, there’s an optical audio out, Ethernet, and an RF connection for broadcast. No headphone jack, sadly, which is an omission becoming more and more common.

Samsung is using a common remote across multiple SKUs; this is the same remote (with a neat little solar cell on the rear) that shipped with the S90F. Annoyingly, like LG’s remote, an input selection button is nowhere to be found. Switching inputs means going back to the Home/Start screen, moving left and then down to “Connected Devices,” and waiting for Tizen to catch up to you. Speaking of Tizen…

Tizen: “Preparing. Please Try Again Later.”

"Preparing. Please Try Again Later." This is an actual error message that Tizen displayed when I tried to use the quick settings menu to adjust the QN90F's brightness. I thought I'd experienced it all – the slow navigation, laggy menus, loading throbbers (!) – (read my S90F review for more), but Samsung keeps finding new ways to annoy me. Whether using the Home screen to load a streaming app, switching inputs, or diving into the settings menu, Tizen continues to feel like a low-end mobile phone or some off-brand tablet given away free as part of a promotion.

I may be old school, but I think all the fundamental, device control touch-points of a TV's menu should be as close to the metal as possible, and they should be fast. Backlight brightness, color temperature, local dimming, sound volume, the current input... these are things that shouldn't be knotted up and entangled with the same code that opens and closes your Samsung Motorized Smart Blinds. Yet, with Tizen, every should-be-easy adjustment brings up a loading throbber:

It’s unbelievably frustrating. Samsung needs to take a good look at the Google TV interface from something like the Hisense U8QG. Navigation there is fast and easy. Even Amazon’s FireTV on a lower end model like the U65QF is a joy to use compared to Tizen.

Setting all that aside, once the menu is actually loaded, Tizen behaves like you’d expect for a modern TV smart OS. The Home screen can be cleaned up and calmed down a bit after diving into the Advanced Features menu (turning off auto-playing video is a must!), but Samsung devotes a bit too much screen space to its TV “recommendations,” leaving the app list, which is what you’re likely looking for, as a small, horizontally scrolling band of icons. As a contrast, Google TV surfaces apps in a large format grid, which is much faster to navigate.

Sound

Sound quality on the QN90F is surprisingly good… for TV speakers. Of all the displays I’ve tested so far, I’ve been the most impressed with Samsung’s engineering effort here. Bass extends deep enough to be satisfying for movies and games without booming, mechanical noises, or distortion, and, importantly, speech intelligibility is good. A-OK for general use.

But for the best, engrossing audio experience, we still recommend a surround sound setup or soundbar. Our top pick happens to be Samsung’s own HW-Q990F, which includes a subwoofer for a good reason: TVs simply don’t have the form factor – no front facing drivers for stereo imaging – or enough chassis volume for deep bass.

Reflection Handling and Viewing Angles

Samsung takes the unusual path, certainly for a TV, of shipping the QN90F with a matte AR coating. For those that find the mirror-like reflections from glossy screens annoying, this is definitely a plus, but manufacturers have made great progress on their high-end models, especially in the last few years, at delivering really excellent glossy coatings.

The comparison image above shows the reflection of a compact fluorescent bulb in all of the screens I’ve tested so far, shot with the same exposure, and ranked generally in the order of quality. Samsung’s QD-OLED S90F (currently at the same price as the QN90F) takes the top spot with a truly incredible AR coating, followed closely by Hisense’s U8QG. For those that find the mirror-like reflections from glossy screens annoying, I think the QN90F offers a decent alternative to something like LG’s C5, which is a bit too reflective and a bit too purple.

The macro image above shows how the matte coating diffuses the light from the subpixels behind. This is a fairly coarse and aggressive coating, not my favorite, but the slight reduction in clarity is only visible very near the screen. At typical TV distances, it’s not an issue.

Also worth noting while looking at the macro is that the QN90F uses a BGR subpixel layout, rather than a traditional RGB stripe. If you’re using the Samsung as a PC display, you’ll want to adjust your ClearType settings to reduce color fringing on text. And like many VA panels, the pixels are dimmed in a one third on, two thirds off manner between rows, so the picture is susceptible to a “scanlines” effect.

Viewing angle performance is typical of most VA panels: loss of color and contrast off angle, and dark scenes are especially susceptible to a gamma shift on the periphery of the screen. This is one of the largest drawbacks of VA panels compared to the OLED competition, and Samsung’s own S90F is much better here.

This purple-blue shot, inspired by a fullscreen ad for Amazon Luna during the TV’s setup, shows the color shift off axis, although the photo doesn’t fully capture how it looks in person. I also noticed that the QN90F has a patchy appearance, but only when displaying blue. Otherwise, the matte coating does a good job handling the reflection of the flash.

Color, Calibration, and SDR

For every display I test, my calibration process begins by measuring the backlight spectrum for each of the individual RGB primaries along with a white spectrum. This allows for subsequent performance metrics to be accurately measured with my colorimeter. The color slide above shows three important aspects of the QN90F’s color performance:

1. White spectrum against a mercury reference
2. Individual, normalized RGB response
3. Subsequent chromaticity coordinates compared to the DCI-P3 reference

The peak wavelengths of the primaries, their shape, and their separation (or purity) define the corner coordinates of the gamut triangle. Samsung’s quantum dot backlight does an excellent job of covering (and over-covering) DCI-P3: the three primaries are smooth, separated, and distinct, giving the QN90F rich, vivid color.

In the Expert Settings menu, the default Color setting of 30 gives the best compromise of coverage and accuracy without clipping. Green is spot on, but red and blue do extend a bit past reference. While not perfectly accurate, I’m a sucker for colorful images, so I welcome a bit of over-coverage.

Before I get into the calibration, I need to mention that Samsung doesn’t allow local dimming to be turned off on the QN90F. This is a problem for me, as a reviewer, because I can’t fully disentangle the performance of the LCD panel itself from the behavior of the backlight, making my job quite a bit more difficult (or impossible in the case of lag measurements).

But it’s also a problem for you. Yes, local dimming is one of the reasons you’d buy a TV like the QN90F in the first place, but Samsung ships the TV with a 165 Hz mode, presumably for PC use. Not being able to disable local dimming when in Windows is a bit nuts, and I can’t think of a good reason why Samsung would omit the option altogether. I’ve done my best to mitigate the issue for all subsequent measurements, but I wanted to mention that up front.

Because I’m primarily looking at the TV as a gaming display, I test calibration in the display’s Game mode, making sure that the TV can deliver the same accuracy and performance as in its Film modes but without the processing that can cause input lag.

Out of the box, Samsung has tuned the QN90F extraordinarily well for SDR content. Grayscale tracking is excellent, hitting 6500K in the default Standard WB mode with low Delta E’s across the board. Great job here. BT 1886 gamma is the default, but setting gamma to 2.2 is the right move to better match most sRGB content. Once done, gamma nicely follows the 2.2 target throughout.

Brightness is one of the QN90F’s major strengths. With a 10% window on a black background, local dimming set to high, it’ll do an eye-searing 2370 nits. That’s extraordinarily bright, but still not quite as good as the U8QG, which’ll hit 4000. You’ll likely never see this in real content, though; a white test patch is really the best-case scenario for manufacturers to show off how hard they’re willing to drive (and cool) their backlight LEDs. With a more reasonable 5% gray background, the QN90F tops out around 1400 nits, tapering off to around 760 nits fullscreen. This is a great result, and very good for daytime viewing. 760 nits is roughly 3x what an OLED can deliver, so FALD LCDs are still superior for bright room viewing.

Samsung also does a very good job of keeping the gray background with the 5% slides roughly the same luminance. Other panels really struggle to maintain that 5% level, prioritizing the white patch and letting the background go dim.

HDR, Contrast, and Local Dimming

HDR on the QN90F varies depending on what you’re looking at. Bright content is very, very good: colorful, bright; but dark content is seriously let down by weak, splotchy local dimming performance.

My first impressions of the TV’s local dimming performance were watching Severance and The Gorge on Apple TV, where I saw egregious blooming on dark scenes. It was so bad, I had to double check to make sure the QN90F was actually a VA LCD rather than an IPS. The image above shows the ridiculously distracting, grid-like blooming around Miles Teller’s silhouette.

Checking the native contrast of the panel is very difficult because Samsung doesn’t allow local dimming to be completely turned off. When the TV is first powered on, there is a brief window where LD is disabled, so I was able to get a shot of the panel’s true uniformity:

A little splotchy, but that doesn’t explain the LD performance in The Gorge. The panel’s native contrast ratio is probably around 4600:1, much better than the 1000:1 typical of IPS, but in dark scenes, the QN90F might as well be an IPS.

Samsung’s LD algorithm seems to push near max brightness instead of using a more open LCD position with less backlight output. Exacerbating this is the very grid-like appearance of the zones, which I counted. The 65” version I have in for review uses a 40x18 grid, or 720 zones. In the comparison shot above, check out how blocky and unnatural the backlight zones look for the warning text, compared to something much smoother like Hisense’s U8QG. The U8QG, and other competitors like TCL’s QM8K, at the same price or lower, are offering 2K+ zones, with a smoother, less boxy transition between the neighboring zones.

Unacceptable performance at this price point.

All that said, bright HDR content is pretty impressive. Day racing in The Crew: Motorfest is vivid, colorful, and very bright. The sun in the image above measured at 1008 nits, and the splotchy blooming isn’t visible at all.

EOTF tracking is only OK. With a black background, Samsung does a good job of tracking target luminance all the way up to a peak of around 2200 nits, but tracking (and brightness) gets worse with a 10-nit background, more typical of real content. I’ve noted the 10 nit background peaks on the slides above, and both max out a little north of 1100 nits.

Real content brightness is excellent, nearly topping the chart, but tracking is generally too dark, leading to a fairly high error rate.

Gaming on the QN90F

I’ve been a fan of The Crew series for years, and testing the QN90F gave me a nice opportunity to dive back into Motorfest, a game which usually sees me completely lose track of time. As I mentioned in the previous section, cruising around during the day is awesome: bright (real bright!), and colorful. Dark scenes are still colorful, but Samsung’s LD algorithm leads to too much blooming.

The QN90F supports VRR with FreeSync Premium Pro, and it worked especially well with Motorfest, which is limited to 60 fps. I was using PC mode at 165 Hz, and gameplay was smooth with no stuttering or tearing. One small niggle I found was that 60 fps content in VRR causes the panel to exhibit a faint vertical jailbar effect. As crazy as it is to use a 65” TV as a desktop monitor, it does allow me to catch a few pixel quirks that you might otherwise miss at couch distances.

Another issue is that 60 fps content – a new frame every 16.7 ms – can do a lot to hide the effect of slow response times, which can get lost in the general sample-and-hold blur. Higher refresh rates, like 165 Hz (with a smaller 6 ms window), demand much faster response times, and the QN90F really falters here: its VA panel is the slowest I’ve tested so far, with gamma-corrected response times averaging out to over 22 milliseconds.

That 22 millisecond average comes from a mix of some relatively fast and some very slow gray-to-gray transitions. The slide above highlights (really low-lights!) the rising and falling behavior from RGB 31 to RGB 191. Rising takes 36 ms and falling an even slower 42 ms.

If Samsung implemented some amount of overdrive, like it does on its LCD gaming monitors, many of these could be dramatically sped up, reducing the amount of blurring and trailing behind objects in motion.

The TestUFO pursuit shot of the QN90F at 165 Hz shows off the smearing and trailing behavior behind each UFO, but very dark scenes in games can often be worse, since VA panels tend to have trouble with dark transitions. For example, the 0 to 31 transition takes 46 ms.

Check out the pursuit shot on my S90F review to see the type of motion clarity that can be achieved on an OLED, even at a slightly lower 144 Hz. For gaming, especially high refresh rate gaming, nothing beats OLED. The QN90F is a bit frustrating in two aspects: 1) Samsung could have closed the gap slightly with some overdrive tuning, and 2) Samsung is selling the QN90F at the same price as the far-superior S90F. For almost any scenario where gaming performance is a priority, outside of perhaps the very brightest rooms where the QN90F’s impressive max luminance could come in handy, OLED is the better choice, especially at price parity.

The latency chart is just here for reference. Because Samsung doesn’t allow local dimming to be turned off, I can’t get accurate click to photon times. My testing relies on measuring how long it takes before a USB input/keypress causes the screen to change from black to white, but the backlight behavior is delayed by several frames, so it doesn’t represent real-world latency.

To be sure, though, I spent a lot of time in Game Mode using the QN90F as a PC monitor, and I didn’t notice any particularly bad input lag. I’d expect latency numbers comparable to the other LCDs on the chart.

The Competition

In the LCD realm, Hisense’s U8QG and TCL’s QM8K are simply better than the QN90F. Both are cheaper. The U8QG is brighter, has better HDR EOTF tracking, and Hisense offers way more dimming zones for better control of blooming. The TCL might not be as bright, but, of the three, its response times are much better tuned so high refresh rate gaming will be clearer.

If you’re already looking for a TV at or around the $1300 mark, my suggestion would be to bite the bullet and take the small price jump for an OLED. Samsung’s own S90F OLED is the same price and thoroughly better: similar real scene HDR brightness, lower EOTF error, excellent AR coating, amazing contrast from the perfect blacks and individually controlled pixels, and top-tier motion performance for gaming. LG’s WOLED C5 is another option that won’t disappoint, but at the same price, the S90F is better.

When the original Nioh hit the scene back in 2017, it emerged as the very best soulslike outside of FromSoftware itself, with exemplary combat, thrilling bosses, and absurdly deep mechanics. Nioh 2 improved just about every aspect three years later, but didn’t change a whole lot overall, essentially making it “Nioh 1, but better.” Nioh 3, on the other hand, is far more than just an iterative sequel. This is a total transformation of the formula – one that trades out static overworld maps for enormous open fields covering multiple different eras of Japanese history. This shift, plus the addition of an entirely new Ninja Stance that changes the rules of Nioh’s combat and a litany of smaller quality of life adjustments, all amount to the most significant shake up the series has seen up to this point, and one of the best Soulslikes to date.

To get the bad out of the way first, one area that has not seen any sort of significant shake up is the storytelling, and that’s a shame because it has always been one of the weakest elements of the series. Like previous Nioh games, the story serves mostly as a means to guide you through a fictionalized retelling of significant battles and wars in Japanese history – one in which monstrous yokai, magical stones with corrupting influence, and Guardian Spirits are commonplace. You play as Takechiyo, the grandson of Ieyasu Tokugawa, and heir to the seat of Shogun, who must travel back in time to obtain a means of defeating an ancient evil that has corrupted the present.

The biggest issue with Nioh’s story is that it’s very dry and, to be frank, just kind of boring. Someone with a better knowledge of Japanese history may get more out of it thanks to knowing the context and significance of these historical figures and events, but for a layman like me, there’s just not enough work done to make you care about what’s going on in each of the eras that Nioh 3 took me to. Fortunately, cutscenes are short, the choreography is great, and these story shortfalls never get in the way of the action elements that otherwise make Nioh 3 one of the best soulslikes around.

I’ll say this right out of the gate: Nioh 3 has the best combat of any soulslike, past or present, end of story. It nails the feel and look of its weapons, the variety within those weapons, the depth of its mechanics, the challenging and aggressive enemy AI, the multitude of different approaches you can take in any given combat encounter, and the list just goes on-and-on. It’s all best-in-class quality at every level.

Nearly all of that was true about Nioh 2 as well, but what elevates Nioh 3 even further into the stratosphere is the split between two different combat modes: Samurai and Ninja. Samurai mode is the traditional Nioh combat experience, characterized by careful resource management through the usage of stamina-restoring Ki Pulses, the need to switch between low, medium, and high stances depending on the given encounter, and a careful balance of defensive techniques and offensive rushdown.

Ninja Mode, on the other hand, is a brand new style of Nioh combat that switches out the aforementioned Ki Pulses and stance switching, replacing them with much faster attacks that require far less stamina, allowing me to basically suffocate enemies with strikes without even giving them a chance to fight back. In addition, Ninja Mode also gives you access to three ninjutsu attacks – like shuriken, traps, and magical spells – which refill as you land attacks and are great for targeting enemy weaknesses or hitting annoying flying enemies.

The two modes can be swapped freely on the fly, and they even have their own equipment sets, letting you essentially build two different characters with different combat focuses and styles. Team Ninja smartly avoids falling into the trap of forcing you to use one stance over another in order to defeat a certain type of boss or enemy, which often stymies creative combat expression in other games. Instead, both stances are always viable, and the choice of whether one is better than the other for a particular type of encounter is always left up to your discretion and playstyle.

It was always a great feeling to return to a boss that I previously died against, and adjust my strategy by using either more or less of one of the modes. For example, in a fight against a boss with powerful but predictable attacks, I might stick to Samurai Stance so I can parry their attacks and have more stamina left over to counterattack. But in a fight against a faster and more erratic boss, I might focus on Ninja Stance and use my quick step mist ability to maneuver around to their more vulnerable backside and avoid having to block all together.

While I have a clear preference for the flexibility and speed of Ninja Stance, developer Team Ninja has done a great job of balancing the two stances to make them both worth swapping between regularly. Samurai Mode feels a little weaker at a base level, but is balanced by being much better defensively – it also has an additional mechanic called Arts Proficiency that rewards you with a powered up special or heavy attack if you’re able to fill up a meter by landing attacks and successfully blocking without taking hits. Meanwhile, Ninja Mode feels like Team Ninja finally taking off whatever limiters they might have placed on the combat in previous games in the service of balancing stamina management, lifting up their hands and saying, “you know what, just go wild.”

Perhaps the biggest departure from previous Nioh games is the shift from a mission structure to a series of open worlds. Over the course of Nioh 3’s 40+ hour campaign, you’ll be time traveling around from the Edo Period, to the Heian Era, to the Bakumatsu Era, and even to antiquity. Every period that you travel to comes with its own enormous battlefield to explore, with tons of points of interest all over the map, featuring optional bosses, challenging combat encounters, and worthwhile rewards.

That last bit is important because one of the few complaints I’ve historically had about the Nioh series has been a lack of satisfying rewards due to the random nature of loot drops. The loot is mostly still random in Nioh 3, but there are now other meaningful rewards for you to seek out. Clearing out Lesser Crucibles will power up your Guardian Spirits, granting you access to new Spirit Skills; defeating Masters will unlock new nodes on specific weapon skill trees; finding Jizo Statues will allow you to select from a variety of bonuses that will aid you when you’re inside a Crucible; sniping the weasel-like Chijinko demons out of the sky will get you elemental variations of techniques in your skill tree; you’ll find equippable skills in the many chests strewn all throughout the world; and all of this on top of the already existing Kodama and Scampus collectibles that existed in past Nioh games.

Doing these open world activities also adds to an Area Exploration rating, which itself comes with rewards, from stat bonuses, to skill points, to more areas of interest becoming pinpointed on the map. Rarely was I ever surprised while exploring any of the Nioh 3 open zones, but I at least was well rewarded for my time, which counts for a lot in a game where you need every advantage you can get.

But while exploration is well incentivized and the environmental design of these huge open landscapes is impressive, Nioh 3’s open worlds feel like they are missing a unique identity. Part of the problem stems from the fact that you’ll fight the same enemies in just about every zone. This was an issue with the previous Nioh games as well, and it is felt even more so when you’re wandering through visually distinct open worlds that all still feel the same. There are almost no enemies that feel unique to a time period. The cyclopes that appear in the Warring States Era are the same ones that appear in the icy Heian period, except instead of rocks, they throw snowballs.

There is at least a fairly wide assortment of enemies to face overall, and a large number of them are completely new to the series, but it is a little disappointing that the returning enemies don’t have any new tricks or attacks to keep me on my toes.

Not that you’ll really need anything extra to be kept on your toes. Nioh 3, like the previous two games, is very difficult, even by soulslike standards. Enemies and bosses are relentlessly aggressive, and if you’re not careful about your stamina management, you’ll find yourself regularly being stunned and vulnerable to high damage grabs that will kill you in just about one hit. But that difficulty is key to why the combat of Nioh 3 is so thrilling. Besides, even though the difficulty is high, checkpoints are well placed, shortcuts are abundant, and load times are super quick, so I rarely became frustrated despite dying 290 times over the course of the campaign.

Loot remains the most frustrating element of Nioh 3. The fact is, this is a loot system that exists for the benefit of New Game+ at the detriment of a first-time playthrough. For New Game+ and beyond, it’s great. You’re able to dig deep into your collection of gear, pick out useful sets and plan builds around their powerful set bonuses, and really get into the nitty gritty of gear customization. But until you get to that point, gear gets outdated so quickly that it just feels like a waste of time and resources to even bother with it. I’ve played enough of these games to know I shouldn’t sweat the loot on my first playthrough, instead just equipping the gear with the highest number and moving on. But my prayers go out to anyone tackling Nioh 3 for the first time, because poring over the literal thousands of pieces of gear on top of all of the equippable skills, skill tree, prestige points, guardian spirits, and soul cores that can be placed in either the yin or the yang position, it’s just… a lot.

Thankfully, there is now an auto-equip feature that allows you easily equip the most powerful gear you own with just the press of a button. What is especially nice about it is that you can set it to automatically equip based on weight. So, for example, you could just set it to equip all of the heaviest gear you have if you don’t care about having a bad dodge with just a few invulnerability frames, or you could set it for a balance of good gear and a good dodge. Or you could go toward the other extreme and set it to auto-equip the best gear that still lets you zip around the battlefield, even if it means leaving one or two gear slots completely empty.

Auto-equipping obviously has its limitations, as it doesn’t take into consideration the build-defining special effects of a weapon or set bonuses. But it does give you an option to dramatically reduce the amount of time spent playing the menu game of Nioh 3, without impacting those who enjoy the process of meticulously fine tuning their builds at every point of the campaign.

The Galleon 100 SD is the keyboard I’ve long wished Corsair would make: a full-fat gaming board crossed with a Stream Deck, the powerful macro box made by Corsair subsidiary Elgato. The result is a keyboard that takes up an inordinate amount of space – and costs as much as both products put together – but does exactly what it should.

You get all of the nice-to-haves you’d want from a great modern gaming keyboard, like 8000Hz polling, pre-lubricated mechanical switches and FPS-focused features like SOCD, plus that unparalleled control and customization that a Stream Deck provides, all in a chassis that is among the best Corsair’s ever built. Still, there’s also room to more fully realize the potential in a future design here, with magnetic switches being a curious omission and software improvements to be made.

Corsair Galleon 100 SD – Design and Features

The Galleon 100 SD continues the modern styling trend Corsair introduced with the Vanguard Pro 96, with textured knobs, thin fonts and a rounded black aluminium chassis. The MLX Pulse mechanical switches inside offer a smooth keypress, with moderate 45g actuation force and a linear action that is well-suited for gaming and pleasant enough for typing as well. The RGB-backlit PBT keycaps provide a bit of texture for the finger and a long lifetime versus ABS alternatives, while a gasket mount arrangement, the aluminium chassis, and layers of sound dampening provide a pleasantly deep sound signature. In short, the Galleon ticks all of the boxes I’d expect for a premium mechanical keyboard in 2026, without quite challenging more boutique typing-focused examples built for enthusiasts. Magnetic switches would unlock extra FPS-focused functionality, but it seems that Corsair is targeting a broader audience for this one.

The big change here is the addition of a 12-key Stream Deck into the right-hand side of the board, replacing the number pad from a full-size layout with a four-zone LCD display above and two chunky knobs at the top. The 5-inch 1280x720 display is vibrant and crisp, with text and icons that are readable (if not pin-sharp) from a normal viewing distance, and of course the keys are physically closer and more convenient to press than they would be on a separate Stream Deck unit.

Everything here is customisable in the Stream Deck software, which I’ll cover in detail later, but the default upper arrangement includes media information from Spotify, a weather forecast, volume levels and an app launcher. Holding down either knob will toggle between the two zones beneath it; with a regular press and rotation performing different functions depending on the widget selected. For example, the Spotify widget skips tracks and plays or pauses, while the weather widget lets you scroll through the weather of the day and see additional information for a certain time period.

The lower section is more standard Stream Deck fare, with each of the 12 keys displaying live information (like your CPU, RAM and GPU utilization) or serving as a static app shortcut. With folders, pages and profiles that can automatically activate in specific PC applications, there are few limits to the amount of control you can build out. As well as official integrations for Elgato products, games and so on, you can also find free and paid community-made options in an online marketplace or code your own.

If you don’t have the Stream Deck software running, you get a barebones arrangement that’s still fairly useful, packing in media controls, toggles for polling rates, profiles and game modes, and instructions for downloading the Stream Deck software.

The rest of the keyboard contains some good ideas, including an RGB-backlit strip along the top of the keyboard with a Corsair wordmark and tri-spoke elements; a similarly wordmarked palm rest made of a soft, squidgy material; flip-out legs to adjust the angle of the keyboard; and, somewhat unusually, two extra USB-C ports. You get two USB-C cables in the box, and the idea is that by running that extra cable and plugging it in the bottom of the keyboard, you can then plug in other USB-C accessories like mice or flash drives into a more easily accessible USB-C port behind the two knobs. Of course, you could just plug in whatever USB-C thing you wanted directly, without involving the keyboard, but the end result arguably looks cleaner by using the extra port.

I did worry that the Galleon would feel a bit cheap or flimsy with its Stream Deck addition, but Corsair’s designers have done well to integrate everything together into a robust and cohesive whole that feels as expensive as it actually is. If you’re a streamer or macro enthusiast, this is a very sleek way to keep the options you need within easy reach.

Corsair Galleon 100 SD – Software

As you might have guessed, the Galleon requires you to visit two places to control it: the Web Hub for changing the keyboard’s settings and Stream Deck for setting up that titular portion. Both are generally well-designed, though complex enough that finding your way around does take some time. I’d suggest starting with the Web Hub software first, updating your firmware if available, and then you can dig into the settings.

Here, you can set up the keyboard for gaming, including selecting polling rates up to 8000Hz (to fractionally reduce the delay between a key being pressed and registered) and enable SOCD, short for “Simultaneous Opposite Cardinal Direction” (letting a press of A override a press of D, for example, to aid counter-strafing in FPS titles). There are also more garden-variety controls for remapping keys, choosing lighting schemes and so on, though you won’t find features like adjustable actuation points, rapid trigger, or other common FPS-focused features due to the lack of magnetic switches. (The sockets here are hot-swappable, but only for other 3-pin or 5-pin mechanical switches, so you can’t change the core tech inside.)

The Stream Deck side of the equation is a bit more involved, with a live feed of what’s being shown on each dial area and button on the left and a menu of available widgets on the right. Adding or moving widgets is as simple as dragging and dropping, and all but the simplest widgets have further settings to customize their functionality and appearance. Icon packs make it easier to have a consistent appearance, but you’re free to go with custom icons, emojis, text and so on to suit your own preferences.

As mentioned earlier, the default set of widgets can be extended through the Elgato Marketplace, though relatively few third-party options are available for the new dial areas versus the original Stream Deck keys. Both of the third-party widgets I was hoping for did exist – YouTube Music and a calendar – but the latter was only available as a £5 or £10 purchase. I found that creating third-party widgets for the slim infobar on the Stream Deck Neo wasn’t even possible when I reviewed that device last year, so I hope that the dials here are easier to develop for.

In terms of what you can actually do with the Stream Deck, it’s a long list, including creating and playing macros, controlling music or audio devices, and supporting live streams. Controlling other parts of the Corsair ecosystem is especially well catered for, including adjusting Elgato lights, mics and cameras, Corsair peripherals, and now Fanatec sim racing gear.

Game integration feels like a bit of an afterthought, with no easy way to find what games on your system are supported by the keyboard – you have to search through all Galleon-compatible profiles or manually search by game title instead. Some third-party integrations are also expensive, with a Star Citizen profile pack costing £25 and Flight Simulator 2024 requiring an £18 investment. This feels like an area that could be improved substantially if Corsair intends to keep building out support for games, or incentivizing third-party developers to do so instead.

I did experience a few bugs in the Stream Deck software, most notably every installation of a new plugin requiring two attempts to successfully install – a pain when the default loadout for the Galleon requires eight or so plugins. Thankfully, the core functionality of assigning functions to each button and triggering them worked like a treat in the Stream Deck software, while the Web Hub provided all of the functionality I needed on the keyboard setup front.

Corsair Galleon 100 SD – Performance

The Galleon 100 SD is a strong option for gaming, with a particular alacrity for more complex simulation games where you benefit from having a large number of available keys. Throwing lesser-used (and easily forgotten) keys and key combos on the Stream Deck pad is handy, as is having an otherwise full layout to use as normal. The key action is well-tuned, with reasonable travel, good audible feedback, and a smooth action, so games like League of Legends or StarCraft 2 that can punish mispresses heavily are easier to play than they would be on a softer and shorter-travel keyboard.

I also found occasion to use the extra Stream Deck keys in FPS games like Counter-Strike 2 (for buying weapons), but I tend to prefer narrower keyboards without a number pad to ensure plenty of mousing space for the low-sensitivity gameplay that most players adopt. That led to a shade of frustration in Battlefield 6, as it wasn’t as comfortable to play with my arms spread wide across the desk. The inclusion of SOCD and a snappy 8000Hz polling rate was something of a salve, and I have no qualms about the keyboard’s overall performance for all but the most competitive FPS players. Still, I can’t help but dream about a Galleon 100 SD in a southpaw layout, with the macro pad on the left side of the keyboard.