Awards announcements, a couple of slight delays, a new horror game that’s getting generally good grades, the return of a pop culture gaming TV touchstone…and a little stock market kerfuffle surrounding GameStop that’s so deep down the financial rabbit hole that all we can do is stand back and watch from a safe distance it’s definitely been a busy week in gaming, which means it’s hard to know where to even start.
So how about we start with an actual game you can play? Bloober Team turned
The Medium loose this week to mostly solid if not gushing praise from critics, giving the Xbox Series X/S the first of many planned exclusives in a new console generation that finds Microsoft raising its platform exclusive ambitions beyond those of its Xbox One predecessor.
Magic: Legends will hold an open beta ahead of launch
Magic: Legends is due for launch later this year, and ahead of its official release date, Perfect World will run an open beta of its deckbuilding RPG game. The open beta on PC will begin March 23, and it will be a chance for everyone to get an early crack at wielding powerful Magic: The Gathering spells in real time.
We had a chance to go hands-on with Magic: Legends at PAX East last year, and we came away impressed with how well the free-to-play MMO manages to fuse the very rules-based card mechanics of Magic: The Gathering with the fast pace of an action RPG game like Diablo or Path of Exile. The abilities you use in combat are drawn from a deck into a hand, and each time you play a spell it’s replaced with another, pulled from the deck you’ve assembled yourself. Every spell you see in the game is a card you can collect and add to your deck, and somehow this all manages to work together marvelously well.