Gaming Squad

On launch, New World broke records and amassed a massive playerbase of over one million concurrent players. But like my high school bully, that towering monstrosity of an MMORPG somehow managed to peak quickly and drop off the face of the planet. Despite the lackluster reception after its first month, Amazon Game Studios didn’t throw in the towel as so many expected of them. Instead, they kept refining the gameplay, redesigning entire zones, and offered players in a handcrafted world with some of the genre’s best gathering and crafting elements. Now, a few years and a single expansion later, the team revamped the experience with New World: Aeternum.

What is New World: Aeternum? It’s a total overhaul of the MMORPG, featuring large-scale PvP, a 10-player raid, end-game solo content, a revamped solo experience for story-centric players, better quality-of-life features, controller support…oh, and swimming mechanics. It’s a lot to take in, especially if you’re a returning player willing to give Amazon’s MMO one more shot.

Read More: How To Get Started in New World Aeternum
Order New World: Aeternum: Amazon | Best Buy

However, if you are a returning player, remember that to access all of the content in Aeternum, you require the expansion, Rise of the Angry Earth, which retails for $29.99. It’s an expensive entry price for an MMO with a history of mediocrity in many players’ eyes.

That said, it’s sitting at ‘Mixed’ reviews on Steam following a lackluster launch—yet again—that left many fans fidgeting in their gaming chairs. Most didn’t mind leaving a negative review, though, so we have plenty of those to sift through. Unfortunately, it was tough to find any ASCII artwork or meme reviews this time, which is highly unusual for Steam user reviews. Most people simply wanted to complain about poor UI changes, controller support, and Amazon customer support. Despite the negativity, it’s steadily seen a healthy 40,000 concurrent players since relaunch, albeit a micro-slice of the 913,000 it once saw three years ago.

If you’re on the fence about whether to play New World Aeternum, here’s a look at the MMO from a different perspective—that of your peers within the gaming community. Here is New World: Aeternum, as told by Steam reviews!

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Pokémon TCG Pocket arrived this week on iPhone and Android, and it’s a surprisingly crisp and streamlined version of the card game after years of really bad alternatives. Pokémon is pretty much a license to print money, but TCG Pocket does a great job of spotlighting what people love about about the game—the cards themselves—and getting most of the other stuff out of the way. Still, as a big fan of Marvel Snap, there are a few things I wish the mobile game would steal from Second Dinner’s 2022 comic book phenomenon.

I’ve been spending most of my idle smartphone moments the past two days playing Pokémon TCG Pocket instead of doom scrolling Twitter or ingesting AI-slop on Instagram, which is exactly what I want from a good, daily grind mobile game. All of the currencies and sub-economies aimed at getting you to spend money on the otherwise free-to-play game are a bit convoluted and hard to parse, but the battles are fun and opening virtual booster packs by slicing wrappers with a finger swipe is a surprisingly effective simulacrum of the pure joys of doing so in real life.

I’m not yet as obsessed with Pokémon TCG Pocket as I was with Marvel Snap, however, and I think there are three reasons for that. The first is match length. Marvel Snap battles breeze by, making it feel relatively low-stakes to start up another no matter what’s going on around you. TCG Pocket is a bit more involved. Players have a cumulative timer of 20 minutes, with countdowns starting at over 60 seconds for individual turns. The clock rarely gets milked, but matches can still feel a little drawn out as players stack their benches and build up their Pokémon’s power. More than once I’ve finished a match and thought, “That was neat but do I really have time for another.”

The second thing holding Pokémon TCG Pocket back a little for me are the match rewards. In addition to bite-sized matches, Marvel Snap has an ingenious progression built around acquiring extra cards to level them up and earn points that can be spent on acquiring new ones. It’s a clever twist on the traditional booster pack RNG formula. TCG Pocket, as an adaptation of an existing card game, doesn’t have that same luxury. Unfortunately, as things stand, the only rewards for winning matches are miniscule amounts of XP that contribute to an overall level. Raising it nets additional rewards but none of them feel very distinct. The result is that finishing matches feels a bit anti-climactic, rather than giving out that dopamine hit that makes you immediately want to play another match.

Finally, there’s the cards themselves. Outside of building your collection, Marvel Snap has the secondary goal of acquiring, sometimes by outright purchasing, cool alternate card art for your favorite decks. It provides something else to strive for as well as a way to express your particular flavor of popular deck type. Again, TCG Pocket runs into trouble here because its working off of existing card art, and while there are multiple versions of certain cards to unlock, there aren’t many, and there’s no real way to chase them directly. If you open a pack and get a full art variant, great! If not, well, wait for the next random pull.

It’s still early and TCG Pocket is otherwise doing a lot right, certainly more than probably every other digital version of the Pokémon card game I’ve played in the past. There’s only one set of cards to collect at the moment and not much eye candy to salivate over in the paid in-game store. I’m sure that will all change soon enough but for now the game hasn’t quite conjured the full magic of my early days with Marvel Snap. Maybe that’s for the best. I eventually had to delete that game from my phone because it was consuming way too much of my free time.

Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 is, understandably, a pretty big deal. The franchise has been in a bit of a lull lately, despite routinely setting new sales records, and this game especially needed to be a slam dunk given its unique position. As the first Call of Duty game to release on Game Pass following Microsoft’s purchase of Activision—which itself has been followed by numerous disastrous layoffs—Black Ops 6 has been touted as a return to form for the series, as well as for its embattled publisher. The status of its probable release on Game Pass was debated for months until it was finally confirmed, and now it’s Microsoft’s single greatest chance to bolster the stagnant subscription service and make good on promises.

Order Call Of Duty: Black Ops 6: Amazon | Best Buy 

Recent installments in the franchise like Modern Warfare III, Vanguard, and Black Ops Cold War have been met with a decidedly more tepid reception than, say, 2019’s Modern Warfare or even the battle royale game Warzone. It almost seems like with every new entry of late the series has strayed from the desires of its outsized and fairly casual audience. Call of Duty is, after all, one of those games that most people pick up once a year and play till the next one comes along, much like a sports game. Folks who play those games tend to want refinements of core principles rather than drastic or convoluted reinventions.

All of which is to say, Black Ops 6’s return-to-basics approach was a welcome bit of news among the cacophony of showcases, directs, and overbearing blog posts about why this game would be the best Call of Duty ever. After MWIII’s flop of an open-ended campaign, Black Ops 6 doubled down on having a cinematic, blockbuster story mode like the best in the series have offered. Its iteration on Zombies feels like a healthy mixture of new and classic features and mechanics. Even the multiplayer feels sensibly pared back, and it restores tenets that fans have missed, like the prestige system. Treyarch and Xbox clearly want us to think that Call of Duty is “back,” but is it really?

According to the reviews that Black Ops 6 is accruing on Steam, the answer’s a bit more complicated than a simple yes or no. Fans seem to generally agree that the campaign here is better than average, and some are even calling it the best story mode in a COD game in years. And of course there are players who have cherished the simplified renditions of both the competitive multiplayer suite and the cooperative Zombies mode, myself included. As is always going to be the case with a series this big and this polarizing, though, the more you look, the more people you’ll find who are disappointed in some of the game’s features.

One of the biggest problems many seem to have with Black Ops 6 actually has little to do with the game itself and more to do with the packaging, specifically the launcher, Call of Duty HQ. While the tool has been reworked since its initial release, it isn’t significantly better, and it seems to be even worse on PC, where fans of the series seem to hate it more than I do! One review joked that Black Ops 6 is actually a “game is updating simulator.”

Elsewhere, Black Ops 6’s various modes are causing division. Some are appreciating their time with the competitive multiplayer suite, but there are also repeated mentions of terrible maps and spawns throughout the reviews. Having played the beta extensively, as well as jumping in after launch, I can kind of agree that there don’t seem to be any unilateral winners among the crop of multiplayer arenas available right now. Zombies has enjoyed a more positive reception than multiplayer, but still there are players who are unhappy with the settings and crying out for more ambient (spookier) maps in the future.

Overall, Black Ops 6 seems to be earning its “Mixed” reception on Steam. It isn’t the greatest game, but it’s a perfectly fine and fun middling title, and that’s about all I need from it to have a great time. The divisiveness surrounding the game is at least producing some good material in the Steam reviews page, though, so read it and weep.