Reviewed on: Switch 2
Platform: Switch, iOS, Android
Publisher: The Pokémon Company, Nintendo
Developer: The Pokémon Works
Release: April 8, 2026 (Switch), June 17, 2026 (iOS, Android)

Pokémon Champions is out today on iOS and Android platforms. Below you can find our review of the Nintendo Switch version of the game that released on April 8, 2026.

Pokémon has persisted for decades for many reasons – cute characters, a popular anime, lucrative trading cards – but chief among them is the game series' consistently satisfying turn-based battles. Pokémon Champions captures this highly refined system, cuts out much of the grinding necessary to train a viable team, and puts a thrilling competitive battling system in the hands of players around the world. The features around those battles, however, are often confusing and uneven, and despite a solid core, Pokémon Champions fails to reach its full potential.

As a longtime observer of the competitive Pokémon scene, I am glad to play a game that sidesteps the dozens of hours of legwork necessary to even participate in ranked play. Mainline games require you to catch, level up, evolve, and EV train monsters, sometimes even sourcing them from past games in the series. In Champions, there are no levels, and swapping natures, abilities, movesets, and stat spreads is as easy as clicking menu options.  After years of watching, I'm finally able to participate, and that alone is worth commending.

Champions includes single and double battles, each in ranked and unranked modes. There is not much content on the surface, but for a free-to-play game, infinitely playable multiplayer is plenty to satisfy me. Each format includes its own strategies, and building teams catered to either style is one of my favorite parts. Champions sees the return of mega evolutions, which allows one Pokémon per team to become more powerful for the battle's duration. Recent competitions have centered around Scarlet and Violet's terastallization mechanic, so the return of mega evolutions shifts the meta in a fun, fresh direction. 

Series veterans can import their favorite companions from Pokémon Home, a cloud-based Pokémon storage system, but the available options are shockingly limited. The series has over 1,000 creatures, but only around 190 are available in Champions. Held items are also severely limited, with many major items like the choice band, assault vest, or life orb nowhere to be seen. For a game billed as the new future of competitive Pokémon, it's surprisingly restrictive.

A limited spread of options is more appealing to newcomers, however. Even then, the onboarding process for someone completely fresh is lacking. In true Pokémon fashion, the tutorial explains the most basic concepts, with instructions aimed at true beginners. Past that tutorial, however, it's a little overwhelming. How do you build a team? Which items are best with which Pokémon? Which Pokémon are even good? Anyone seriously interested in answering these questions can access plenty of vast, free resources on the internet, but Champions teaches such basic building blocks that it implies it can be played in a vacuum. That is not the case.

The microtransactions also disproportionately affect new players. VP, the game's currency, is needed for just about everything. Cosmetics understandably cost VP, but so does unlocking held items and mega stones. Collecting Pokémon is free once a day, but keeping them permanently costs VP. Training them to have different moves or stats costs VP. You gain VP by playing battles (winning gets you bonus VP), and Champions is generous in the opening hours. Still, for a game so seemingly focused on pulling new players in, it's hard to shake the feeling that you should have been buying and playing the main series games this whole time.

It's never been easier to get into the competitive Pokémon scene, and playing Pokémon Champions has been a highlight of my last week. Champions seems to be designed for people like me, who are familiar with competitive battles and want an easier way to participate. However, it also makes moves to cater to completely new players and extremely seasoned players, and by trying to satisfy all three audiences, it fails to properly serve either. With minimal content and a pressure to collect Pokémon in mainline games, it works best as an additional mode for the main series. As a standalone product, it's a game confused about its own goals. And much like the in-game status condition, that confusion only hurts it in the long run.

Score: 7

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Reviewed on: Switch 2
Platform: PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, PC
Publisher: Square Enix
Developer: Team Asano
Release: June 18, 2026
Rating: Teen

Despite starring a hero clad in red, it's clear that The Adventures of Elliot: The Millennium Tales is a game trying to fill the proverbial green tunic worn by Nintendo's star swordsman, Link. Between its talking fairy, time-traveling narrative, and arsenal of weapons/puzzle solving tools that includes bombs, a bow, and a boomerang, the comparison is impossible to deny. While it arguably improves on some elements, like its enjoyable combat system, I spent most of my time with Elliot entertained, but never satisfied. Link did it better, but my 25 hours in the land of Philabieldia were pleasant nonetheless.

Elliot earns his subtitle of "the Millennium Tales" thanks to its story, which spans four ages of its continent's history. By passing through Doorways of Time, Elliot embarks on a quest to save the kingdom of Huther in his home time period. The story, while simple, is the classic sort of adventure publisher Square Enix is known for, with magical secrets, sages, and a long-lost sacred sword. But while time travel is an interesting hook, I was left frustrated at how little each age varied from the last. The main town and its people shift drastically, but enemies don't vary much from era to era, and the overworld doesn't change enough to feel new. I often would be ushered back into a new time period, meet the people of a new town, and then go through the same fields, caves, and dungeons I had already explored further down the timeline. 

For most of the game, Elliot also doesn't seem to impact the timeline, which is slightly disappointing. He participates in major conflicts, but the flow of history isn't altered – his appearances are canon events, so nothing drastically changes when you return home. The time travel functions more as a tool to explore the land's history at each of its most pivotal moments. You're far more likely to travel to the past to learn about a problem's context than you are to solve it before it occurs. The only exception is the game's true ending – it's the first time the causal relationship between eras is really felt in the story, rather than just worldbuilding. This great sequence, which added eight hours onto my playthrough, is absolutely mandatory if players want to understand Elliot and his world, as it's the narrative's proper conclusion. It's just a shame the story's most unique element takes so long to truly pay off, and I hope most players don't put the game down before then.

The Adventures of Elliot's greatest strength lies in its protagonist's wide arsenal of tools, all unlocked fairly early in the game. There are seven main weapons to equip and customize with Magicite, Philabieldia's enchanted gems. These crystals alter your attacks in various ways, making them hit harder, cause elemental status effects, or add other weapon-specific traits. I made my boomerang extra large and lengthened its time in the air, allowing me to shred enemies with a buzzsaw-like attack. Meanwhile, my massive hammer knocked foes far away and caused defeated enemies to explode. It's a great system, and I regularly experimented with my weapons and builds.

I wish there were a greater variety of enemies, as you battle most of them in the first 10 hours. Luckily, The Adventures of Elliot has a bonus drops feature, which increases enemy rewards as you defeat foes without getting hit. Despite combat growing stale towards the end, I enjoyed feeling like I had mastered the existing enemy types, blazing through familiar monsters to max out my gains to make extra cash.

Your fairy companion, Faie, also gains abilities throughout the adventure, and while they're mostly used for puzzle-solving, they also add fun wrinkles to fights. You can also play challenges focused on these abilities in the menu, shooting for high scores and unlocking music tracks to listen to in-game. Faie herself, however, is the game's most grating feature. Her high, bouncy voice would not be out of place in an episode of Dora the Explorer, and she talks nonstop, usually over-explaining basic concepts or simple observations. Faie manages to put Navi's cycle of "Hey, listen!" to shame, even when dialing down the "chattiness" setting in the game's menu. She's also the only companion to follow Elliot between eras, so you're stuck with her, whether you like it or not.

Despite the successes of The Adventures of Elliot: The Millennium Tales, I can't help but feel it doesn't make full use of its time-travel potential, both in its overworld and in its story. Still, while it's not particularly exceptional or exciting, it is both adequate and effective. I doubt The Adventures of Elliot will replace Zelda in anyone's list of favorites, but across my roughly 25 hours, I was always glad to pick my Switch 2 back up and play some more.

Score: 7.25

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Ever since we learned the name of Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, fan speculation began running rampant about what the third and final entry of the Final Fantasy VII Remake trilogy would be called. While, thematically, many considered "Reunion" to be a fitting choice, that was disqualified as it was the name of the Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII remaster, which arrived in 2022. In early June, we finally learned that the name was Final Fantasy VII Revelation.

Oddly enough, while on stage at Summer Game Fest 2026's live show, director Naoki Hamaguchi focused more on another word that begins with "re." "As I spoke about in my stage presentation, the central theme of this title is going to be 'Resolve,'" he tells Game Informer. "That could mean a lot of things, but one of them is the resolve of our party player-characters heading into the final battles. What kind of resolve do they have in them? What are they feeling? What are they thinking about? Things like that. We're going to really dive deep into that specific aspect of their emotions and what they're thinking. It's going to shape a little bit differently between the choices that the players take, so the overall game experience might change a little bit depending on those choices that the players might take, but the goal is for the characters to feel closer than ever for the players."

When I ask Hamaguchi directly if, given that response, "Resolve" was ever in consideration for the name of the third part, he is direct in his response. "The central theme being 'Resolve,' and it being a word that starts with R-E, that's just a coincidence," he says. "It wasn't really a candidate for our title. We landed with 'Revelation,' because that was the word that was the best match for what we wanted to depict in the third installment of our series. One thing I can share about the title 'Revelation,' though, is that we kept this under the veils for the longest time, and we wanted to be very careful about it. We have a very huge development team, but among those development team members, only five or six people knew about the title. Most of them found out about the title at the SGF stage presentation!"

I asked Hamaguchi about the name of the third entry during our 2023 Rapid-Fire interview with the director of the Final Fantasy VII Remake trilogy, he responded, "That is kept inside [creative director Tetsuya] Nomura-san's head," before he rejected various joke pitches I gave him, so the secrecy of the announcement checks out.  

Given the themes of the third act of Final Fantasy VII, I'm curious if there is any inspiration for the final entry of the Final Fantasy VII Remake trilogy from the final book of the Bible, The Book of Revelation. "Some people might make that connection with Christian [mythology], but from our point of view, it was more about revealing all these unanswered questions that the fans may have with Remake and Rebirth. I think a lot of fans and players were just really wondering, how this is going to go down, and how the trilogy is going to conclude. As a response to that, this is our message, to say that this is the end of everything, this is where everything gets revealed, and this is where you will find out all the answers."

Final Fantasy VII Revelation is set to arrive on PS5, Xbox Series X/S, Switch 2, and PC in the first half of 2027, marking the first time the Remake trilogy is going multiplatform on day one. To learn how Hamaguchi feels about bringing Final Fantasy back to Nintendo, read his thoughts here. To learn more about the changes coming to Queen's Blood in Revelation, head here.

Platform: PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, PC
Publisher: Xbox Game Studios
Developer: Halo Studios
Release: July 28, 2026

As part of our trip to Halo Studios back in May for our recently announced Halo: Campaign Evolved cover story, I had the chance to sit down and play through all three of the new missions included in the remake package. These missions take place prior to the famous narrative of Halo: Combat Evolved, giving us more insight into Master Chief pre-Cortana, as well as his relationship to Sgt. Johnson. These hands-on impressions are just a part of our in-depth cover story that chronicles the creation of the original Halo: Combat Evolved, as well as the upcoming 25th-anniversary remake, Halo: Campaign Evolved. 

To read the full story, which spans 22 pages in our print edition, subscribe to Game Informer by heading here.

The story of Master Chief and Cortana in Halo: Combat Evolved is widely known by this point. And though Halo: Reach gave us glimpses into the days leading up to the events of Halo: Combat Evolved, the games have stopped short of giving us many interactions with Chief ahead of his debut title. Halo: Campaign Evolved not only delivers a remake of the full original story of Combat Evolved, playable with up to four players, but also a trio of bonus missions set in 2551, around a year before Combat Evolved’s story begins.

While Halo Studios could have easily rested on its laurels by simply delivering a remake of the original content, the team wanted to see how it could further flesh out the universe in the events leading up to that story. This decision includes bringing in weapons, enemy types, and other elements that wouldn’t debut until subsequent Halo games.

These inclusions make the universe feel more alive, as though these elements were always present, rather than conveniently popping up in the in-universe timeline just as the developers added them to gameplay. The three missions star two of the most popular characters in Halo: Master Chief and Sgt. Johnson. The latter has appeared in several games, but the Halo: Campaign Evolved bonus missions look to further explore and establish his relationship with Chief.

“It’s a big universe with a lot of great characters, a lot of great stories to tell, and things that happen in this time period,” creative director Max Szlagor says. “These missions are before the events of the main campaign, but specifically, Chief and Johnson, they’ve had a relationship for some time, and so it’s really interesting to dig into what that’s like, or the relationship between the ODSTs and the Spartans. [...] When you first see Johnson in the original campaign, you’re like, ‘Okay, who is this character?’ So, just having that context, I think, really enhances the overall feel of the experience.”

Despite these missions taking place chronologically before the events of the original game, Halo Studios recommends that players who are either new to Halo or whose skills may be a little rusty start with the original campaign, as the bonus missions jump pretty quickly to the difficult end of the spectrum. Despite this, the story plays out like a fun prequel, giving us more insight into Master Chief before he partners with Cortana. Immediately, I see a slightly chattier Chief than I’m used to, with him even making small jokes that you would typically hear between friends with Johnson.

Senior franchise story lead Jeff Easterling oversaw the creation of the narrative, while longtime Halo novelist Troy Denning worked closely with the team of writers as a contributor. “A couple of Troy’s most popular [novels] were dealing with the early dynamics of the relationship of Sgt. Johnson and The Chief,” Easterling says. “We always felt like, Sgt. Johnson, we want to spend more time with him, and in the original [Combat Evolved], I think people forget that Sgt. Johnson actually doesn’t play a huge role. It really is only in Halo 2 and 3 where he becomes the Johnson that we know in our minds, and we try to ‘retro’ that into CE, but we’ve done some interesting things with Campaign Evolved and these three missions being paramount to elevating Johnson into the Johnson that we remember. Troy was an easy pick to be involved with that.”

“We knew that we wanted them to get some mapping coordinates trying to find a map for the Covenant homeworld, and after that, we sat down and started talking about the three parts of the story, how we would structure it, and just tossing out ideas,” Denning says. “I obviously had a blast writing Johnson and The Chief together [in Halo: Silent Storm], so it was fun to be able to do that again.”

The trio of missions begins with Boarding Action. Chief and Johnson smuggle themselves aboard The Triumph of Tolerance to retrieve nav data that would allow them to strike back at the Covenant following the glassing of a planet. The first room is full of Grunts and Jackals, as well as one Elite, but it’s nothing I can’t handle while in control of the powerful Spartan. After the coast is clear, Chief opens a hatch in the ship they came in on to let Johnson out.

As Johnson works to open the first door, Chief asks, “Any way to speed this up?” Johnson replies, “Until we can find a way to cram an AI into that suit of yours, this is the best we’ve got.” References to events still to come give nods, both subtle and overt, to the broader universe.

“It’s fun because the writers and the creators on the game can deep-seed some lore that a newer player may not know anything about, or they may be discovering some of these things for the first time,” executive producer Damon Conn says. “We made sure to put in a lot of nods to lore around The Chief and Johnson and what they have gone through, and things that have happened in books and other media to make sure that we’re anchoring some things in there that, if you’re a real Halo lover, you’re gonna have something to look forward to in these, because you’re gonna discover some nice little notes as we tell as new story.”

I played through the entire three-mission arc, but I don’t want to spoil too much of what unfolds. However, as I work my way through these missions, I love seeing these various elements from games outside of Combat Evolved crop up. I’m excited that one of my favorite weapons from later in the franchise, the battle rifle, is a mainstay in these missions, and I could find powerful arms like the fuel rod cannon and energy sword regularly, but I continually gravitated towards the needle rifle as my go-to. And, since this is built on Halo: Combat Evolved, you know I put the notoriously powerful pistol to good use.

One of my favorite sequences came in the first mission when Chief stumbles upon a sparring room, which serves as a sandbox arena for one of the best encounters. Since it’s a training room for the Covenant, dozens of different weapons are scattered throughout the area, giving you access to a large arsenal. The thrill of swapping between favorite weapons as more and more enemies poured in was nearly unrivaled during my hands-on time. And when I finished that room, I exited to a fully stocked armory, making me feel like a kid in a candy shop.

You’ll need to use the wide range of weapons to make it through. Facing off against Elites, Grunts, Jackals, and Hunters is expected, but shortly after that training room encounter, the story takes a turn. As Chief and Johnson enter a room, a cutscene shows their fight interrupted by an unlikely voice: a Prophet. And not only that, but the Prophet Harmony introduces a new enemy type into the mix, The Brute. These ape-like creatures, who originally debuted in Halo 2, are now a mainstay for the rest of the bonus missions, and their aggression fundamentally changes the flow of how the combat encounters play out.

The second of the three missions sees Chief and Johnson exiting the claustrophobic hallways and tailor-made battle arenas in favor of an outdoor biome. The third mission brings the conflict to a head with the most challenging stretch of combat, including a moving platform sequence where you must survive the ride as enemies fire on your position from all angles.

The three missions culminate in yet another surprise: a space battle. I won’t talk about what’s happening in the story at this point, but you must accomplish your mission while piloting a Covenant Seraph. After hours of boots-on-the-ground combat, putting an exclamation point on this bonus content with a distinct gameplay style inspired by Halo: Reach was a fun way to shake things up.

I’ll be the first to admit I approached these new missions with a sense of apprehension; after all, how do you expand upon the story of a game like Halo: Combat Evolved without feeling like apocryphal fan fiction? But by being smart with the chosen time period, how it tells the story, and how it incorporates elements from the wider Halo universe, Halo Studios delivers an incredibly fun, bite-sized prequel to Halo: Combat Evolved that stands capably alongside the original content.

Halo: Campaign Evolved arrives on July 28 on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC. To read the full cover story, be sure to subscribe to Game Informer. If you already subscribe, you can read the 25th anniversary retrospective of Halo: Combat Evolved here, and the in-depth look ahead at Halo: Campaign Evolved here.

Cosmic horror shooter Luna Abyss launched on May 21 to a generally positive reception, but the team behind it has been laid off. The news comes from developer Kwalee Labs’ CEO.

In a LinkedIn post, CEO Hollie Emery announced that, as of Monday, June 16, the entire team was made redundant. Emery does not give an exact reason as to why, but states the decision was “completely outside of our control." The small team of nine employees is now looking for work.

“We're enamoured by the love and support it received both by our industry and critically by journalists and media. Whilst we faced many challenges along the way, it has been the highlight of our careers - and we are incredibly proud that [Luna Abyss] has finally seen the light of day (thank you to everyone who believed in us!),” writes Emery.

Luna Abyss is available on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC and sees players controlling a prisoner forced to explore a derelict megastructure beneath the surface of a moon called Luna. As you uncover the moon’s mysteries, you’ll gun down cosmic horrors in first-person shooter combat with bullet hell flourishes and an emphasis on traversal and mobility. 

The game currently has an 81 critics' score on Metacritic. Game Informer editor-in-chief Matt Miller endorsed the game in a recent impressions piece, writing, "While it shares much in common with the recently released Saros, including cosmic horror elements and bullet hell dodging of multi-hued attacks, Luna Abyss has a lot to recommend a playthrough all on its own."