Star Fox is back! And by that, of course, I mean the 1997 Nintendo 64 game is literally back. Who knows how long we will be waiting for a proper, new Star Fox, but you know what? The remake, simply titled Star Fox, is pretty dang good. Turns out doing a faithful remake of a great game, even an old one, usually works out pretty well.

That’s the big game release this week, but there is plenty of other stuff happening across the industry. Check out some stories below before diving into our weekend recommendations.

• Grand Theft Auto VI has a price and pre-orders are open
• Bungie is suffering huge layoffs
• The Xbox Series X and S consoles are also getting another price increases in August
• Olivia Rodrigo is coming to Fortnite
• Capcom also shared updates on upcoming games like Dragon’s Dogma 2: Dark Arisen and Monster Hunter Stories 3: Twisted Reflection

Reviewed on: PlayStation 5
Platform: PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S
Publisher: EA Sports
Developer: EA Vancouver
Release: June 19, 2026
Rating: Mature

Legendary boxer Marvin Hagler once said, “It’s difficult to get up and do roadwork at five in the morning when you’re sleeping in silk sheets.” While this refers to getting rich through combat sports and therefore losing the work ethic you once had, the notion could also be applied to EA Sports and its lack of competition. The Madden franchise, with its NFL exclusivity, has long drawn the ire of fans for a perceived lack of innovation due to its monopolization of the NFL video game space, and after spending many hours with EA Sports UFC 6, I’m starting to worry the same problem might have transposed to this franchise as well.

To be clear, the gameplay in UFC 6 is the best this franchise has seen. Thanks to new ways of differentiating the fighters, either via animations, movements, tendencies, or signature ways of attacking, EA Vancouver finally cracked the code on making combatants feel distinct. And those fighters largely look incredible; though your mileage will vary based on fighter popularity, the biggest stars’ likenesses are often dead-on in UFC 6. This permeates the experience, whether you’re playing a quick one-off fight in the game’s capable online suite or diving deeper into longer-tail modes.

UFC 6 carries forward the series’ pedigree of action-packed fights inside the cage; though grappling options are always available, in my experience, wrestling-heavy affairs are rare. That’s a good thing, as grappling continues to be a sore spot, straddling the line between being too cryptic and too mindless. Instead, fights often quickly develop into high-speed chess matches and violent car crashes. Thanks to improved blocking and more variance in striking, it pays to be strategic, particularly as you manage your stamina over the course of an extended bout. And thanks to an evident focus on approachability, anyone can ease into the action with optional features like slow-motion in-fight moments, beginner control schemes, and simplified grappling. 

This entry also introduces a Flow State mechanic, which uses a charging meter and aims to emulate the feeling of a fighter being in the zone. Once you enter Flow State, activated with a push of the d-pad, the background noise fades away, and your fighter temporarily gains a performance boost. This addition effectively captures the momentum shift that can occur when everything starts clicking, but it also veers the action heavily to the arcade side of the fence.

 

However, like many UFC stars past and present, the in-Octagon performance isn’t the problem – it’s everything that happens outside of the fights. The M rating affords more blood in the cage, but it’s more often used to listen to (mostly) uncensored rap and nu metal songs on repeat in the poorly optimized menus. You still have access to all the modes of recent games; I enjoyed putting together my dream fight card, setting up a one-night tournament like the early days of the promotion, or pulling off fantasy matchups between two legends in their primes, but I’m always drawn to the longer-form experiences. 

UFC 6 touts two distinct career modes, but unfortunately, both fall flat. The standard career mode features the same loop as past games: You sign to fight a specific opponent, then manage your week-by-week bandwidth by completing a combination of sparring and promotional activities. However, this quickly becomes repetitive, as you complete the same few activities multiple times per fight with a career spread across 30-plus fights. You can simulate some of the activities you’ve already completed, but you get fewer benefits, and with all the promotional activities simply being menu items you select, it doesn’t take long for the tedium to set in. 

Even the new player-agency elements fall woefully short of expectations, giving you occasional binary choices that range from how you trash-talk to whether you want to fall for your coach’s get-rich-quick scheme. These feel inconsequential at best and outright annoying at worst; by the end of the first couple of years, I was hoping to change camps like in past games, but that is one area of player agency that’s missing. Normally, I’m glued to this mode with each new entry, but since I’ve played all previous UFC games, UFC 6’s career mode quickly gave me an unshakeable sensation of “been there, done that.”

It’s perhaps why I was so hopeful for The Legacy, a narrative-driven twist on career, where you take control of a fictional UFC prospect. This mode, with its M-rated story and promise of fights that spill outside of the Octagon, has a ton of potential, but once you get past the short, forgettable story, it’s just the standard career mode without your custom fighter. After seeing the story through to the end, you can continue playing career mode as the narrative’s protagonist, but I left The Legacy shortly after its narrative conclusion, likely never to return.

The one UFC 6 mode that impressed me is the Hall of Legends, a new interactive museum that highlights three current UFC fighters. Walking around a lovingly crafted museum themed after Max Holloway’s home of Hawaii or one that pays homage to Zhang Weili’s Chinese origin in third person delivers a cool immersive experience, giving you bite-sized documentaries of each fighter and tasking you with re-creating iconic moments from their careers in-game. It’s here that the dev team’s love of the sport really shines, but when there are only three fights to relive per fighter, and the documentary footage seems to be all repurposed from past UFC content, I was left wanting more.

Instead, the one area that feels completely excessive and largely unnecessary is perhaps the most baffling: The Gym. This area serves as a menu-based training system, where you navigate some of the laggiest and most unwieldy screens to assign trainers to fighters to arbitrarily unlock cosmetic items. It almost serves as a chart-your-own-path daily login bonus, with each new level for every fighter unlocking new items to equip, but it all feels so tiresome and unnecessary. In fact, the menus throughout the entire UFC 6 package are so laggy that they bring the menu-heavy experiences of The Gym and both career modes down in noticeable ways. In some cases, they’re so poorly optimized that the music even skips as the next screen loads.

UFC 6’s incremental gameplay improvements and bewildering stagnation fly in the face of the fact that it’s been three years since the last entry in the series. With annualized sports franchises, you almost expect iterative innovations year after year, but after such a long wait, I expected a bigger bump with UFC 6. The improved character models, graphics, and fighter distinctions are welcome improvements, but when almost everything else feels so familiar or inessential, I can’t help but wonder if EA Sports’ UFC franchise has experienced too much time uncontested at the top.

Score: 6.5

About Game Informer's review system

Somehow Star Fox returned. Yesterday. With the release of Velan Studios' remake of Star Fox 64 for Switch 2. And it's good! It is, expectedly, making us reflect on the larger Star Fox franchise. We originally published this list around the launch of Star Fox Zero back in 2016, but we've updated today with new games and have reconsidered our order.

You can check out our list below.

10

9

8

7

6

5

4

3

2

1

We're not including it on this ranking because, frankly, it is not a Star Fox game. But Starlink: Battle for Atlas is absolutely worth mentioning when it comes to discussing the Star Fox series. Playing the Switch version of the game contains much more than a Fox McCloud cameo – he is integrated into the game's story in a big way. And, the game also included a physical Arwing toy. It was the most exciting thing we had from Star Fox between the release of Star Fox Zero and the release of Star Fox (2026).

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To learn about the assorted gimmicks that have invaded the Star Fox franchise, head here. For our review of Star Fox Zero, head here. For our review of Star Fox (2026), head here.

Haunted Chocolatier is the highly, highly anticipated follow-up to Stardew Valley, one of the biggest indie games of all time. But while this chocolate-making spiritual successor was announced way back in 2021, we've seen very little of the project, save for a handful of blog posts on creator ConcernedApe's website. The last update came in late January, and now, just under six months later, developer Eric Barone is checking back in with a new post to reassure fans he's still working on the game and explain why he's shown so little.

First, Barone thanks everyone for their patience, and gives some insight into why his development process is so time-consuming. "Lately, I’ve been revisiting the recipe book for making chocolates," Barone writes. "As with many things in the game, I’ve iterated on this many times, each time bringing it closer to its final form. To me, it’s not a simple task, as I torture myself over every last detail. This is a UI you will be using fairly often, so it has to be perfect."

While this recipe book is one of the core mechanics, he adds that he likes to "fuss over" his whole game this way. Ideally, the game will come out with a level of polish he's satisfied with (like how Stardew Valley is now), but that also means the process will take a long time. On that note, he says that his eye for detail and refinement is also the reason there are so few screenshots or gameplay clips in the wild.

"Side note… please excuse me, but I don’t like to share too many screenshots, or even talk about the systems in too much detail, while the game is in development," Barone's blog reads. "Partly, it feels like I’m serving a half-baked bread. I would rather serve a fully baked bread. Also, I know that many parts of the game will likely evolve and change before release, so if I reveal them early, I risk disappointing players if the final product does not match their expectation."

Haunted Chocolatier currently has no release window. While Barone said he hoped to release the game within five years back in 2025, he has since clarified that this isn't a hard and fast date. "The bottom line is, I don’t want to give a release date," his January update reads. "The game will come out when it’s done."

For more Haunted Chocolatier and Stardew Valley, you can check out guest contributor Ana Diaz's in-depth interview with Barone from issue 378, published online in May. For more on why Haunted Chocolatier is one of our most anticipated games, check out our collection of our Most Anticipated Games of 2026 (And Beyond) from issue 375.

Last November, FX announced that a limited Far Cry anthology series was in production. We already know the series is helmed by executive producers Noah Hawley (creator of FX’s Fargo and Alien: Earth) and Rob Mac (creator of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia), the latter of whom will also star in the show, but it's been announced that Lizzy Caplan is joining the cast.

Caplan most recently starred in Netflix’s Zero Day and the FX limited series Fleishman Is In Trouble, earning an Emmy nomination for the latter. The actress’s extensive credits also include Now You See Me 2 and Now You See Me: Now You Don’t, the Paramount+ series Fatal Attraction, Showtime’s Masters of Sex, and the 2023 horror film Cobweb. Personally, we remember Caplan best as Janis Ian in Mean Girls, but that’s just us.

Far Cry has no premiere date, and it’s unknown if the anthology series, which means each episode features a new setting and cast, will adapt any of the existing games or tell original stories. Far Cry is set to air on FX, Hulu, and internationally on Disney+. 

Ubisoft has another live-action series based on one of its IPs in the works. Netflix greenlit an Assassin's Creed series last year, and you can read more about that here.