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A screenshot from Raidou Remastered showing the protagonist, Raidou, dashing down a Tokyo street with his cat companion Gouto

Raidou Remastered: The Mystery of the Soulless Army review

by admin June 18, 2025

Need to know

What is it? PS2-era Megami Tensei JRPG starring a kid detective in early 20th century Tokyo
Release date June 19, 2025
Expect to pay $50
Developer Atlus
Publisher Sega
Reviewed on RTX 3060 (laptop), Ryzen 5 5600H, 16GB RAM
Steam Deck Playable, with some small in-game text
Link Steam

When Raidou Kuzunoha vs. the Soulless Army released for PlayStation 2 in March 2006, Persona 3 was only four months away from making its debut in Japan. The latter, inarguably a classic, introduced Atlus’ now-iconic social link system, thus sealing the studio’s fate as one of the most beloved 21st century RPG creators. Raidou, though? Most people have forgotten about it, if they’ve heard of it at all.

And yet here we are with a remaster, and a high-effort one at that: the combat has been revamped, and every line of dialogue voiced. It belongs to the Devil Summoner strain of Shin Megami Tensei games, which are distinguished by their detective fiction leanings (the most recent was Soul Hackers 2). It didn’t receive particularly glowing reviews at launch: it was fine. But with the benefit of hindsight it’s kinda interesting. Not only is its early 20th century Tokyo setting unique for a series that loves to hang around in the present and near-future, but it also features one of Atlus’ only dalliances with real-time combat.

Raidou Kuzunoha is a teen detective working for the Narumi Detective Agency, which has a special interest in the supernatural and occult. He’s well-suited to the job because he’s also secretly a Devil Summoner, working for an organisation dedicated to the protection of Tokyo against the wrath of supernatural forces. A seemingly routine quest to save the daughter of a local magnate eventually blossoms into the usual absurdly meandering anime fare, touching on superweapons, time manipulation and, of course, Russian mystic Grigori Rasputin.

Raidou is another voiceless and expressionless teenage protagonist, though given his situation—Raidou is an investigator, and not a hapless student—some of the weirdness of other SMT games has been sanded away. The sense of young people being thrown into a malignant alternative world only just hidden beneath their own doesn’t hit quite as hard when the hero is reporting for duty as a ghost detective every morning.

The devils Raidou can summon will be familiar to anyone who has played a Shin Megami Tensei game, and they’re utilised in fun ways here. Each has a couple of different uses outside of combat, which bleeds into some of Raidou Remastered’s curious point ‘n’ click trappings. For example, Jack Frost can freeze water to create new paths, while Azumi can fly. Neko Shogun can use force to move large objects around, and Lilim can read people’s minds. These powers can only be used in the right context, and whenever they’re called for in puzzle scenarios it’s usually extremely obvious, even when Raidou’s cat companion Gouto doesn’t blurt out the solution.

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(Image credit: Atlus)(Image credit: Atlus)(Image credit: Atlus)

On the flipside, some late game “puzzles” are surprisingly obtuse, so much so that I had a form of gamer whiplash: Am I just meant to sit here and wait for Gouto to explain what I’m meant to do? Or am I meant to, uh, think about it?

These elements exist because Raidou is ostensibly a detective, but they feel less like puzzles and more like a series of chores doled out by an especially patronising boss. The story has Raidou investigate, but I don’t investigate: I just move our hero around and click on things. It’s a missed opportunity, both in 2006 and now, to feel out a more investigative style of play in a game about being an investigator. This sense of wasted potential extends to mission design, which generally involves going back and forth between characters for information, while occasionally dipping into the Dark Realm—a bleak and mysterious parallel world full of demons—to nip the present episode’s big baddie in the bud.

Thankfully the combat and demon hunting keep things interesting, and the former has been completely reworked. The original’s static camera angle is now free roaming in combat, and Raidou is much more nimble on his feet, with a long dodge and double jump at his disposal. He can now summon two demons rather than one, to help alongside his own melee weapon and gunfire.

(Image credit: Atlus)

Compared to the syrupy combat of the original, it’s very fast and fluid, mixing light tactical complexity with dexterity-focused hack ‘n’ slash. Raidou can specialise along magic or raw damage paths (I built a mix between both) while also following upgrade trees for swords, spears and axes.

The combat is as close to the SMT Press Turn system as it can be in a real time format: using the right elemental attack against an enemy will weaken or stun it, all the better to bolster your sword attacks, while using the wrong elemental attack will usually buff an enemy. Familiar SMT conundrums inevitably arise: what if one enemy needs a fire attack, but you’ve only got an AOE fire attack and another enemy on the field is buffed by fire? Then it’s time to dive into menus, fine-tune your demon loadout, and carry on. What if a volt-weak enemy keeps charming my healers into healing them? And what if my healer is the only demon I have with a volt attack? Damn: it’s time to go find another volt demon.

Collecting demons and trying them out in battle is as fun as ever, even if they all feel more flexible and thus less special than in other contemporary SMT games. Jack Frost is an ice creature, but if I have him inherit a volt or fire attack it’ll still serve to weaken an enemy if they’re susceptible to those elements.

(Image credit: Atlus)

I found myself using early game demons well into the 30-hour story, mostly because the strength of their elemental attacks didn’t really matter so long as Raidou himself was capable of doling out high damage (and also, because Neko Shogun is my favorite). Similarly, I was about three-quarters into the game before I really had to think about what demons I wanted to keep and which I wanted to sacrifice via demon fusion: in other SMT games, including Persona, demons that can buff and debuff feel essential, leading to frequent stops to fuse together demons towards stronger and better-equipped ones. That isn’t so much the case here, though I did play on normal; things may become trickier at higher difficulties.

This may all sound unpromising but the truth is I enjoyed Raidou Remastered, and I think anyone into monster collecting, action-focused SMT games will too. By all reports Raidou was a 7 out of 10 JRPG in 2006, and with a complete renovation of its combat system—and the merciful removal of random encounters—Atlus has ensured it remains a 7 out of 10 JRPG now. I’m not sure why they decided to remaster this instead of any of the other SMT games stuck on the PS2, but it’s definitely worth playing, especially if you’re curious to see what might happen if (gulp) Persona 6 goes the way of Final Fantasy 16 and ditches turn-based combat.

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June 18, 2025 0 comments

Game Reviews

FBC: Firebreak review | Rock Paper Shotgun

by admin June 18, 2025

FBC: Firebreak review

This co-op Control spinoff isn’t without some mad science laughs and decent FPS boomsticking, but grindy unlocks and tedious objectives make it fleeting fun at best.

Developer: Remedy Entertainment
Publisher: Remedy Entertainment
Release: June 17th 2025
On: Windows
From: Steam,, Epic Games Store, Game Pass
Price: $40/£33/€40
Reviewed on: Intel Core i9-10900K, 32GB RAM, Nvidia RTX 3090, Windows 10

Well, you can’t say Remedy don’t have range. After the screeching survival horror of Alan Wake 2 comes FBC: Firebreak, a three-person multiplayer FPS spun off from Wakeverse stablemate (and excellent action game in its own right) Control. Perspective isn’t the only thing that shifts, either, as Firebreak reframes Control’s eerie, New Weird-influenced setting as a backdrop for comedy co-op shenanigans. There will be gnomes creating lightning storms.

Back in the Oldest House, the illogically vast and currently invaded headquarters of the Federal Bureau of Control, Firebreakers – volunteer office drones turned underqualified field agents – gear up to do battle with whatever outdated guns and jerry-rigged tools they can find. The Firebreak initiative is as haphazard and cobbled-together a task force as you’re likely to see, and ultimately, a reflection of the game it stars in: one that’s plucky and capable of impressing, yet never quite comes together as a cohesive prospect.

Your opponents are, once again, the Hiss, Control’s resonance-based baddies who take up residence in the warped bodies of less prepared FBC staff. Deprived of that game’s desk-chucking superpowers, Firebreak’s Anti-Hiss toolbox is more mundane, with most of the firepower coming from simple firearms. The satisfaction of their shooting experience varies wildly, depending on the precise flavour of gun in use; shotguns and the hunting rifle are great fun, being boomy, weighty blasters that stagger chunkier enemies and send weaker ones airborne. The assault rifle and SMG, though? Awful. These deal about as much damage to a Hiss as a rude email, and with the pre-upgrade models especially, only fire off slightly faster.

Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun / Remedy Entertainment

Livening up these gunfights are Crisis Kits, Firebreak’s take on player classes, which include one unique tool, a helpful deployable, and an Altered Augment – an ultimate, basically – apiece. The latter play into the FBC’s mission statement of containing and researching artifacts that defy natural law, and conveniently, they often prove useful in a scrap. Chuck a spooky teapot on top of the Splash Kit’s water-spewing Ejector tool, for instance, and its harmless payloads become globs of melty magma; that gnome, meanwhile, is the hateful star of the electricity-focused Jump kit, whose obsession with following the nearest live creature makes it as likely to smite its user with summoned lightning as the Hiss.

That said, the tools are mainly utilities, designed to speed up janitor work like fixing machinery or extinguishing fires. That sounds boring, and it often is. But sometimes, these tools come good: at least some of the fires will be the ones engulfing your teammates, so timely dousing with the Ejector could save a life. Much of the wire-fiddling work also needs doing under the pressure of a Hiss assault wave, turning simple wrench whacks into genuine clutch plays.

The ability to apply shock and wetness at will also ties into the elemental interactions that grant Firebreak’s action a much-needed third dimension. Intentionally setting these up can be tricky, unless you’ve got teammates on mics, but the first time you lethally zap a gang of drenched Hiss with conduction-boosted chain lightning feels like you’re outsmarting the paranormal as well as out-shooting it. And I wanted to reach through my screen and hug the teammate who, seeing that our whole squad was about to perish from the heat of a possessed furnace, had the presence of mind to shoot out an overhead sprinkler, rescuing the run with an improvised shower.

Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun / Remedy Entertainment

Firebreak is usually content to let players discover these interactions for themselves, though the very start of your Firebreaking career arguably would benefit from a firmer helping hand. The onboarding process is not kind: with only the briefest of tooltips offering advice, it’s all too easy to launch into the opening mission (or job, as the game calls them) with little to no understanding of how all these magical contraptions work. And, just to make an even worse first impression, said job is a deflatingly straightforward matter of fixing some electrical boxes and leaving.

That’s because at first, you’ll need to not just unlock each of the five jobs by completing the preceding one, but also the full length of each job – they’re split up into three sections, or Clearance Levels – by beating the shorter, lower-level versions in order.

The idea behind this structure is that the availability of shorter missions makes Firebreak more accessible to busy types, who might not have the time or inclination to settle down for 45-minute slogs in the vein of Left 4 Dead’s campaigns or Deep Rock Galactic’s weekly Deep Dives. Noble in concept, and technically successful in practice, with most Level 1 jobs clearable in a couple of minutes and Level 2s doable in around ten.

Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun / Remedy Entertainment

Sadly, not all Clearance Levels are created equal. The first two are always and exclusively based around the workmanlike maintenance tasks – fixing generators, tossing radioactive orbs into a cart, shooting sticky notes and suchlike. That leaves only the third to ever offer a meaningful twist or dramatic climax, like battling an ogre made of Post-Its or launching a waste disposal rocket into space. These are invariably the highlights of any job, and so to stick to the lower Clearance Levels isn’t just to play a faster game, but a duller one as well.

Corruption effects, where an escaped artifact plays havoc on anything from player shields to gravity, could spice up the handyman simulation. My personal favourite? An anomalous snare drum that forces enemies to move and attack at hilariously exaggerated speed, as if Sam Lake accidentally sat on a Fast Forward button over at Remedy HQ. Except these too are strictly limited to Level 3 runs, hollowing out further the promise that Firebreak would be a less time-intensive take on live service.

As does, it turns out, the entire progression system. Pretty much everything requires XP tokens to unlock: perks, guns, upgraded perks, upgraded guns, and most gallingly, the deployable and Altered Augment for each kit. You don’t even get these as standard, making those early missions even more stripped-back. And, because weapon and kit upgrades are gated behind tiered pages – think the battle passes in Helldivers 2 – you’ll often end up wasting points on gear you might not even want, just to spend enough for the next page to open up.

Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun / Remedy Entertainment

In effect, you’ll need a lot of XP to get beyond the weakest guns and perks, once again disadvantaging those who only fancy dipping in now and then. Folk who put the hours in will indeed be rewarded, but then even with a full set of maximum Clearance levels, there are still only five job types for now. Corruption or not, Firebreak soon ends up repeating itself, quietly slipping into the grinding habits that it simultaneously claims to reject.

All of that is not to say that Firebreak is devoid of fun. There’s actually an hours-wide sweet spot, between that iffy start and the point where job fatigue kicks in, where it’s very enjoyable indeed, a gloriously “Why not?” mess of exploding piggy banks, skin-of-the-teeth monster containment, and glowing men in floating chairs hurling masonry at you. I wish it lasted longer, but it’s there.

It also helps that Firebreak inherits certain charms from Control, particularly the Oldest House itself. This was already a great vidjamagame fightspace back when we were aggressively levitating through it as Jesse Faden, and from the first-person perspective of these nameless FBC mooks, its imposing sense of brutalist enormousness is even stronger. It sometimes even pulls one of its lore-established spacial shifts, like cheekily putting a safe room on a ceiling and forcing poor Firebreakers to climb a debris ladder to open it.

Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun / Remedy Entertainment

Regretfully, genuine oddities like this are rare, which together with the marked tonal shift makes the Control relationship feel like a surprisingly distant one. I get why this was attempted – co-op shooters are inherently disorderly, so a lighter tone makes sense on paper. And some of the ways in which Firebreak communicates this intent are likeable in themselves, such as how the ammo station refill animation has your combat-inexperienced character frantically grabbing handfuls of loose bullets. Or how Firebreak’s version of a mobile turret is just a big pneumatic tube sat on a desk chair. That’s good design language, in a vacuum. But at least for me, a seasoned Control liker, it perhaps strays far enough from the original vibe that I can never draw too deep from a shared well of excitement.

As for the techy stuff, the public matchmaking is reasonably reliable at finding comrades to play with, especially if you’re willing to hop into Quick Play rather than fine-tuning a lobby for yourself. I have been put into a few laggy games, but that was when the matchmaking pool was comprised solely of journalists and influencers – it seems to have an easier time finding low-latency hosts now it’s been released in the wild.

Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun / Remedy Entertainment

Whether Firebreak can maintain a healthy supply of volunteers, however, may depend as much on its post-launch overtime work than on the game itself. As it stands, its successes are at risk of being overshadowed by a weak introductory phase and a general lightness of activities once you’ve unlocked all the jobs’ Clearance Levels. At least two more jobs are due for later this year, though those alone won’t address Firebreak’s investment-heavy progression system, weak weapons, or lack of effective onboarding.

Still, they could serve as an opportunity to de-boring the lower Clearance Levels, by replacing the simple repair tasks with more unique and substantial objectives. That would both sweeten the deal of replaying jobs for XP, and steer Firebreak back towards to the ideal of shorter deployments that are still worth playing. Would such an approach risk overstuffing a full, three-stage job? Maybe, but then this is the studio that made We Sing and the Ashtray Maze, and I’d very much like to see Firebreak gain some of that confident maximalism. Right now, it’s lacking, and not just in musical numbers.

This review is based on review code provided by the publisher.

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June 18, 2025 0 comments

Keychron V6 Max mechanical keyboard during our review

Product Reviews

Keychron V6 Max customizable mechanical keyboard review

by admin June 18, 2025

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In my twenty years as a professional writer, I don’t think I’ve ever looked forward to using a keyboard before. Some are good, some are bad, some, like the ones on modern ThinkPads, are easily the best you can get on a laptop and offer very comfortable typing experiences.

In fact, I’ve always hated changing to a new keyboard, with the inevitable typos and finger-slips as muscle memory goes right out the window and the brain tries to relearn the new key placement.

But never, ever, have I wanted to find excuses to type something, anything on a keyboard, or just pressed a few keys as I passed the desk for the thrill of it all.

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Until, that is, I got my hands on the Keychron V6 Max mechanical keyboard. And if I could, I’d sit at my desk all day and all night just to feel that pleasing feedback, listening to the satisfying clackety-clack as my fingers depress the keys. It might just be the best office keyboard I’ve ever used.

Keychron V6 Max at Amazon for $119.99

Keychron V6 Max: Price & availability

This is no budget keyboard – but that’s expected with this sort of design and the features packed in here. It’s a definite ‘investment’ product for those who will be using it day in and day out.

It’s available via the official US Keychron site for $120, while at time of review, it’s currently discounted from £124 to £112 over on the Keychron UK site. In Australia, it’s priced at AU$159 via Keychron.

You can also pick up from Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk and other online retailers, where it’s going for the RRP.

Keychron V6 Max: Design

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(Image credit: Keychron)(Image credit: Keychron)(Image credit: Keychron)(Image credit: Keychron)

This little beast is beautifully designed, with its carbon black frame and light and dark blue keys. To me, it really looks the business, eye-catching but professional.

Unlike some Keychron keyboards, like the Q6 Max we reviewed, this model is built from a hardened ABS plastic rather than dense aluminum. It’s still pretty heavy, though, and not suited to portability. On the other hand, the weight also made it very stable, refusing to whizz across the desk under the slightest provocation while I used it. So, pros and cons.

The V6 Max comes in a range of configurations – first off, you can select between a barebones version and one that’s fully assembled.

In the US, you’ll get the double-shot OSA PBT keycaps, while in the UK, you can choose between PBT and ABS keys, with the latter allowing the backlight to shine through.

You can also choose between a few different mechanical switches (Gateron Jupiter Red, Brown, and Yellow), which will subtly adjust your experience (you can see the full differences between each by clicking here). In this review, I’m looking at the PBT version with Gateron Jupiter Red linear switches.

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(Image credit: Keychron)(Image credit: Keychron)(Image credit: Keychron)(Image credit: Keychron)

Along the top row, nestled between F12 and Print Screen, is a sturdy volume knob that can be clicked to mute/unmute. It’s really useful if you want easy access to volume controls, and easily ignored if you don’t.

Around the back are two switches for changing compatibility between Windows, Mac, and Android devices, and alternating connectivity (2.4GHz, cable, and Bluetooth). Over to the right is a nub which houses both the USB and USB-C receivers.

In the box, you’ll also find a wealth of tools – a charging cable, keycap and switch puller, screwdriver, screws, hex (Allen) key, extension adapter for the receiver, and eleven replacement keys.

Keychron V6 Max: App

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(Image credit: Keychron )(Image credit: Keychron )(Image credit: Keychron )

One of the big highlights of the Keychron V6 Max is its near-total customizability, both physically and while using the app at launcher.keychron.com. You’ll need to run Chrome, Edge, or Opera, and connect the keyboard with the wire. I found the app found the keyboard pretty quickly – not instant, but quick enough. And I was pleasantly surprised by the host of options on offer here.

Arguably the most useful here is the keymap, where you can alter what each key does when pressed. It’s very straightforward to use. Then, alongside this, there’s a key test to make sure everything’s running smoothly, an option to create macros, which will be essential for coders, firmware updates and bug reporting, and backlight selection.

To my mind, this backlight tab is where every user should head first. To manually change the keyboard’s backlight, you’ll need to turn it on with Fn + Tab, then cycle through each option using Fn + Q. There’s loads of presets here, but let me tell you, it takes ages to find the one that’s right for you – and one wrong press and you’ll need to cycle through them all over again. In the app, on the other hand, you can quickly find your preferred style, and adjust the color using the palette. Job done.

All in all, I thought the app was a nice extra that gives you much more control over layout and style to fit how you want the keyboard to perform.

Keychron V6 Max: In use

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(Image credit: Keychron)(Image credit: Keychron)(Image credit: Keychron)(Image credit: Keychron)(Image credit: Keychron)

This keyboard is an absolute delight to use. Typing feels natural, comfortable, I used it for hours and hours at a time and never once had any issues. Every keystroke registered quickly and accurately, and there’s a pleasing softness to each one. What more could you want from a mechanical keyboard?

Of course, it helps that it’s incredibly customizable to suit your work, and the desk boasts a gasket mount design with sound-proofing foam under the hood. Saying that, it’s in no way silent during use. As a mechanical keyboard, it has a muted clack that will remind readers of a certain age of busy offices and typist pools.

Personally, I quite enjoy the sound it makes when in full writing flow- it’s somehow soothing. However, it won’t be ideal for those looking for a super low-profile keyboard, where a scissor-switch or rubber-dome keyboard will offer a quieter experience.

Keychron also claims the V6 Max has a polling rate of 1000Hz, which has a theoretical latency of 1ms. So, while it should easily handle competitive gaming, it isn’t strictly designed for this.

For me, it’s one of the best keyboards around, perfectly positioned for productivity-minded professionals, students, programmers – effectively anyone who’s going to be spending a lot of time at their desk. On that score, it delivers an awesome experience.

Should I buy the Keychron V6 Max?

Buy it if…

✅ You want comfort when typing
I can’t fault the overall performance of the V6 Max when it comes to general typing, even at speed.

✅ You want to customize your set-up
This keyboard can basically be configured any way you want, from switching out keycaps to redefining the key map using the app.

Don’t buy it if…

❌ You don’t type much
For the price and the specs here, it’s going to be overkill for sending the occasional email or replying on Teams – although it’ll feel good while you’re doing so, at least.

❌ You want a silent keyboard
As a mechanical keyboard, this isn’t exactly quiet in use, which you may want in shared workspaces.

Keychron V6 Max: Price Comparison

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June 18, 2025 0 comments

Game Updates

FNAF: Secret of the Mimic review

by admin June 18, 2025

Screenshot by Destructoid

Can the origin story of Five Nights at Freddy’s deliver a frightening setting with intriguing lore?

Published: Jun 18, 2025 10:34 am

Having played all mainline FNAF games, I was eager to see how far the series has come and if an origin story without William Afton can deliver. Could a tale about corrupted software and a broken family truly replace years of child murders and haunted animatronics?

The latest Five Nights at Freddy’s tells the origin story of the Mimic as a prequel to Fredbear’s Family Diner. Steel Wool Studios has fully left behind Scott Cawthon’s unforgiving point-and-click adventures, in favor of a 3D, more kid-friendly world that’s heavily focused on stealth. Lore is to be expected with any FNAF game, and while it delivers in abundance, there are a lot of areas where Secret of the Mimic falls flat. So let’s get into it.

Is it scary? No, not really

Screenshot by Destructoid

Secret of the Mimic takes place inside Murray’s Costume Manor, a brand new setting for the series, where we play as Fazbear Entertainment technician, Arnold. The main threat is introduced off the jump, for the abandoned facility isn’t so abandoned (classic). The Mimic is waiting for your arrival, and it can take the form of any animatronic. This camouflage is an effective way of introducing horror because it creates uneasiness and paranoia, suggesting that you’re never truly safe. The idea is fantastic because the environment is full of unused animal suits just collecting dust, yet they are perfect for a hostile entity to jump inside at any moment. Isolation is prevalent in this entry, a feeling I don’t think Security Breach captured.

Screenshot by Destructoid

However, the horror quickly fizzles out when the Mimic just spawns inside an animatronic that wasn’t in the room to begin with, making the main threat seem more like an annoying poltergeist than a predator stalking its prey. The concept of the Mimic gets tiresome fast and becomes frustrating to deal with, especially when you’re trying to enjoy the innovative way Secret of the Mimic handles collectible hunting.

Repetition kills horror

Screenshot by Destructoid

The scare factor is removed completely, even before you meet Jackie in the Box, the first “boss” in Secret of the Mimic. The chase sequences in this entry are underwhelming, repetitive, and have a strong likeness to Poppy Playtime.

Each boss arena concludes the same way, with Arnold falling and losing consciousness. The plot and your objective are simple and follow the same formula throughout, where you complete a task, run from a boss, upgrade your Data Diver, talk to Dispatch, and repeat. Because it relies on the same format, there’s nothing about Secret of the Mimic that feels fresh or inviting. Engagement is difficult when you’re playing the same hour of gameplay on a loop. By the time I was looking for the last eight collectibles in New Game+, I’d gotten so fed up with the Mimic and wondered if getting the secret ending was even worth it.

Screenshot by Destructoid

I experienced my fair share of performance issues playing Secret of the Mimic, which I feel is incredibly important to mention, as this game costs $40. I lost an hour of gameplay during Foxy’s stage play and Nurse Dollie’s sections because it was permanently autosaving, yet didn’t actually save, which reset my progress when I loaded in from a “game over” just to freeze in front of Nurse Dollie’s face. I also had to manually close the game repeatedly because the mouse cursor became tiny and couldn’t line up with the continue or main menu buttons.

Murray’s Costume Manor tugs at your curiosity

Screenshot by Destructoid

There are some strong points with Secret of the Mimic, such as its distinct level design and exploration, which reminded me of System Shock, Fallout, and Alien: Isolation. I really enjoyed the Data Diver mechanic and how you slowly but surely upgrade your permission level so you can backtrack and enter new areas for collectibles, audio logs, and mail. The exploration perfectly pairs with the lore, like you’re uncovering a dark secret the further you go—something that was very much missing in the original FNAF games, as lore was exclusive to the mini-games, which gave the series an overall arcade-y feel. It’s classic survival horror level design that I’m happy to see make a comeback. Outside of its level design, the text-based adventure of Moon.exe hidden inside Secret of the Mimic carries most of the mystery.

Where FNAF always does well is in its storytelling, and Secret of the Mimic definitely shines brightest here. Intrigue peaked for animatronics like the White Tiger and Moon, but this was confusing as it felt like I’d discovered multiple entities, rather than being stalked by just one.

Screenshot by Destructoid

The development of Edwin’s story and the reveal in the non-default endings was great, even if the default ending is predictable. But, if you have the patience to see the entire story out, you will surely appreciate the conclusion in New Game+. Annoyingly, replayability is exclusive to the secret ending that is locked behind New Game+, for the only difference is a collectible you cannot get in the base game. You may miss out on some secrets in your first playthrough, but the only standout area lies in the depths of the Retail Showroom.

As much as I enjoyed these aspects, it was infuriating to play through the entire game again and be unable to skip Fiona’s quirky dialogue (which was only nice to hear the first time around), and forced to stealthily avoid the Mimic over and over because there’s no other gameplay option.

Final thoughts

Screenshot by Destructoid

Secret of the Mimic doesn’t feel like a Five Nights at Freddy’s game at all. There isn’t that strong urge to hunt down information because so much is handed to you without any real fight for it. The gameplay is too similar to Poppy Playtime, venturing too close into being a children’s horror game than an adult’s. While I’ve always felt mascot horror shouldn’t be targeted towards kids because of its content, Secret of the Mimic does just that. There is literally nothing scary about this entry, and it sadly lacks what made the original games so strong: the challenge. Because of this, I clocked out of Secret of the Mimic for the third and final time feeling disappointed.

Alright

Slightly above average or simply inoffensive. Fans of the genre should enjoy them a bit, but a fair few will be left unfulfilled.

Underwhelming in horror and gameplay departments, but fantastic in its level design and core mechanics; Secret of the Mimic is an average entry in the series. Having equal strengths to weaknesses, FNAF retains its mystery, but at the risk of losing its identity. Replayability is ruined by the repetitive hunt of the Mimic and inability to skip dialogue. The environment is memorable, pacing is good, but the threat in Secret of the Mimic grows tiresome fast because of its never-ending formula of stealth gameplay finished off by chase sequences. FNAF fans should enjoy the lore and conclusion to Edwin Murray’s story, but Secret of the Mimic may be one of those horrors best enjoyed as a viewer—not as the player.

Pros

Great level design that invites exploration
Memorable environments
Fantastic gameplay mechanics of the Data Diver
Engaging collectible hunting that feels innovative
Classic FNAF lore, executed perfectly in “game within a game” feature
Strong non-default endings that will satisfy storytelling enthusiasts

Cons

Predictable at times
Tiresome and repetitive stealth gameplay
Weak bosses
Horror peaks at its conception
Occasional but frustrating performance issues
Weak replayability value

A copy of this game was provided by Steel Wool Studios for review. Reviewed on PC.

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June 18, 2025 0 comments

Game Reviews

The Alters review | Rock Paper Shotgun

by admin June 18, 2025

The Alters review

An extraordinary, unwieldy, high-concept management game in which you grow a workforce from your own psychological baggage.

Developer: 11 Bit Studios
Publisher: 11 Bit Studios
Release: June 13th 2025
On: Windows
From: Steam, GOG, Epic Games Store
Price: $32/£27/€32
Reviewed on: Intel Core-i7 12700F, 16GB RAM, Nvidia RTX 3060, Windows 11

11 Bit Studios have a thing for circles. Their 2018 hit Frostpunk had you plant rings of buildings around a massive coal-fired generator in a frozen crater, picking research paths to steer your fully overlapping class/temperature Venn diagram of a city toward either fascism or theocracy. Frostpunk’s radial design is hypnotic, putting across the theme of humanity versus the engulfing cold with claustrophobic symmetry, and 11-bit’s later colony sims have struggled to either evolve the motif or depart from it. Frostpunk 2, for instance, shatters and smooshes the circle to form a district-based frostland republic that gets lost in its own chatter.

The Alters is weirder than Frostpunk 2, and more successful. It tips the circle on one side. The crater city is now a wheel-shaped spacebase, strung with modular dwellings, which trundles across a landscape you will also explore on foot. It’s one genre, the colony management sim, bowled through another, the third-person action-adventure. The game also develops Frostpunk’s urban faction dynamics into a more intimate, tortured blend of psychological allegory and workplace soap opera, with the quirk that every member of that workplace is technically one and the same guy.

In this winningly uncategorisable endeavour – equal parts Severance, Moon, Astroneer and The Sims – you play Jan Dolski, the solitary survivor of an interplanetary geological expedition. You are marooned on a planet where time is both managed and mined in the form of Rapidium, a magical substance that groans like a foghorn and can be used to accelerate the temporality of creatures and objects.

As in Frostpunk, the apocalyptic rhythms of the planet itself are your greatest enemy. While you wait for rescue, you must keep your spacebase rolling in order to escape a devastating sunrise, its proximity advertised at the beginning of each in-game 24-hour cycle. The immediate problem is that you can’t operate the base alone. But your employers at Ally Corporation back on Earth have a solution: use Rapidium to flash-grow clones of yourself, based on the speculative alternate lifepaths mysteriously mapped out for Jan in the base’s Quantum Computer.

Image credit: 11 Bit Studios / Rock Paper Shotgun

The result is a narrative-led strategy experience of two, fidgety halves. On the one hand, you need to expand the base using resources extracted from the surrounding landscape, exploring mildly labyrinthine 3D maps in your spacesuit and setting up drills and fast-travel pylons, while dealing with hazards such as radiation and billowing, transparent anomalies. These maps have a touch of the metroidvania, in that exploration is sharply and, at times, laboriously constrained by gadgets: you’ll need battery power for your grappling gun, and charges for your laser drill in order to blast through walls of rubble. They are also littered with drop pods containing Jan’s belongings, conveniently scattered across the campaign path during the crash landing.

On the other hand, you have to supervise your growing team of roads-not-taken – each heroically voiced by the same actor, Alex Jordan – whose feelings toward you predictably range from grudging empathy to searing hatred. You need to attend to their overall living requirements, slotting dormitories and leisure facilities into the wheel, while also fielding individual requests, gifting them emotive relics (such as university hoodies), and helping them figure out the sheer insanity of their existence. You need to keep them alive during the periodic magnetic storms that, as with Frostpunk’s blizzards, induce a gruelling marathon to stay on top of dwindling supplies and deteriorating equipment. And you need to keep them chugging away at the resource deposits, research terminals and crafting stations so that you can reconfigure the base and get it moving before dawn.

In amongst all this, you must bluff and barter with your reptilian superiors back on Earth, who want you to hoover up as much Rapidium as possible. Just to make life a little zestier, one of them happens to be Jan’s ex-wife. All this lasts 20-30 hours and is divided into acts, each of which halts the base in a new region and hands you a fresh major obstacle to overcome, while dealing with any number of competing, smaller-scale crises. Oh, and in the evenings back at base you can play beer pong.

Image credit: 11 Bit Studios / Rock Paper Shotgun

It’s a lot to digest, more than many commercial video game publishers would consider “safe” in a market where players can’t go 30 seconds without checking their phones. One of the great pleasures of The Alters is simply the knowledge that it got made, that a group of plucky devs bore this curious chimera all the way to completion, that a crackpot concept such as this dared the waters of triple-A photorealism. Another pleasure is realising that all the majestic, hyper-nepotistic nonsense about literal “self-employment” is a platform for more relatable conversations about crunch and morale, about personality conflicts, labour conditions and ye olde capitalist alienation.

Above all, perhaps, The Alters is an alternately daft and devious deconstruction of the middle manager figure. It positions you as the interface between the execs, each a voice emerging from a wall of static in the Communications Room, and your grumbling subalternates.

The bosses are various flavours of untrustworthy. Maxwell, your overall manager, is a suave and calculating big dreamer, partial to Jobsian rhetoric but careful to wind it in. Lucas, the Nice One, is more obvious and charming in his manipulations. Lena, your ex, is the most sympathetic, but in some ways the least dependable, by virtue of your history. You must broadly keep them all happy to ensure the arrival of a rescue ship, and you will need their help for certain problems along the way. But you will also play tricks on them: lying about your decisions, lying about whether you’re collecting the all-important Rapidium, even lying about which particular Jan they’re talking to.

Image credit: 11 Bit Studios / Rock Paper Shotgun

Your alters, meanwhile, are both soulmates and uncanny aberrations that need to be deftly inserted into the workings of the base, though they’re pretty autonomous once given assignments. One of the initial wrangles when they emerge from the spacebase “Womb” is a question of semantics that doubles as a question of class: are they a version of you, or are you a version of them? Who gets to be Jan Prime, Ur-Jan, and who gets to be relegated to a Janist vocation such as Jan Botanist or Jan Refiner?

It’s a dilemma with serious practical import for 11 Bit’s designers. The game needs the alters to be your derivatives, your existential inferiors, your NPCs, in order to function as a management sim made up of generic employees with skills that befit certain base tasks. At the same time, the story’s thrill lies with the fact that the alters don’t see themselves as offcuts, particularly given that some of them were born from moments in Jan Prime’s life where, from their perspective, he chose weakness and they chose strength. Why are you entitled to a Captain’s Cabin, when you’re the Jan who left his mother all alone with his abusive dad?

The Alters does entertain the possibility of an actual uprising, but this is a canned insta-fail event with no meaningful follow-through that I’ve discovered. Still, there is ample room for conflict and angst. The whole thing is an absolute headfuck for all concerned. I cloned a miner to help me gather the metals and minerals I needed to bridge a lava river. Then I cloned a shrink to help the miner deal with how deranged he feels about having his lost arm “grow back”. I ripped our winsome, whiny Jan Botanist from a timeline in which he was happily married, and transformed him into a counsellor for managing relations with the woman who is suddenly his ex.

Image credit: 11 Bit Studios / Rock Paper Shotgun

The dialogue captures all this pretty well, both efficiently selling you on the bizarre stresses and gently expressing the differences between Jans. Admittedly, some of them do feel like pantomime creations in wigs with goofy accents, but the differences in, say, vocabulary can be delicate.

I know, for example, that the version of Jan who stood up to his dad is unlikely to use the word “absurd”. The soft-spoken Jan who became a doctor, meanwhile, is frightened by his clone body’s relatively undamaged hands. “They’re so… impeccable,” he breathes. The Jan who became an elite scientist has experience of Rapidium research from his “past life”, and does a lot of the emotional processing before he’s even gotten to his feet. Scientist Jan is powerfully arrogant – “I’m successful because I’m the version of you that doesn’t get discouraged by failure,” he tells you at one point – but he is also quite accommodating, in that he doesn’t much care about certain details as long as there is orderly progression.

Miner Jan is a different case entirely: a craggy, terrified man who finds peace in opiates and endless work. In my playthrough, he was the focus of the game’s very relatable exploration of crunch. While other Jans urge you to force the Miner to take time off, Miner Jan finds the idea condescending, even as he injures himself again and again on the job. “Stop being so noble and take advantage of it like a proper boss,” he tells you at one point. Eesh.

At times like these, you sense that 11 Bit are offering The Alters up as industry commentary. But this is no case study in how to be a caring manager, because the self-cloning premise won’t quite allow it. You’re supposed to look after your workers, and there’s a story ending which sees you siding with them against Ally Corporation, but those workers are also just thought experiments and mirrors in which to hone away your failings. You remain the centre of this rolling circle. As you guide each alter’s personal storyline towards a Lessons Learned reward that unlocks some custom dialogue, Jan Prime flowers under pressure, both confronting his own baggage and fleshing out his people skills in a way that is at once consoling and insidious. The further the base travels, the more complete he becomes, and the more and more he sounds like Maxwell.

Image credit: 11 Bit Studios / Rock Paper Shotgun

Inevitably, the writing creaks in places, at once stretched by the multiversal premise and cramped by the game’s conventional, act-based campaign and the rhythms of base management, which often don’t leave much time to track disgruntled Alters down for a chat. Each day is a rush to assign the Alters to tasks, plug in new rooms, capitalise on research that grants access to new areas, and ensure that you’re pulling in all the resources you need. Amid all that, the story would risk feeling rather drawn-out if you had to explain the Rapidium cloning thing to every fresh Jan in full. 11 Bit’s solution is the repeated onboarding instruction “read the mission logs”, which seemingly advances every Alter through their personal subplot to approximately the same point as the others.

There are also traces of Frostpunk’s somewhat clunky moral dilemmas, variations on the old “is this enough of an emergency to warrant child labour” gambit, but they’re better handled here because those implicated are proper personalities with branching dialogue. And there are a few bonding moments that are just cheesy, particularly when they go hand-in-glove with Simmish “morale improvement” mechanics such as watching movies with your Alters in the Social Room. Sure, I sprouted your whole mind and body from the litany of my regrets in order to help me pull a lever, but on the brighter side, let’s all have a jar and catch a romcom, eh?

I’ve been referring to The Alters as a genre hybrid throughout, and perhaps unfairly: rather than defining this as a jigsaw puzzle, we should portray it as a singular fable that has adopted familiar structures as needed. But I do cling to the idea of incompletely meshing genre parts, of wheels tumbling and grinding through worlds, because the tensions between those genres are evocative, illustrative.

The game’s need to be a reasonably performant piece of management software means that it can’t quite be a fluid and believable third-person action game. The spacebase is sort of a glorified menu (though there are proper menus as well) and menus need to be responsive, so the elevator whips you between levels with what ought to be bone-rupturing speed. The lesser Jans should be scraping Jan Prime off the ceiling every time he uses it, and the fact that this doesn’t happen seems appropriate to a story that can’t determine whether you’re a human being or one among many grades of mass-produced screwdriver.

Image credit: 11 Bit Studios / Rock Paper Shotgun

On a similar note, the game takes a pragmatic approach to time even before you start fooling around with Rapidium. When you hold a button to perform a task, Jan lurches into fast-forward, spinning through the hours with the shriek of a boiling kettle, till the standardised onset of “exhaustion” at 11pm sharp slams his blurring body to a halt. This shortcutting is a necessary convenience for the management sim player who doesn’t want to spend minutes watching a dude wield a drill. But again, it has thematic resonance. So much… velocity visited upon the flesh of one man, and none of it is enough, so back we go to the Womb.

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June 18, 2025 0 comments

Product Reviews

Dune: Awakening review: an engaging survival MMO that’ll teach you to fear the sun

by admin June 18, 2025

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Review information

Platform reviewed: PC
Available on: PC
Release date: June 10, 2025

Early on, while sprinting between rocky islands in Dune: Awakening’s desolate sandy seas, I began to wonder why it’s taken so long for Frank Herbert’s fascinating world to be translated into a survival MMO PC game of this scale.

Making the most of the mythic beasts, warring factions, and an unforgiving setting, Funcom’s latest offering reimagines the core material, providing players the opportunity to step beyond the existing lore and carve out their own place amongst the stars. With so much to see and die as a result of, I still feel like I’m only scratching the surface of this monstrously sized expedition into the desert. But, despite the sizable journey ahead, one thing is for sure – I’m thoroughly enjoying the grind.

Dune: Awakening doesn’t take place in the Dune world you know from Herbert’s cult book, Denis Villeneuve’s cinematic duology, or David Lynch’s 1984 space opera. Instead, it’s set in an alternate timeline where Lady Jessica has a daughter instead of a son, and Duke Leto Atreides survives the assault on Arrakis, leading to an all-out war with the opposing Harkonnen dynasty. Without Paul Atreides and his Lisan al Gaib status, the Fremen are missing in action. Naturally, with all this drama, Arrakis has become a battleground over the most important resource in the galaxy – Spice.

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(Image credit: Funcom)

Players enter this conflict as a prisoner, whose job is to find the Fremen people and awaken ‘the sleeper’. But before you dive into the many processes needed to uncover them, you first need to make some decisions about your character, namely what they look like and how they fit into the political landscape.

You’ll first get the chance to tweak the physical form of your character. There’s a decent variety of choices, from hairstyles to stature and tattoos, too. Naturally, I opted for a pre-distressed look, picking out murky blue eye makeup and some messy lipstick. Visual identity chosen, you’ll then pick some personality building blocks: your homeworld, social caste, and mentor.

Each option will provide you with alternative starting abilities and emotes. As someone who’s always wanted to use the Voice, I opted for a Bene Gesserit mentor and based myself in the frosty peaks of IX as a Bondsman. Sadly, it’s mainly your Mentor that factors into gameplay, with the other decisions acting more as role-playing flavor. Regardless, I was ready to feel the sand on my digital feet and test my survival mettle.

Fear is the grind killer

Needless to say, this planet is not exactly hospitable. (Image credit: Funcom)

You aren’t just dropped into Dune: Awakening without a clue, and are run through a pint-sized tutorial sequence first. Here, you learn the basics of combat and survival, which amounts to scavenging morsels of water drops from plants and swiping at enemies with a glorified box cutter, before witnessing a sandworm gobble up the remains of your ship.

Emerging into the open sand, your workload is split between maintaining your hydration and shelter while branching out into the surrounding areas of the map in search of story missions. Much of my first hour was spent cowering in the shade, fearing for my life as I followed my objectives to earn some scrappy sun protection and a ranged weapon. Suddenly, I wasn’t so afraid, and I began assaulting enemy camps with my newfound confidence.

As you run between pockets of shade, scavenging for resources and completing objectives, you’ll naturally start to earn Skill Points and Intel Points that fuel your skills, research, and crafting abilities. Soon, instead of scrounging around for a morsel of water and clipping enemies with a pea shooter, you’ll be drinking the blood of your enemies and hammering targets with the improved arsenal at your fingertips. Dune: Awakening has all the hallmarks of a classic survival MMO. However, it’s the clever grapple between feeling brave and weak that kept me interested beyond the climactic opening.

Best bit

(Image credit: Funcom)

To complete quests and rise up the ranks, you’ll eventually need to cross large portions of the desert. And, despite the isolation you might feel in the arid landscape, you’re never truly alone. In Dune: Awakening, Sandworms, otherwise known as the Shai-Hulud, are more terrifying than raiders or dehydration. If you’re unlucky, or simply not paying attention to your vibration meter, they can fleece you of all your precious items and leave you in the dust, literally, with nothing but your underwear. Regardless of how terrifying a prospect, the addition of these iconic creatures only makes the world of Dune: Awakening more immersive and entertaining to explore.

It’s not all desert roses, though, and unfortunately, as I sought out more enemies, I ran into issues with the rudimentary combat. You can block and parry, as well as deliver quick, slow, and ranged attacks, which is fine, if not a little underwhelming. Your limited toolbelt, early on, isn’t complemented by the limited enemy variation, and many of the baddies you face look much the same, and frankly, don’t seem too smart either.

On one occasion, while taking out a duo of scavengers, the firing stopped abruptly mid-fight. As I sheepishly wandered around the corner, I noticed that the second scavenger was standing frozen, as if they’d forgotten I was there. As you push into more difficult districts on the map, there are complicating factors like shields, and your opponents have more diverse combat skills, though that does little to make the combat more enticing, and as of right now, it feels like fighting still needs some fine-tuning.

Thankfully, when the combat excursions start to get old, you can tackle story missions called the Trials of AQL, which arrive as alternate challenges that test your dexterity while explaining the history of the Fremen. Hidden amongst the craggy horizons, the trials felt like a carefully constructed extension of the lore, rewarding your attention with gear essential to survival long term. It’s clear Funcom cares about the material that the studio is adapting, and the involved and thoughtful Trials feel like proof of that.

Hope clouds observational skills

See that weird glowing stuff? That’s Rapidium – and Jan’s going to need a lot of it to make more alters. (Image credit: Funcom)

While exploration will take up the lion’s share of your time, base building is another important aspect to your survival in Dune: Awakening. Say a sandstorm warning pops up on your screen, and you need to quickly assemble a dwelling. All you have to do is craft a useful 3D printing gun and pick a safe spot to place your cover.

Here, external walls and flooring all snap together nicely, while the inside of your home requires a bit more finicky work to get things to fit just right. If you do run into problems, the system itself is quite forgiving, and it’s easy enough to modify your floor plan to fit more appliances if things get a little tight. You can technically build a shelter almost anywhere you’d like, and with the speed at which items respawn, plopping down your possessions in open sand is an obvious no-go.

This brings me to the real antagonist of Dune: Awakening. Beyond the periodic sandstorms, trigger-happy enemies, or unwavering thirst, are the more terrifying and possession-destroying sand worms or Shai-Hulud. Hidden underground in the open sands, the worms are attracted to your movements, which you can track via a friendly vibrations bar that appears at the center of your screen.

Laying out your base smartly (as I have very much not done in this screenshot) is key to making the most of your limited resources. (Image credit: Funcom)

Simply put, the more you move in open sand, the more likely it is you’ll attract a sandworm. Once the bar turns red, it means your luck has run out and you need to sprint away to higher ground or risk losing everything you’ve worked so hard for. Short distances start to feel large, and I felt genuine pangs of fear as I tiptoed between the stone monuments that broke up this seemingly endless world.

Dune: Awakening looks solid in motion, but it isn’t always visually seamless, and there are plenty of frustrating bugs and bouts of texture pop-in that get in the way of the fun. Still, Dune’s desert landscape more than makes up for those small squabbles, and it’s easy to get swept up in the carefully constructed details Funcom has embedded on Arrakis.

Visual accents like the billow of a water seal as you cut through it, or the sand particle texture on your windows, help to build the fantasy and commit your exploits to memory. Yet considering how large Dune: Awakening is, I’m sure there’s even more to uncover on my journey to ultimate power, and I’m excited to keep digging and discover more of these details.

Should I buy Dune: Awakening?

Buy it if…

Don’t buy it if…

Accessibility

You can access the settings from the pause menu while in-game, or at the bottom left of the main menu before you join a server. From the accessibility menu, you can toggle on and off camera shakes, controller rumble, and motion blur.

From this menu, you can also toggle on and off subtitles, choose the font size, as well as select an option to have previous subtitles on screen for a longer period of time. You can also tweak the gamma setting from this menu, too. Dune: Awakening allows you to rebind all your keys from the dedicated Keybinds menu.

Where audio is concerned, you can use a slider in the Audio submenu to tweak individual streams of sound (Master Volume, Music Volume in-game, Sound Effects Volume, Cutscenes Volume, Dialogue Volume, and Radio Volume).

How I reviewed Dune: Awakening

I played Dune: Awakening on Steam, using an Acer Predator XB271HU gaming monitor, a Logitech MX Master 3S mouse, and a Logitech G915 TKL gaming keyboard.

I used my external Creative Pebble V2 computer speakers and Audio Technica ATH-MX50X headphones plugged into a Scarlett 2i2 interface for sound. My gaming PC is powered by an RTX 3080 and an AMD Ryzen 9 3950X.

First reviewed June 2025

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June 18, 2025 0 comments

Product Reviews

Peak Design Pro Tripod review: stronger, taller, better

by admin June 18, 2025

Whenever Peak Design releases a new product, whether it’s a backpack, a camera strap, or even a wallet, I’m always looking forward to seeing what kind of genius engineering tweaks the San Francisco-based company came up with. And while there are some clever tricks here, the newly released line of video tripods is more about applying lessons the team learned from its first tripod release over six years ago. The legs are sturdier, there’s an improved center column, a redesigned ball head, and many other improvements worth going through.

$799

The Good

Sturdy
Great ball head
Tilt module

First, the basics: there are three variants to choose from: the Pro Lite, Pro, and Pro Tall, all of which share the same core features but differ in max height and weight. The whole lineup of tripods is available on Kickstarter, but they won’t be cheap — the Pro Lite, Pro, and Pro Tall cost $799, $899, and $999, respectively. Discounts for backing them on Kickstarter range from 23 percent off the Pro Lite to 27 percent off the Pro and Pro Tall.

I had a chance to test all of them over a few weeks.

Pro Lite was easy to carry around with me on my hikes around San Francisco Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge

The Pro Lite is the lightest model and weighs 3.7 lbs. You’ll notice the added heft compared to the 2.81 pounds of the carbon fiber Travel Tripod — Peak Design’s first and only tripod until now. A lot of that extra weight is justified and comes from the ball head. We’ll talk about that soon.

The Pro Lite is four inches taller than the original Travel Tripod with a sturdier and longer center column. That extra height is just enough for me to record my to-camera sections at eye level. (For reference, I’m 6 ‘1 or 187cm.)

Then there’s the Pro and Pro Tall. These tripods are heavier, taller and have a larger weight load than the Pro Lite. I mostly kept using the Pro and Pro Tall tripods indoors and have added things like sliders and my heavier cinema cameras rig.

All of the Peak Design’s new tripods are made out of carbon fiber, but only the Pro version will come in a silver option. Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge

Each tripod is made from carbon fiber; there aren’t aluminum options, and each is light enough to bring anywhere with me. Even the Pro Tall, at 4.5 lbs, gave my back a nice break compared to my usual video tripod — a decade-old 5.5 lb Manfrotto 055 with a 3.7 lb fluid video head. But, out of the three, I found myself using the Pro Lite the most, since I try to keep my gear as light as possible during hikes or long photo walks.The ball head featured on all three tripods has a new quick-release system that feels much more secure than the one found on the Travel Tripod. The camera easily snaps onto the Arca-Swiss compatible plate, and there’s a separate locking mechanism flush against the side of the ball head. This lock, which the Travel Tripod didn’t have, made me more confident I wouldn’t accidentally release it and drop the camera by bumping into a tightening knob.

New ball head feels more robust, keeps your camera safely locked in, pans, but can’t tilt. Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge

I’ve been using Peak Design’s first tripod since it launched in 2020. The ball head has deteriorated over time. It still works, but the lock often gets stuck and is hard to release once tightened. This new lock addresses that issue.

I don’t know how this new ball head will perform in a few years, but I expect it to be better. A dedicated lock toggle which wasn’t present in the Travel Tripod means you won’t have to overtighten the previous tightening system. Durability is one of the most important aspects of a tripod, and when you pay a premium price for one, you hope it lasts for years. That Manfrotto that I mentioned earlier, I’ve been using it for nearly a decade.

One of my favorite new features is that it’s much easier to switch to vertical filming. It can easily flip onto its side by unlocking the ball head. The Travel Tripod has that ability, but with limited maneuverability. The new head can move freely in any direction. I love it!

Original Travel Tripod had prongs on the base which made vertical operation harder. That is no longer a problem here. It’s easily the best and my favorite upgrade. Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge

The ball head panning was smooth, but there aren’t friction adjustments. It’s either unlocked or not, but it was able to handle my mirrorless Fujifilm XH2s and even my heavier cameras like the Canon C70 well. However, you’ll need a separate $149 (MSRP) attachment if you want to add tilting capabilities.

I assume most readers looked at the scorecard and saw that I added “tilt module” under both the “good” and “bad” sections. Allow me to explain. On one hand, it’s annoying to pay extra for this accessory and I wish it came with the tripod. On the other hand, I like that you don’t have to pay the added cost if you don’t plan to use it. One possible workaround is to use an L-bracket on your camera, flip the ball head for vertical filming and your built-in pan axis now becomes a tilt one.

The tilt module snaps onto the ball head with its Swiss-Arca base, just like a camera would. The extendable handle magnetically attaches to the back of the tilt mod. It’s super clever. But the tilt accessory wasn’t ideal for everything. As with pan, there’s no way to adjust the friction. That made it harder to keep my tilts smooth and steady with heavier gear, such as my Fujifilm XH2s with a 5o-140mm lens.

There is also another option — you could use an different fluid video head, but you’ll need to get a separate $129 (MSRP) Pro Leveling Base attachment. It replaces the included ball head and has a much shorter center column. You can still quickly and easily level it on uneven surfaces.

Each aspect of the tripod has been improved including the flip leg locks which now feel smoother and easier to engage and disengage. Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge

There are lots of smaller improvements. They have better leg locks, sturdier concave center columns, a hidden hex tool (you don’t need to attach one to the side, it’s in the center column), and an easier way to disassemble and clean parts. Even the carrying bag is roomier; it’s not a very tight-fitting sock like before.

But are they worth the price? It depends on how you use your video tripods. Over the last few years, with better camera and lens stabilization, my need for video tripods has slowly diminished. During my review period, I ended up using the Pro Lite tripod more often as a photo tripod than a video and it slowly replaced my original Travel Tripod. While the other two in the lineup stayed in my studio for video work. But each of the new tripods addresses every pain point of the original Travel Tripod.

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June 18, 2025 0 comments

Product Reviews

Peak Design Pro Tripod review: a triumph of design, compactness and stability

by admin June 18, 2025

Why you can trust TechRadar

We spend hours testing every product or service we review, so you can be sure you’re buying the best. Find out more about how we test.

Peak Design Pro Tripod: two-minute review

Peak Design’s tripods have a couple of unique design features. One is the leg design, which is not tubular but has a six-sided cross section with an inner edge that fits straight up against the center column, with no gaps. The center column is thinner than most but also has a six-sided cross section for the legs to fit neatly against the legs when folded. This non-tubular construction does seem to give both the legs and the center column unusual stiffness.

The Peak Design Pro Tripods don’t use tubular carbon fiber legs. They have a more complex six-sided cross-section designed to fold up tight against a flat-sided center column. (Image credit: Rod Lawton)

Peak Design’s clever leg and column design means these new Pro tripods fold down to a very small diameter compared to regular tripods. (Image credit: Rod Lawton)

The other unique feature is a low-profile ball head with no protruding locking nut. Instead, it’s clamped with a rotating collar, and another, just above locks and releases the compact Arca Swiss compatible camera plate.

This low profile head design means that the original Peak Design travel tripod does not have to have its legs rotated 180 degrees from their folded position before you can use it. The low height of the ball head means that you can simply fold the legs in and pack it away without any complicated manoeuvers.

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The new Pro Tripods also come with a new Pro Head. It still uses rotating collars to release the ball and the QR plate but it’s bigger and more substantial than the original. (Image credit: Rod Lawton)

The Pro head takes regular Arca Swiss compatible plates and also accepts Peak Design’s clever new Tilt Mod specifically for video work. (Image credit: Rod Lawton)

These design features made the original Peak Design Travel tripod very different to anything else. Now Peak Design has taken those same design concepts and scaled them up into a Pro version designed for serious professional use.

In fact, there’s not one Pro tripod but three. The regular Pro tripod is the one I spent most time with for this review, but I also got to try out the Pro Lite and Pro Tall variants. The Pro Lite is almost the same height and folded length of the regular Pro Tripod, but has a lighter construction for easier portability. The Tall version has longer leg sections and can even reach eye level for tall people without any center column extension – it exceeded my eye level!

The new Pro tripods aren’t just bigger and more substantial than the original Travel Tripod – they have a new Pro ball head that’s larger and more substantial than the original, plus it has a neat ‘inverted’ design so that the pan axis is above the ball not below it. This means that you can level the pan axis for panning shots and panoramas without having to fiddle around with the leg lengths. It’s not a huge range of adjustment but it might be all you need.

For more extreme pan axis adjustments, or if a lot of your work is video, Peak Design has you covered. There are two new ‘mods’ to go with these tripods: one tilt head for video work, and the other a leveling bowl which you swap out with the standard center column, and which has a regular head attachment screw so that you can use your favorite video head if you want to.

This is Peak Design’s new Tilt Mod, which attaches directly to the Pro head to offer a smooth tilt movement for video. (Image credit: Rod Lawton)

Here you can see the Tilt Mod fitted. It clamps straight into the Pro head’s Arca Swiss mount so it takes just a few seconds. (Image credit: Rod Lawton)

The Tilt Mod and the Pro head feel as if they were made to go together… but there’s another clever touch. The Pro head uses an ‘inverted’ design so that the pan axis is above the ball. This means that it also acts as a basic but effective levelling head for video work. (Image credit: Rod Lawton)

I love the original Peak Design Travel Tripod, so do the new Pro tripods leave me just as impressed? Yes! It is, literally, just like using scaled up versions of the Travel Tripod. The carbon fiber legs feel just as smooth and warm to the touch, the leg clamps are just as quick and positive, and because these Pro tripods have four leg sections rather than five, they’re a little quicker to set up.

The new Pro ball head is terrific. It’s big and chunky, it locks tight and it doesn’t add a whole lot to the tripod’s height when you’re packing away. As before, there are no protruding knobs or levers to get in the way either.

Peak Design’s use of a rotating collar to lock the QR plate does take a little getting used to. The head has two collars in close proximity and at first it can be a struggle to remember which does what and how they work.

The new Pro head, though, feels absolutely rock solid, and it’s with the pan and tilt mod that it gets really clever. All you need to do is take out the regular Arca Swiss plate and slot in the pan and tilt add-on for a proper fluid pan and tilt action.

There’s an extending panning handle which is stowed against the side of the head via a magnet (Peak Design loves magnets) and can be quickly screwed into the head ready for use. It sounds like a kludge, with one head mounted on top of another, but it absolutely isn’t. It looks like it was made to work this way, and feels like it too. The tilt axis is sprung, by the way, so if you use a longer camera plate you should be able to balance it up fairly well for light and controlled tilt movements.

If you’re into more serious video work, you might want to take a look at the Pro Leveling Base. This replaces the center column with a shorter ‘stub’ column incorporating a leveling bowl. This also has a regular head fitting, so you can still use your favorite video head – it doesn’t have to be Peak Design’s. (Image credit: Rod Lawton)

The center columns on these tripods are longer than the one in the original Travel Tripod, which is useful, but even though they’re fixed with a small-looking locking knob, they lock down really tight and with no flex.

You can also get spiked feet but these are an optional extra, nor does it seem like Peak Design includes a phone clamp with these tripods, so that will be a paid extra too. It kind of makes sense because these Pro tripods are overengineered for phone use anyway. If you do get the phone mount, it will still slide up into the base of the center column for storage. Here, Peak Design has stuck with its slightly complicated pull-and-twist hook release which is easy when you’ve learned how it works but can be annoying at first.

So that’s a quick tour of the Peak Design Pro Tripods, but which is the best one to get? That’s quite tricky because they are somewhat similar, both in size and price. The standard Pro tripod is expected to sell for $899.95 when it goes fully on sale in November 2025, the lighter Pro Lite will be $799.95 and the Pro Tall will be $999.95. I haven’t seen prices for the UK or Australia yet.

Personally, I wouldn’t go for the Pro Lite. I can understand the reasoning – it’s a slightly lighter, slightly cheaper alternative to the regular Pro model – but it’s not a lot smaller and I think I’d rather just pay the extra for the thicker legs of the Pro model. The Pro Tall is interesting, though. If I was 6ft tall and didn’t like using center columns, I would go for this one. It’s definitely longer when packed away, but all of these tripods are too long to fit inside a backpack anyway and would end up strapped to the outside. Besides, for those times when you didn’t need the extra height you could just extend three leg sections not four, for even more stability.

Peak Design Pro Tripods: key specs

Swipe to scroll horizontallyHeader Cell – Column 0

Pro Lite

Pro

Pro Tall

Packed length

48.8cm

50.1cm

58.1cm

Packed diameter

8.5cm

9.3cm

Max height, center column down

133.2cm

138.0cm

162.0cm

Max height, center column up

162.5cm

168.4cm

197.4cm

Min height (low mode)

15.8cm

15.9cm

17.3cm

Weight

3.74lbs / 1.7kg

4.19lbs / 1.9kg

4.4lbs / 2.0kg

Max payload

15.9kg

18.1kg

Head

Integrated Pro Ball Head

Material

Carbon fiber

Leg sections

Peak Design Pro Tripods price and availability

The Peak Design Pro Tripods launch on Kickstarter on July 17 2025 but are expected to go on general sale in November 2025. The Pro Lite tripod has an expected price of $799.95, the Pro tripod will be $899.99 and the Pro Tall will sell for $999.99.

The Tilt Mod and Pro Leveling Base will be sold separately and we’re currently waiting for price information on these, but we are told the option spiked feet will sell for $49.95.

Peak Design Pro Tripods: Also consider

Should I buy a Peak Design Pro Tripod?

(Image credit: Rod Lawton)

Buy it if…

Don’t buy it if…

How I tested the Peak Design Pro Tripods

Operational speed and efficiency
Stiffness and rigidity
Ball head operation
Effectiveness of add-ons

I had just two weeks to try out the Peak Design Pro tripods because loan stocks were in short supply and shared between many different reviewers. However, I know the original Peak Design Travel Tripod very well and I review tripods as part of my work, so I already had a list of what I was looking for and expected from these new Pro tripods.

I particularly wanted to test the speed and ease of deployment and was pleased to find it was just as slick as with the original Travel Tripod but quicker, thanks to the 4-section legs and larger leg clamps. I also wanted to check if the excellent stiffness of the original Travel Tripod had scaled up to these new, bigger sizes, and it has. I don’t remember any other tripods I’ve tested with more torsional rigidity and lack of leg flex than these.

I was also keen to check how the new Pro Ball Head worked. The original was good but quite small and fiddly. This one is much better. Not only does it clamp tighter and hold heavier loads better, the inverted ball design makes levelling the camera for panning shots so much easier.

Lastly, I spent some time trying out the Tilt Mod and Pro Leveling Base and came away impressed. The Tilt Mod fixes so well to the Pro Ball Head that they feel like a single (very smooth) unit and the Pro Leveling Base took a minute or so to swap out with the regular column but lets you use your own tripod head.

First reviewed June 2025

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June 18, 2025 0 comments

Product Reviews

Fortnite Nintendo Switch 2 Edition review: by far the best way to play on a handheld, and a pretty solid TV experience too

by admin June 17, 2025

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Launching alongside the Nintendo Switch 2, Fortnite Nintendo Switch 2 Edition is quite simply the same game, but better. Bless developer and publisher Epic Games for trying, but Fortnite on the original Nintendo Switch is hardly the most elegant way to play and feels like you’re at a significant disadvantage thanks to the decreased graphical fidelity, framerate, and draw distance. It’s forgivable on handheld, but with TV mode, it looks rough and feels rougher. But I’m glad to say the Nintendo Switch 2 edition is a great way to play, no matter where you are.

Review info

Platform reviewed: Nintendo Switch 2
Available on: Nintendo Switch 2; Non-Switch 2 version available on Nintendo Switch, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, PS4, PS5, PC, Android, iOS (in some regions)
Release date: June 5, 2025

I mean, what can you even say about Fortnite at this point? Epic Games’ 100-person Battle Royale game has taken over the world over the last eight years, and it’s only grown larger in the time since. In the vein of something like Roblox, Fortnite is both a battle royale and a user-generated game platform where you can find an endless amount of custom maps to play with your friends on.

But let’s get into why the Fortnite Nintendo Switch 2 Edition is such a great way to play.

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Chug jug with you

(Image credit: Epic Games)

To really hammer that “you can play Fortnite without even touching its main mode” point home, I don’t like Battle Royale – the marquee mode – thanks to the game’s building mechanics. However, when it comes to the Zero Build mode, it’s undoubtedly the best Battle Royale game on the market right now. Over the years, Epic has augmented the core mechanics of the game with a host of new movement options like wall kicking and roll landing that keep things fluid in what used to be the jankiest of movement systems.

Of course, the problem with any ‘evolving game’ is that it’s tough to give a review of the main mode because of how it changes. Fortnite Chapter 5 Season 1 was peak, while Chapter 4 and Chapter 5’s third seasons were two of the absolute worst seasons of a live service game I’ve played. This means there could be three-month stretches where you just simply don’t like the game. And considering Epic Games has been experimenting with seasons based around media franchises like Marvel, Star Wars, and a rumored upcoming Simpsons season, if you don’t like those, that’s all you get for months.

Thanks to the use of the Nintendo Switch 2’s feature set and specs, it’s one of the best ways to play the game on console and by far the best handheld version.

Outside of that, there are the Epic Games-created modes. There’s Fortnite OG, which brings back the original Chapter 1 map (which can also be played in Zero Build, thankfully); Reload, which is a faster-paced 40-player battle; and Ballistic, a first-person mode that is a take on Counter-Strike. While none of these stand up to the core mode, they offer different ways to take on the mechanics of Fortnite and are solid games in their own right.

Then there are non-shooting modes like the Minecraft-inspired Lego Fortnite, Rocket Racing, and the best side mode, Fortnite Festival, which is a rhythm game mode and the closest thing we’ll get to a new Rock Band game, considering it was developed by Guitar Hero and Rock Band creator Harmonix. This mode gets constantly updated with songs and artists, with a new singer taking center stage with a skin and big song drop every few months or so (with the likes of Sabrina Carpenter, Metallica, and Hatsune Miku showing up).

And despite having so many options, the player base for each main mode is really healthy, meaning you’ll never wait too long to find a game of anything, with some custom games even having dedicated player bases. A few of these Epic-made modes have their own seasons and battle passes, too, which does add up if you don’t subscribe to the Fortnite Crew. However, Epic recently changed it so XP earned in any mode goes towards every single pass, which is a massive step up.

Mouse trap

(Image credit: Epic Games)

Fortnite Nintendo Switch 2 Edition is the same game as it is everywhere else; there are no exclusive modes or anything of the sort. However, thanks to the use of the Nintendo Switch 2’s feature set and specs, it’s one of the best ways to play the game on console and by far the best handheld version of Fortnite.

Compared to the Nintendo Switch version, which ran at 880p docked and 660p in handheld mode, Fortnite Nintendo Switch 2 Edition runs at 1224p docked and 900p in handheld, so it still isn’t 4K / 1080p, but it is a significant boost. However, the resolution isn’t where the upgrade matters; the improved textures as well as a far greater draw distance, which was one of the original console’s biggest hindrances – especially with how big the Fortnite map is. Most importantly, Fortnite Nintendo Switch 2 Edition runs at a solid 60fps as opposed to the 30fps of the Nintendo Switch – which in an online shooter that has cross-play with more powerful platforms – makes a world of difference.

Gyro aiming returns from the Nintendo Switch edition of Fortnite, but new to the Switch 2 version is support for mouse controls via the Joy-Con 2 controllers. Effectively, this allows you to use a mouse setup for aiming with the movement capabilities of an analogue stick, and is a wonderful combination.

Best bit

(Image credit: Epic Games)

As I was writing this review, Epic released a Hank Hill skin alongside an emote recreating the King of the Hill intro: my best bit can only be that and even how it looked on the Switch 2, which was excellent.

However, the mouse implementation is a touch awkward. Due to the lack of buttons available, you’ll still need to access the face buttons on your Joy-Con to jump and reload, which creates some uncomfortable moments as you crane your hand. Plus, the mouse controls need to be activated from the in-game menu, as opposed to just sticking the Joy-Con in mouse position like in other games. This isn’t the biggest pain in the world, but it doesn’t revert back once you use a controller that doesn’t support mouse controls (such as attaching your Joy-Con 2 to the Switch 2 itself), which means you’ll need to get the controller off and go through the menu with the mouse to deactivate it.

Fortnite is a phenomenon for a reason; if you let yourself get by the “popular game bad” noise that you often see with this and the likes of Call of Duty, you’ll find what is probably the best Battle Royale game in the genre. And even outside of that, it’s a massive game platform that has an endless supply of whatever you like, from racing, rhythm games, and even custom Fall Guys games.

However, the risks of an ongoing game persist because you’ll occasionally be hit with a season that makes the game bad for months, and there’s not much you can do to help it.

Having said that, Fortnite Nintendo Switch 2 Edition is easily the best way to play on the go or on a handheld device, and while it’s outclassed in power by the PS5 and Xbox versions when it comes to TV mode, it’s still solid to look at, and the mouse controls give it an edge that those consoles don’t have.

Should you play Fortnite Nintendo Switch 2 Edition?

Play it if…

Don’t play it if…

Accessibility

Fortnite has a ton of accessibility options, including multiple color blindness filters, the ability to remap controls however you like, alongside multiple control options like gyro aiming and mouse controls.

A standout feature is the visual sound effects toggle, which displays a ring around your character to indicate the source of sound effects and their corresponding representations (footsteps, loot, gunfire, etc.). This is particularly beneficial for those with hearing difficulties or when playing the game with the sound muted.

How I reviewed Fortnite Nintendo Switch 2 Edition

I played around eight hours of Fortnite Nintendo Switch 2 Edition on top of a good 300-400 hours played across PlayStation, PC, and Nintendo Switch. During my time with the Nintendo Switch 2 edition, I tested Zero Build mode, Fortnite Festival and a number of custom games.

I played this in a mixture of handheld mode on the Nintendo Switch 2 itself and on a Samsung Q60D TV and a Samsung HW-T450 soundbar using the Nintendo Switch 2 Pro Controller and the Joy-Con 2 controllers when using mouse mode.

First reviewed June 2025

Fortnite Nintendo Switch 2 Edition: Price Comparison

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June 17, 2025 0 comments

Product Reviews

Gardyn Indoor Hydroponic Garden Review: Better Growing Through AI

by admin June 17, 2025

I’m in the midst of putting together a buying guide of indoor vertical gardening systems, and the Gardyn—the 30-plant Home 4.0, to be exact—was the first tester to arrive at my house. I had it unboxed and set up within a couple of hours, lights on and water pump running. I’m already a pro! I thought.

Sure enough, within a couple of weeks, all of Gardyn’s proprietary seed-filled yCubes had sprouted, and a couple of weeks after that, I was harvesting bowlfuls of herbs and salad greens. Even though from setup to harvest the Gardyn required the use of about five brain cells, I was quite pleased with myself, despite having long ago given up gardening outdoors due to deer, rabbits, and my own incompetence with anything other than starts from the big-box store.

What I failed to understand, but would come to grasp with subsequent systems, was that indoor hydroponic gardening is just as hard in some ways as outdoor gardening. I had no way of knowing this, however, because Gardyn’s pricey add-on app and AI gardening assistant, “Kelby,” had been doing all the real work via a network of sensors and live-view cameras (two on the larger Home model, one on the smaller Studio).

Easy Living

My new friend Kelby had been gathering data in order to set its own watering times, schedule its 60 LED lights, and send me the occasional customized task that never took longer than 10 minutes. And this customized maintenance isn’t just helpful for convenience, as mold, bacteria, or roots clogging up the plumbing are extremely common in hydroponic gardening. Kelby told me when to add the needed nutrients (included) and how much to add, when and how to attend to the plants’ roots, and even when to harvest.

Photograph: Kat Merck

There’s also remote monitoring, of course, and a vacation mode that keeps the plants in a sort of stasis. Most of the work on my end was simply me admiring my plants, and admire them I did. The first time I ever saw a Gardyn was a couple of years ago, in a Parade of Homes show house, adjacent to a floor-to-ceiling wine cabinet. “Wow, what is THAT?! I want one!” announced nearly every person who shuffled by in their paper booties. Even in a $2 million spec house, the lit-up display of lush herbs, flowers, and vegetables was a showstopper.

When I began testing other systems, I was feeling quite big for my britches. At this point, I had successfully grown sunflowers, lemon balm, and even an entire kohlrabi. I’ve got this! Within five minutes of opening the other systems’ boxes and finding pH test strips and vials, manual-dial timers, and multiple bags of supplements, however, I realized I did not have this. In fact, I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. Gardyn had only made me think I knew what I was doing. And, according to founder FX Rouxel (pronounced F-X, like the initials), that’s Gardyn’s entire raison d’être.

Engineered Growth

Courtesy of Kat Merck

You might expect the founder of a hydroponic gardening system to have an agricultural background (perhaps even a certain kind of agriculture), but Rouxel is a tech guy. Though he did once work for the French version of the Environmental Protection Agency, his most recent pre-Gardyn gig was at French IT company Capgemini, deploying cloud, automation, and AI technologies. Although he is also a parent, cook, and Ironman athlete, his passion lies in using technology to lower the entry barrier to growing your own food.

“With other systems, they’re basically a pump on a timer,” Rouxel told me during a recent interview. “You need to know what you’re doing. We looked at, ‘Can we use AI to actually solve this problem?’ Unlike our competitors, we have a big chunk of the company that is just engineers.” They make sure the Gardyn app is constantly adjusting through data collected via the system’s two cameras and sensors that track water usage, humidity, temperature, and plant growth. If the system identifies an issue, it will send the user a specific task through the app to fix it.

Note that I did find the cameras to be slightly glitchy during the seven weeks I’ve been using the Gardyn, requiring periodic resets of the system to keep them both online. It didn’t seem to affect any of my tasks or plant stats, but I found it irritating nonetheless. Though if I weren’t using the Kelby feature, it wouldn’t matter, as the cameras are essentially useless otherwise.

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June 17, 2025 0 comments