The Duskbloods, Tides of Annihilation, Aliens: Fireteam Elite 2 – Catch Up on IGN's Game Previews This Week ICYMI

The Duskbloods, Tides of Annihilation, Aliens: Fireteam Elite 2 – Catch Up on IGN's Game Previews This Week ICYMI

Editorial callout

"Your one-stop shop for any game preview coverage you might've missed at IGN this week."

Posted : Aug 21, 2026 1:06pm UTC

Welcome to a new weekly feature on IGN: a roundup of game preview coverage in case you missed anything we got to check out over the course of the week. We enjoyed quite the variety of games we looked ahead to: The Duskbloods, Tides of Annihilation, Aliens: Fireteam Elite 2, Star Wars: Smuggler's Gambit, and Silver Pines.

The Duskbloods might be FromSoftware’s most complex and interesting game yet. Miyazaki cites TTRPG influences for its gameplay systems and multiplayer mechanics.

As far as gameplay feel, it's comparable to Bloodborne or Nightreign with added mobility and fit into an eight-player phase-based PvPvE setting where you earn victory points to avoid elimination.

The lock-on targeting and camera can have trouble tracking fast moving opponents, but the combat is intricate and intense.

FromSoftware isn't new to multiplayer. Invasions have been a staple in the Souls games and we just came off of Elden Ring's co-op twist with Nightreign. But The Duskbloods is something very different and new territory for the team, and to simply label it as a PvPvE game is to woefully undersell what it is. It has that familiar tough action combat packaged in phase-based matches where eight players compete for what are essentially victory points on a map in order to advance to subsequent phases, which then concludes in a three-player PvP brawl. I got to play about eight hours of The Duskbloods on a visit to FromSoftware in Tokyo, and while there are a ton of nuances I'll dissect in this preview, I'll say upfront that it has the makings of another hit in the Souls lineage where fun is found in the challenge and the mysteries of its world propel you to keep pushing – just now in the context of a competitive multiplayer Switch 2 exclusive. If any team can pull off such a wild idea, it'd be director Hidetaka Miyazaki and company. So buckle up y'all, The Duskbloods just might be the most complex and most fascinating project to come out of FromSoftware yet.

Check out our full preview of The Duskbloods for more.

This Arthurian-legend action-RPG leans into its King Arthur inspirations in a really impressive way.