Key Preview Takeaways:

The remake looks good, but not necessarily better than the 2D original it updates.It's got new content to add on to what's already here, along with an entire other Rayman game bundled with it.It still plays really well as a pure platformer.

I’m going to get my most subjective opinion out of the way here first, before I tell you about my experience actually playing Rayman Legends Retold, the just-delayed remake of 2013’s absolutely stellar 2D platformer. Here goes: despite being 13 years newer, I don’t think this 2.5D remake looks any better than the gorgeous 2D original…which seems like something that, if you ask me, shouldn’t be up for debate if you’re going to remake a game. And as such, I’m not sure how necessary this remake is. Our own Michael Higham arrived at the same opinion after he did our first preview.

But that’s not to speak ill of what is being presented in Rayman Legends Retold. It looks good, to be explicitly clear, regardless of whether or not you’ve ever seen the 2D original, and even better, it still plays fantastically well. This is a platformer that has aged quite well in the gameplay department – at least, based on the three hours I played of Retold recently, combined with the fact that I hadn’t touched Legends since it originally released one Grand Theft Auto ago.

That being said, based on what I’ve played so far, it does nicely integrate some new content with the old. It’s got new musical levels, where you’re essentially platforming to the beat of a song (I played the “Macarena” stage). It’s also got new stages and a revamped Kung Foot mode. Heck, Ubisoft is even throwing in the entirety of Rayman Origins: Enhanced Edition as a sweetener with the standard, $40 version of Retold.

This is a platformer that has aged quite well in the gameplay department.

If you’ve played a Rayman platformer before then you’ve probably read all you need to at this point, but if you’re new to the series, Rayman Legends Retold is a pure side-scrolling (mostly) platformer where, not unlike in Mario’s 2D platforming adventures, you can absorb at most one hit (read: any contact whatsoever) from an enemy before dying and resetting to the most recent checkpoint. Although I should note that Rayman Legends Retold does its very best to avoid frustration, as there are optional “golden hearts” you can pick up; they appear when you respawn after dying a few times in a row at the same point. And if the game still detects you banging your head against the proverbial wall, you have the option to invoke the “Fairy Blessing” that puts our limbless hero in a protective bubble and lets you literally float right by whatever challenge you’re currently frustrated with.

Each hub area, meanwhile, has a unique theme, and the variety was both impressive and appreciated. I started my hands-on in a food-themed zone called “Spoiled Rotten” where I was jumping off giant cucumbers and tomatoes and occasionally being shrunk down to the size of an ant through carefully placed trumpets that let me navigate the innards of a watermelon, as one example. The “What the Duck” stage here was marked by everything being made of sweets and pastries, and here I had a hungry flying helper named Murphy who would zip around in specific patterns near certain bits of culinary geometry, leaving me to press LB or Y to have him eat through whatever he passed through. These were often enjoyable platforming challenges unto themselves, as I had to figure out how to navigate my way through the freshly eaten spots unscathed before the cakey walls regenerated a few moments later.

I played one boss fight in a completely different world against a giant Luchadore, too, which mixed things up with timed attacks and big, bold setpieces. Pretty standard platforming fare, but really well-executed. And I suppose that’s where I landed after my few hours with Rayman Legends Retold. It’s not breaking any new ground – not visually and not gameplay-wise, not that it should be expected to since it's a remake, after all – but it is a clean remake chock-full of content both new and old at a pretty nice value. It might be of particular interest to the Switch 2 crowd that isn’t getting the GTA 6 meteor landing in their lives this Fall (particularly in light of a new 3D Mario platformer’s continued absence and Super Mario Bros. Wonder being a couple years old now), and/or to the younger crowd that hasn’t played the series before. Here’s hoping it leads to a brand-new Rayman adventure sooner rather than later.

While you're here, check out these recent previews of other big upcoming games we've checked out recently!

Grand Theft Auto 6FableExodusFinal Fantasy 7: Revelation

Ever since Blizzard revealed World of Warcraft: Forever at Blizzcon 2026, the company has been laser-focused on maintaining its Classic+ identity, even if that means not implementing some quality-of-life features the game's retail version has had for years.

In a reply to GingiTV and Nobbel87, two of the biggest WoW personalities on X/Twitter (albeit from complete opposite ends of the community), Blizzard developer Josh Greenfield confirmed that not implementing shared drops and tagging was "one of those things that we simply must hold the line on." He continued, saying "It’s hard to see the value in something like this when you are frustrated in the moment but it is extremely important to our social pillar to maintain some of this friction."

Yep, this. This is one of those things that we simply must hold the line on. I think there are other things we can do to help alleviate some frustration here but shared tagging is not it.

It’s hard to see the value in something like this when you are frustrated in the moment but…

— Josh Greenfield (@AggrendWoW) September 20, 2026

In the retail version of World of Warcraft, players who are questing or trying to farm rare spawns can all tag the same enemy (to a limit), so that everyone can get the rewards for killing it. This makes it a lot easier to play the game outside of a group, but it all but eliminates the need to group up with other players outside of high-end group content like dungeons and raids.

It's not hard to see why some people would want shared tagging implemented in Forever, too. The beta for this new version of old World of Warcraft has been incredibly popular, which means there's a lot of competition for anyone that just wants to kill some boars for some bones. The solution, which was suggested by Nobbel and confirmed by Greenfield is to "group up and get it done together," which will give people more opportunity to socialize, which is really what WoW Forever is designed for.

To Blizzard's credit, it seems like a huge portion of WoW Forever players agree with its approach. Most of the replies and quotes of Greenfield's post are along the lines of "The Classic team we trust 💙" from MrGMYT, and "shared tagging taught players to pay less attention to each other and soon became less social" from covingtown.

World of Warcraft: Forever is currently in Beta, which you can access by spending $60 on the Skyborne pack, but you'll only be able to play until level 20. The full game will launch on November 4, and will be included in your World of Warcraft subscription, just like any other version of Classic.

This is an IGN opinion piece from Ryan McCaffrey, who worked at Official Xbox Magazine from 2002-2012 during the original Xbox and Xbox 360 era before joining IGN, where he remains “the Xbox guy” and has reviewed several Halo games, including the Master Chief Collection and Halo Infinite.

I’ll give Asha Sharma this: she is not afraid to shake things up. Whether you love or hate how she’s run the Xbox business in her first six months as CEO so far, there are no sacred cows with her. Whether it’s slashing Xbox Game Pass prices, nuking an unpopular marketing campaign, restoring console exclusives, telling Obsidian to make a damn Fallout game already, or signing Hideo Kojima after PlayStation cancelled Physint, she is more than willing to flip over some tables to try and get Xbox to a better place. Unfortunately, these decisions have also come paired with a lot of layoffs. To say the situation for all at Xbox is changing would be to put it very lightly.

When it comes to the very fundamentals of Xbox’s game DNA, though, Sharma’s latest power move is arguably her most earthshaking one yet. The next mainline Halo will be developed by Activision. Meanwhile, Halo Studios – the series’ custodians since 2011 – has been hit with significant layoffs.

Read that again. Halo Studios, once known as 343 Industries – the developer founded purely to create Halo games – will no longer be the creative drivers behind Halo. The keys to the Warthog have been taken away and given to Activision, makers of Call of Duty and the crown jewel of Microsoft’s $69 billion acquisition. The company had to crawl through regulatory broken glass in order to get approval for such a move, so I suppose this is one way to help further justify that kind of expense.

This doesn’t reflect well on Xbox’s handling of Halo over the past 15 years. You know you f*cked up pretty bad when the developer that was renamed to Halo Studios less than a year ago is now no longer making the next big Halo game. Like, holy shit. Let that sink in for a minute. But from where I sit, Halo Studios’ issues have never been with raw talent. I absolutely loved Halo 4’s campaign that centered on Master Chief and Cortana’s relationship, but its multiplayer failed to live up to the Halo standard. The opposite happened with Halo 5, whose awful campaign sat alongside a phenomenally good multiplayer. And Halo Infinite finally put two great halves together…for a minute, until the modern needs of maintaining a living multiplayer shooter couldn’t be met by the studio.

Instead, the problem has always seemingly been with management. From a reported reliance on an ever-cycling crop of contractors, to having to onboard every one of those said contractors with Halo’s proprietary Blam/Slipspace engine, it made the studio wildly inefficient. I’ve also personally heard from a well-placed source in the past week that leadership is “ineffective” and “makes me facepalm on a regular basis.”

You know you f*cked up pretty bad when the developer that was renamed to Halo Studios less than a year ago is now no longer making the next big Halo game.

But one source does not a complete narrative make. Let’s instead look at the results. We are already less than three months away from Halo Infinite’s fifth anniversary. And, based on the “reboot” of 343 Industries under the new Halo Studios name, its change of leadership, and shift from the proprietary Slipspace engine to Unreal Engine 5, the chances that the existing development structure could ship a new big Halo game in the next five years seems slim at best.

Sharma, who has already made it clear she wants Xbox to take a franchise-first approach to what it invests its resources into, must’ve come to the same conclusion. Giving the series to Activision says one thing above all else to me: she wants a Halo game soon. And Activision, whether you love it or hate it, does have a pretty sterling track record of getting big-budget blockbuster games done in a timely fashion. They’re not always great games (see last year’s Black Ops 7), but they’re usually at least pretty good, and they always ship on time. Has a Call of Duty ever missed a holiday ship date? Not that I can recall – that’s the power of multiple support studios working together.

So from that purely business perspective, handing Halo to Activision makes perfect sense. But what about creatively? That’s a more difficult question to answer. Activision undoubtedly has a ton of talent in-house, but Infinity Ward doesn’t seem like it’ll be escaping the Call of Duty salt mines anytime soon after successfully rebooting itself over its last few projects. Sledgehammer, meanwhile, has seemingly fallen out of favor following its tenure on some of Call of Duty’s weakest projects in recent years – Vanguard and Modern Warfare 3. But then again, Microsoft didn't say it was forming a new studio for Halo. It specifically used the term "purpose-built team." To me, that strongly suggests that a new team will be formed within an existing Activision studio that can plug directly into the established development pipeline. That leaves two likely candidates in my eyes: Treyarch and Raven.

Treyarch has arguably been Activision’s most dependable cash factory since it first created the Black Ops sub-franchise back in 2010. It was a success story born out of disaster, following Infinity Ward’s implosion and much of the studio’s founding team departing to form Respawn. Black Ops went on to become the flagship brand for many Call of Duty fans, particularly following the titan that was BLOPS 2. That winning streak came to a screeching halt last year, though, when Black Ops 7 released to middling reviews and disappointing sales. Perhaps that’s the signal that Treyarch needs a new focus. Interestingly, the studio recently said that it was “ready to make something new,” a quote which looks awfully suspicious given Sharma’s latest big move.

Putting Treyarch in charge of Halo would, in my opinion, be the safest move. Halo needs help, and Treyarch has been Activision’s most reliable studio that has a proven track record of elevating the world’s biggest franchise.

A lot of Halo fans understandably hate the idea of the series starting afresh, but honestly, I think it’s time.

There’s another possibility, though: Raven Software. The pride of the Wisconsin game development scene has been stuck on Call of Duty for what feels like an eternity, but before that, its resume consisted of some absolute bangers. Heretic, Hexen, Quake 4, Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force, Star Wars Jedi Knight 2, Soldier of Fortune, and the 2009 Wolfenstein reboot are all examples of its FPS pedigree. Putting Raven in charge of Halo would be the bolder pick, if you ask me, and I’d be fired up if the studio got the call. And of course, it's also quite possible that this new team will pull talent from multiple Activision studios, but again, based on the way Microsoft worded it, I'd be willing to bet lunch that it's a new team within one of Activision's existing studios.

No matter who’s developing the next mainline Halo game, however, this move only makes me even more confident in a prediction I’ve been making for a while now on Podcast Unlocked: that the next major Halo game isn’t going to be Halo 7, or a sequel to Halo Infinite. It feels like far too much time has passed for a direct successor to make sense. Instead, I think what’s next is going to be a reboot.

A lot of Halo fans understandably hate the idea of the series starting afresh, but honestly, I think it’s time – especially now that the franchise is changing hands. By the time Activision is ready to roll, we’ll be 30 years deep, give or take, into the Halo canon. There are entire generations of players who missed out on some of Master Chief’s most important chapters. And considering Campaign Evolved was surely Halo’s first and last appearance on a PlayStation console, now that Sharma has made exclusives a priority again, a re-run of those formative years for a wider audience of players is no longer necessary. The reality is that it will be a new team picking up the mantle following a multi-year pause in Halo’s story, and that team is going to have its own ideas.

Campaign Evolved isn’t just a dead end when it comes to re-establishing the canon – it’s potentially also a technological loose end. Think about it: if one of the Call of Duty studios takes over, and Sharma wants Halo back on shelves as quickly as possible, you’d only slow that team down by having them pivot to Campaign Evolved’s Unreal Engine 5 when they’ve spent the past 15+ years working with Call of Duty’s proprietary tools. Those teams’ entire development pipelines are built around the bespoke IW engine and its unified toolset. And, for all the creative faults you could pick with Call of Duty, it’s hard to criticize them from a technical perspective. There’s almost zero chance that process gets messed with. Take all of that together and I just don’t see Activision picking up where Halo Studios left off in any way, be it narratively or otherwise.

So, can Activision save Halo? The cynical answer would be, “Well, they can’t do any worse.” But the real answer is: maybe. It depends on which studio and which team is entrusted with this billion-dollar task. Halo was the biggest first-person shooter series in the world before being dethroned by Call of Duty. How crazy is it that the very same people who defeated it are now being asked to resurrect it? If I’m being honest, though, as talented as Treyarch and Raven are, neither would be my first in-house pick at Xbox to revive Halo. I’d pick id Software (who might be done with Doom for now) or MachineGames (who is reportedly busy with the conclusion to its Wolfenstein series). But both Treyarch and Raven are fully capable. Here’s hoping that whoever’s name is on the next Halo understands the assignment and is afforded every resource available to get it done properly.

Editor's note: this story has been updated to better reflect Microsoft's plans to have Halo developed by "a new, purpose-built team".