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This review of AGGRO DR1FT was originally published after its screening at the 2023 New York Film Festival. It has been updated and republished for the film’s limited theatrical run.

Greetings, Polygon readers! Each week, we round up the most notable new releases to streaming and VOD, highlighting the biggest and best new movies for you to watch at home.

First published by Games Workshop in 1983, Talisman: The Magical Quest Game is remembered fondly by kids who grew up with board games in the 1980s and early 1990s. But the last version of the dungeon crawling board game, its fourth, was published way back in 2008, well before the modern board gaming Renaissance really began. Now Hasbro is bringing it back for a fifth edition. Pre-orders, priced at $59.99, are live now. The game returns to mass market retail on July 1.

Finally, all those little dumpy Crewmates from Among Us can start shaking their asses on Twitch again. CEO Dan Clancy announced changes to the platform’s Community Guidelines on Wednesday, allowing cute animated emotes where characters shake their butts and twerk will be allowed on the platform.

I woke up this morning thinking I would be a normal, composed adult. Instead, I find myself crumpled over my keyboard, misty-eyed, compulsively texting friends I haven’t spoken to in years about a trailer for a football video game.

There are many things that make Mad Max: Fury Roadone of the most enduring crowd-pleasers of the century. Death-defying stunts, a fantastic and deep cast, extremely quotable dialogue, breathtaking imagery. But one of the most important elements in the movie, and the Mad Max franchise in general, is the evocative character design.

Fallout is coming to Fortnite. Exactly how and when Bethesda Softworks’ post-apocalyptic franchise is coming to Epic’s battle royale-turned-everything game is unclear, but we’re pretty much guaranteed to get some cartoonish power armor out of it. We’re also likely to get some Vault Dweller jumpsuits, but it remains to be seen what exactly Epic and Bethesda have cooked up for the highly anticipated collaboration.

Who are the X-Men for?

I Saw the TV Glow is a rare treat of a movie. It’s equal parts dense, complicated, funny, and sad, all while being an absolute joy to watch. Its story is equally concerned with the pain of loving a TV show that ended too soon, and the pain of letting your whole life slip by without ever truly knowing yourself. Finding ways to communicate all these complicated ideas while still making a watchable, entertaining film is a big task, but TV Glow writer-director Jane Schoenbrun has experience with that.

A new multiplayer hero shooter reportedly in development at Valve leaked Thursday in the form of gameplay details and early screenshots of the project, known as Deadlock. The new game is described as a blend of Valve’s own Dota 2 and Team Fortress 2, as well as competing multiplayer games like Overwatch, Valorant, Smite, and Orcs Must Die.

We are currently in the middle of a bountiful month for indie games, and our collective cup runneth over with inventive, stunning, and incredible titles. So I apologize that I have to stop and beg you, upon bended knee, to please play this game about flipping eggs in the Arctic.

You might not know this if you grew up in the later eras of Nintendo, but the company ran an esports competition called the Nintendo World Championships way back in 1990. The event toured 29 American cities and players from across the country gathered to compete using a custom Nintendo Entertainment System Game Pak. The cartridge used in the event went on to become a prized collectors’ item, but now, players will get a chance to buy a physical item directly inspired by it.

With the release of EA Sports College Football 25 just two months away, we’ve now got our first glimpse of what the game looks like in action, courtesy of a proper trailer that publisher Electronic Arts released Friday morning.

It’s time to do a bit of casual Friday colonizing (virtually). Amplitude Studios, the Parisian game studio known for strategy games, is giving away its acclaimed game Endless Legend for free on Steam. Starting on Thursday and running until May 23, interested players can download the entire game for free on Steam.

Disney Lorcana’s newest set, Ursula’s Return, drops Friday at local game stores and Disney parks before its mass market retail release on May 31. While fans that are already heavily invested in the trading card game will be reaching for those pricey booster boxes, new players and collectors will be more interested in the set’s two new starter decks that can get them up and playing right away. We’ve had them both on the table for a few weeks now, and each one is fairly competitive right out of the box. But they could easily benefit from some simple upgrades. These are your best bets.

Compelling sci-fi dystopias are few and far between in movies these days, which is why it might be surprising that one of the best is hiding inside an underappreciated action movie from 2018. Upgrade, which arrived on Netflix this week, is full of bone-crunching, genuinely funny action, but it’s also secretly a fantastic thriller with an excellent sci-fi world hiding beneath the surface.

Microsoft intends to put its $69 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard to use by releasing the next Call of Duty game directly on its Game Pass subscription service, the Wall Street Journal reports. The WSJ says the plan will be announced at Xbox’s annual summer showcase on June 9.

Indonesian indie game studio Piknelsia was in the middle of development on its rhythm-based visual novel Afterlove EP when it received the devastating news: Mohammad Fahmi, the studio’s founder and creative director, had died. “When it happened, I remember our character artist, Soyatu, called me around 2 AM in the morning and said, ‘Is Fahmi joking about death again? This time it’s not funny, please tell me that this is not true!’” Afterlove EP game producer Ivor Dwitomo told Polygon.

Shōgunis an early contender for 2024’s best TV show. The series, which debuted in February, is smart, complicated, tremendously well made, beautifully acted, and the most watched FX series ever, according to a press release from the network. All of which makes Thursday’s announcement that the show is coming back for more season pretty unsurprising. The only question that remains is what exactly those seasons are going to be about.

When MultiVersus relaunches with a makeover later this month after a nearly yearlong hiatus, it will come equipped with a new PvE mode called Rifts that will let players take on tutorials, challenges, and story-based missions. In a new video breaking down Rifts, we see what kind if minigames and giant boss fights — and some other oddities — players can expect.

Grand Theft Auto 6 will be released in the fall of 2025, according to publisher Take-Two Interactive. The release window — however vague — is a narrowing of what Take-Two Interactive had previously shared when it put Grand Theft Auto 6 simply within the 2025 calendar year. The fall 2025 release window makes sense, placing the much-anticipated game right before the holidays.

The purpose of art is to inspire and incite discourse, and the recently unveiled portrait of King Charles has certainly done that. The current monarch of the United Kingdom was coronated last year, and it’s a common tradition for painters to sit down with heads of state to create a personalized portrait of them. On May 14, King Charles’ portrait by artist Jonathan Yeo was revealed to the public, and while some art critics wanted to debate the heavy use of red in the portrait and the symbology therein, other people decided to just make some banger memes out of the painting.

Minecraft is turning 15 years old. Somehow, it feels like it’s been around for much, much longer, which speaks to the ubiquity of the game. Despite its age, Minecraft is still wildly popular due its its sandbox-style gameplay — you can do or make almost anything. You can already play it on your computer, console, or mobile phone, but Microsoft’s added one more platform: Google search.

The low-key king of the modern survival-horror movie, Alexandre Aja — who’s made movies like Crawl, Oxygen, and The Hills Have Eyes — is back with a new film staring Halle Berry. The first trailer for Never Let Go was released on Thursday, and the movie already looks like a terrifying addition to Aja’s impressive canon of people trying to survive the very bad things that are happening to them.

Max has released a trailer for its documentary MoviePass, MovieCrash, coming to the streaming service on May 29. And frankly, it looks awful. The trailer makes the film look like the worst kind of bubbly, hyperbolic TV news report, full of over-the-top voiceover, staccato sound bites, and sensationalist quotes, all trying to inject riffy, bouncy energy into a story that doesn’t need zhuzhing up. The actual doc may be nothing like this; trailers are notoriously unreliable about reflecting what a movie is actually like. But either way, I don’t care. I’m all in, for one reason: I just want to see the faces of the people behind the story I followed with absolute nonstop disbelief for two full years of “Oh God, what now?” schadenfreude.

In school, I once learned about British politics. I don’t remember the details, but our teacher showed us a video of a rancorous debate in the House of Commons. Shouts of Parliament members echoed throughout the chambers, and people booed in disapproval to someone speaking at a mic. People squished up next to each other like a loose mosh pit and waved papers at each other. It’s unruly, it’s chaotic — and it’s also exactly how I imagine Cloti and Clerith shippers would have it out if you corralled them all up and tossed them into a single hall to debate the best love interest for Final Fantasy 7 protagonist Cloud Strife.

As an animator, Joaquim Dos Santos has steadily carved out a career boasting credits on some of the most influential American animated series of the past two decades. The 46-year-old animator and director has gone from directing episodes of Justice League: Unlimited and Avatar: The Last Airbender to co-directing one of the biggest animated features of last year: Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse.

We are thrilled to announce Polygon’s latest book: Year of the Ring, an in-depth exploration of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy and the books that inspired them. Year of the Ring — authored by Susana Polo and a variety of Polygon contributors — will hit stores on Oct. 15, 2024, kicking off Polygon Pages, an ongoing publishing partnership with Insight Editions.

One of the best parts of our jobs at Polygon is recommending awesome new games to play. Whether it’s indie games, cozy games, board games, or just the best of the year, we’re always trying to introduce readers to new and exciting picks. Lists are a great way to share a variety of games in a short amount of time. But sometimes it’s fun to do something more personally curated.

The Epic Mega Sale, an annual sale on certain games in the Epic Games Store, has just begun. The discounts and deals will last four weeks — from May 16, starting at 11 am ET, to June 13 at 11 am ET — promising an “enormous range of discounts across the Epic Games Store’s library,” according to PR.

We finally know when we’re going back to school: EA Sports College Football 25 is scheduled to launch July 19, publisher Electronic Arts announced Thursday.

The RetroArch video game emulation frontend was released on the iOS App Store yesterday, alongside popular PSP emulator PPSSPP (itself a core available in RetroArch).

The Los Angeles Chargers have chosen to begin their announcement of the NFL schedule in the most incredible way: Putting a bunch of other teams’ fans in a swimming pool and removing the ladder — in The Sims 2, of course.

Dearest Reader,

When the revised 5th edition of Dungeons & Dragons becomes available on Sept. 17, the world will finally get a taste of the seminal role-playing game’s upgraded mechanics. But D&D’s most dedicated fans will likely have a head start. The Player’s Handbook (2024), including a version with a special alternate art cover, hits brick-and-mortar shelves first on Sept. 3.

While here in the US the Nintendo Switch Online service got three new Mario games this week (yes, Alleyway is a Mario game), the update for Japan included a bonus classic you may not have heard of. Kaeru no Tame ni Kane wa Naru (officially translated as The Frog For Whom the Bell Tolls) was a Japanese Game Boy release, co-developed by the familiar tag-team of Nintendo R&D1 and Intelligent Systems, responsible for much of the Game Boy’s lineup. And while The Frog For Whom the Bell Tolls may not be a household name, if you’re a fan of The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening (and who isn’t?) you should take the time to play it.

Voice performance has become isolating work over the years — these days, for an actor like JP Karliak, a day “on set” is completed from a home studio, and notes come in over Zoom calls. But the goals are the same: find the perfect sound to match a character, and relentlessly chase the perfect take. Karliak has done voice work across the animation and video game spectrum, and is no stranger to IP demands. He’s been in everything from The Boss Baby: Back in Business to Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, where he played Batman’s nemesis, Joker. Taking over the role of Morph in Marvel Animation’s X-Men ’97, voiced in the original series by actor Ron Rubin, put him under high pressure from nostalgic fans. Still, alone in the room, he found it: his own pure voice.

Netflix’s adaptation of Cixin Liu’s novel The Three-Body Problem and its sequels is coming back for a second season, and potentially more, the streaming service announced on Wednesday. It seems that the renewal is for however many seasons the series needs to wrap up. The announcement came with a quote from the series’ showrunners that’s focused on the end of the series, though they don’t specify how many seasons that might involve.

X-Men ’97 closed out its first season in the glorious, traditional way of its forebear, X-Men: The Animated Series. That is to say, with a wild cliffhanger.

PlayStation Plus is Sony’s equivalent of Xbox’s Game Pass service, and games come and go from the catalog over time. While not every game is on the service, and some rotate out, it’s still an excellent way to play a selection of great games from the last decade. For instance, Rockstar’s epic cowboy saga Red Dead Redemption 2 will soon be available on PlayStation Plus after a long absence, along with a handful of other intriguing titles.

When a live-service game undergoes a massive systems overhaul, it’s often characterized as a reversal, a change of course, even a mea culpa — particularly if the game had been headed in a direction the community didn’t like. But a truly successful update of this type is one that enables a game to be more fully itself; to unlock something beautiful that was always present at its core, just tough to get to.

Like a war over gas in a post-apocalyptic landscape, the franchise-fatigue debate rages on, with multiple factions claiming that sequels, prequels, and superhero films are killing the cinematic landscape, while others claim the smoke doesn’t lead to fire, and the entire battle is overblown. The latest salvo in the war — which is to say, the latest prequel extending a decades-long franchise — is Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, a prequel nearly a decade in the making. But where long experience with franchise logic would lead us to expect director George Miller to offer up a louder, bigger retread of its predecessor, the groundbreaking Mad Max: Fury Road, Miller dares to ignore that expectation. He blazes a brave, exploratory trail with a searing film that refuses to play by any of the tried, tested, and tired rules that franchise films follow.

Ubisoft has ended development of The Division Heartland, the free-to-play game set in the universe of Tom Clancy’s The Division, the company announced Wednesday. The game was announced in 2021. The publisher said it will divert resources elsewhere, specifically to XDefiant and the Rainbow Six franchise.

Sci-fi and fantasy epics on television have come a long way in the last several years, but you could be forgiven for finding it hard to believe that Max’s upcoming Dune prequel series could live up to the majesty of Denis Villeneuve’s massive movies. However, the Dune: Prophecy trailer, which came out on Wednesday morning, is here to prove you wrong.

Late last year, Polygon showed that Kickstarter’s earnings from tabletop games were down for the second straight year, an abrupt change following more than a decade of uninterrupted growth. Our analysis also showed that the number of successful campaigns was up sharply compared to previous years. Now two high-profile campaigns, both removed from the website for different reasons, show how this increase in velocity may be straining the Brooklyn-based crowdfunding pioneer’s resources.

Ubisoft gave Assassin’s Creed fans their first real look at the next flagship game in the long-running franchise with the debut trailer for Assassin’s Creed Shadows on Wednesday. Previously known as Assassin’s Creed: Codename Red, Shadows will send the franchise to feudal Japan for the first time this November, letting players live out their shinobi fantasies as the ninja Naoe.

Tango Gameworks will update Hi-Fi Rush one last time before Microsoft shuts the door on the studio. Microsoft announced earlier in May that it was closing three studios, including Hi-Fi Rush developer Tango Gameworks. Shortly after the news of the closures, Tango Gameworks confirmed the game will “remain available and playable everywhere” it's already accessible.

Several puzzles in Lorelei and the Laser Eyesmade me wonder: What sort of sickos does it take to create this kind of game? The answer is the developers at Simogo, the Swedish studio known for pop rhythm game Sayonara Wild Hearts and puzzle games Device 6 and SPL-T. This new Simogo game pulls together different realities, layers of logic puzzles, math, and a distinct, undeniable ambiance. Everything is a puzzle in Lorelei and the Laser Eyes — even the story itself — and nothing is exactly as it seems.

Nintendo’s latest additions to the Nintendo Switch Online lineup of Game Boy games is led by Super Mario Land, the 1989 platformer made exclusively for the company’s handheld system. Super Mario Land is joined by two other Game Boy launch titles now available for Nintendo Switch Online, and they’re both Mario games too.

Cameos: They’re not just videos that actors do in their living rooms for money! In its excellent first season, the X-Men ’97 writers have had a lot of fun giving viewers little views into the Marvel Universe beyond the X-Mansion. A quick glimpse of Spider-Man here, a conversation between Rogue and Captain America there — it’s a thrilling old-school approach to comic book cameos that signals the scale of what’s happening instead of teasing the potential for spinoffs.

I have never crushed on a Victorian polar explorer before. The thought simply never occurred to me, mostly due to a lack of exposure: Outside of the (very good) TV series The Terror, I’ve frankly never had much time to consider them, or the many ways they might be charming. Kaliane Bradley, however, has — and she’s written a whole book that might convince you to crush on one too.

Netflix and anime studio Production IG’s take on the Terminator arrives this summer, marking a big year for James Cameron’s killer cyborgs. Terminator: Zero will be a somewhat-familiar time-travelling tale with a twist: While we have our standard future warrior sent to the past to protect humanity from killing machines, there will also be a new protector in the form of an AI designed to battle Skynet’s genocidal ambitions.

If there is one thing that people who make and play video games love more than video games, it’s labels. People love to label a game, to invent a genre, to categorize and sort and declare some kind of rudimentary ownership. YouTubers have built entire careers around this.

Games Workshop will broadcast updates on the various video games under the Warhammer umbrella during its yearly Warhammer Skulls presentation. This is the eighth Warhammer Skulls event, and it’ll take place on May 23 on the official Warhammer Twitch stream. The stream will begin at 12 p.m. EDT/9 a.m. PDT.

After making fans wage war by picking which of two trailers to watch on YouTube, HBO is back with a new trailer for House of the Dragon season 2 that promises things will go quite badly no matter who your fave is. That’s the Westeros Promise, baby!

Megalopolis, legendary director Francis Ford Coppola’s first film in 14 years, is one of 2024’s most notable movies for two reasons. First, it is the decades-in-development self-funded passion project of a cinematic titan, and second, no one wants to distribute it. On paper, that’s plenty baffling, but it only becomes more so when you see what the film looks like.

Mordor’s most terrifying monument will soon be available in Lego form. A new Barad-dûr Lego set is coming from Lego and Warner Bros. Discovery this summer, the two companies announced on Tuesday.

The nonsense was all there on the page — Adam Pally in an echidna costume, Julian Barratt rocking out in an owl headdress, an enormous puppet hell demon, a black-box-theater-worthy interpretation of a Sonic stage — but when director Jorma Taccone began orchestrating the hallucinatory musical tucked inside Knuckles’ fourth episode, his impulse was to pile on even more.

It’s been a bit of a slow time of year for comedy movies, but 2024 has enough laugh-out loud gems to round out a list. And there’s a wide variety of sub-genres to pick from: musical reboots, existential animated kids’ movies, campy horror flicks, and even a DC parody.

Dead by Daylight is a game absolutely packed with murderous monsters, both original and licensed from other franchises. The next crossover is a little bit outside of the usual horror wheelhouse — Dead by Daylight is producing a chapter themed around the wildly popular tabletop game Dungeons & Dragons. Vecna, known in-game as The Lich, will be the game’s next Killer. Vecna is joined by a pair of Elven bards, one male and one female, who will serve as the new Survivors.

Valheim is a fantastic sandbox survival game, set in a fantastical 10th realm of the Norse afterlife. Adventurers explore from the peaceful meadows out into more dangerous biomes, and today, the most dangerous one yet is available to explore. The last biome update was the Mistlands; today, players can venture out into the Ashlands.

Amazon’s The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power returns this August, and while the new trailer is short on story, it’s long on one undersung aspect of Tolkien’s world: epic fantasy monsters.

Twelve more games are coming to Microsoft’s Xbox Game Pass service in May, adding to the five games that joined the service earlier this month. Little Kitty, Big City, meet the best puzzle game of 2023, Chants of Sennaar.

When director Kelsey Mann took the helm on Pixar’s Inside Out 2, Pixar chief creative officer Pete Docter had one big suggestion for him. Before becoming CCO, Docter directed many of the studio’s greatest hits, including the originalInside Out.

If Amazon Studios’ teaser trailer for the second season of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power has one thing to say, it’s that Sauron is back and it’s everybody’s problem.

In its latest financial report, Sony has revealed that Helldivers 2 — the scrappy co-op shooter turned online gaming sensation from Sweden’s Arrowhead Game Studios — is the fastest-selling game PlayStation has ever released.

Kim Kardashian was already more than a household name in 2013. The Kardashian name (hers, specifically) was equivalent with “celebrity” — or “notoriety,” depending on who was saying it. But there was one more step toward international fame that she wasn’t so sure about: whether she wanted to become a video game character.

The Sims is about to get even more competition. A new studio co-founded by Jake Solomon, the veteran game designer behind XCOM and Marvel’s Midnight Suns, will challenge Maxis’ enduring and dominant life simulation game series with a new, still-untitled game that focuses on “the drama of modern life.”

One of Super Mario 64’s few remaining mysteries has been solved, thanks to a player who figured out how to open a previously “unopenable” door from the 1996 Nintendo 64 classic. We can thank a nearly four-hour YouTube video that exhaustively detailed how invisible walls work in Super Mario 64, and the tenacity of the game’s community for the new discovery.

There’s a lot of TV to weed through in any week, and this week is no exception — something I’m sure I’ve said about plenty of packed TV weeks, but what’re you gonna do! The television giveth, and giveth, and taketh away, and giveth some more.

On May 22 at 3 p.m. EST, we invite you to tune into our Twitch channel for a very special The Sims 4 show, co-hosted by streamer and filmmaker Charlie McDonnell.

The Joker is coming to MultiVersus as part of the fighting game’s relaunch later this month, and actor Mark Hamill will reprise his role as the Clown Prince of Crime for the occasion. Developer Player First Games and Warner Bros. Games showed off Joker in a new gameplay trailer that contains another fun surprise: The Powerpuff Girls are coming to MultiVersus as well.

Square Enix has revealed a new business plan — titled “Square Enix Reboots, and Awakens” — that will see the publisher “aggressively pursue” a multiplatform strategy for its biggest games across Nintendo, Xbox, PlayStation, and Windows PC.

Every monster needs an origin story. Here’s mine.

Wrestling is a huge part of Mercedes Varnado’s career, having gained notoriety as Sasha Banks for the WWE before crossing over as Mercedes Moné for the AEW. But her fans may not realize she is also a huge Sailor Moon fan. The professional wrestler, who recently jumped to acting for The Mandalorian, has a deep appreciation of the classic magical girl fantasy anime based on Naoko Takeuchi’s 1992 manga. Fans of both wrestling and anime know she donned a Sailor Moon-inspired outfit during the 2022 Royal Rumble. So it’s no surprise that she’s openly campaigned to play Sailor Jupiter in a live-action adaptation of Sailor Moon, if that ever happens.

“Cozy games” are a huge phenomenon right now, because at the end of the day, who doesn’t like being cozy? While some games focus on visceral combat or thrilling narratives, cozy games often focus on creating a comfortable or fulfilling place for players to hang out. Instead of swinging a sword or slaying foes, players can focus on creating the perfect flower bed, or befriending the kind golem next door.

I spent a lot of time contemplating the title of Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s new film Evil Does Not Exist. It still echoes in my brain, as I watch and rewatch the film. It’s a puzzle to turn over, a bitter lozenge lodged in my cheek. It’s almost farcical, how banal the movie’s premise is: a talent agency wants to set up a glamping site in a remote Japanese village, and sends two hapless PR reps to sell the community on the plan. Most of us don’t contemplate the nature of evil when considering glamping, you know? But maybe we should.

Spoiler warnings have become a polite way to signal to the internet that you’re about to discuss some aspect of a movie they might prefer not to know before seeing the film. People online have argued endlessly about what constitutes a spoiler and what needs a warning. But the question gets more complicated when a studio’s marketing for a movie is handing out the spoilers.

We’re in the dead middle of May and on the cusp of several huge releases to the usher in the summer season. If you’re looking for a trio of blood-chilling, adrenaline-pumping, and heart-racing thrillers to tide you over until this year’s summer blockbusters, you’ve come to the right place.

Greetings, Polygon readers! Each week, we round up the most notable new releases to streaming and VOD, highlighting the biggest and best new movies for you to watch at home.