Jay Peters | The Verge

Xbox CEO lays out priorities in memo after major ‘reset’

2026-07-30T18:29:50-04:00

Asha Sharma. | Image: The Verge, Microsoft

After a massive Xbox “reset” that laid off thousands of employees and spun off four studios, Xbox CEO Asha Sharma wants to get Xbox back to growth. In a memo obtained by The Verge, Sharma told staff by the end of fiscal year 2027 (which runs through next June), “we will return XBOX to player and revenue growth.” Xbox will also “improve profits back in line with industry averages,” Sharma said. “Every function and studio will own part of that outcome.”

Since taking over Xbox in February, Sharma has made sweeping changes to attempt to turn things around. Previously, she has cited challenges like a low accountability margin, increasing component costs for hardware, an “over extended” slate of studios, and platform infrastructure that’s “not built for the battle ahead.” In addition to the major structural changes, Xbox made Gears of War: E-Day and Clockwork Revolution Xbox console exclusives and is planning to do more. Sharma has also set an ambitious and nearly impossible goal to make Xbox “one of the few companies that entertains more than a billion people each day.”

In Thursday’s memo, Sharma laid out four Xbox priorities for fiscal year 2027:

CORE: Strengthen our platform, led by console

CONTENT: Grow great games into global franchises

CREATION: Make Minecraft the world’s creator platform

CONNECTION: Extend the worlds that fans love

Xbox will measure progress toward its goals in three “stages,” Sharma said. The first is to return to growth by the end of fiscal year 2027. The second is to turn its bets into growth; “In FY28 and FY29, our Four C’s and roadmap must move into businesses producing meaningful player value and revenue acceleration.” The third is to “scale what works,” and by fiscal year 2030, “our ambition is to be halfway to our long-term daily-player goal with sustained double-digit growth in players and engagement and industry leading margins.”

Sharma shared some vague numbers about Xbox’s current playerbase. “XBOX is one of the largest stadiums in the world, bringing together more than 100 million people every day, more than 500 million each month, and nearly one billion each year,” she wrote. She also noted that console “generates the majority of XBOX revenue and remains the foundation of our fandom” and that it is still Xbox’s “flagship experience.” Xbox’s OS, Game Pass, Windows, and streaming “become our platform for new players and developers.”

The company is also shifting its studio system from a decentralized model to one that’s “more focused around our strongest franchises and biggest new ideas,” Sharma said — something that’s already become evident with changes like the big new Fallout push. Xbox will build “long-term plans” for its biggest franchises “across film, television, consumer products, sponsorship, live experiences, and form new partnerships globally, including China.” Three Xbox franchises “already generate more than $1 billion annually,” though Sharma doesn’t specify which those are.

To grow its share in casual games, Xbox plans to lean on Candy Crush-maker King as well as Microsoft Causal Games, Sharma said. And Xbox is planning to invest in Minecraft “more than ever before.”

LinkedIn actually adds a ‘seems like AI slop’ button

2026-07-30T18:33:19-04:00

A lot of content on LinkedIn might seem like AI slop, and now, you’ll be able to report those posts. As part of a series of updates to reduce the volume of AI slop on the platform, LinkedIn is introducing an actual button that lets you flag a post as something that “Seems like AI slop.”

The new feature is part of a broader push to reduce the volume of apparent AI slop on the platform. AI detector Pangram recently found that 41 percent of longform LinkedIn posts were flagged as being completely generated by AI, as reported by 404Media.

“AI slop is a top priority for all of us,” chief product officer Hari Srinivasan says in a post. “We really care about this.” In addition to the button to report a post as seemingly being AI-generated, LinkedIn is also ramping up new classifiers to identify “if a post is AI-slop or generally low-quality content,” which will “reduce the amount of AI slop you might see in suggested content and content from outside your network.”

I’m currently seeing the new report button in the three-dots menu on posts. When I click it, LinkedIn hides the post and shows a message thanking me for my feedback.

The new button will help LinkedIn “tune our models and make better feeds,” Srinivasan says. The company is also testing a way to show people that other users feel their posts come across as inauthentic or that they include heavy use of AI.

In addition, LinkedIn is removing a feature that used AI to “enhance” a post and will replace it with a “feature that proofreads your words, but does not change your voice,” according to Srinivasan.

Pixel 11 Pro Fold design leaks ahead of Google launch event

2026-07-30T13:04:31-04:00

Weeks ahead of Google’s next Pixel hardware event, Leaker Evan Blass has shared what appear to be marketing renders of the unannounced Google Pixel 11 Pro Fold in a post on his Substack.

The renders, if accurate, show that the new foldable will look fairly similar to last year’s model — it has a tall outer screen instead of using a shorter style like the new Galaxy Z Fold 8 and the rumored foldable iPhone. The renders also show that the inner screen will retain the 8-inch size. However, the Pixel 11 Pro Fold’s back camera array has been slightly redesigned and will apparently get the glowy light that Google has already teased for the Pixel 11 Pro. The renders also show the phone in an olive green color that I think looks really nice.

Blass also posted images of what are likely new Pixel Buds (in that same good olive color) and a new Pixel Watch. Google didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment.

Google’s next Made by Google hardware event takes place on August 12th at 6PM ET, and that’s probably where all of these Pixel devices will be formally announced. Due to RAMaggedon, Google has already signaled that the upcoming gadgets could have higher prices.

Mark Zuckerberg is planning a big push into personal AI agents

2026-07-29T17:48:07-04:00

Meta is all-in on AI, and sometime soon, the company is going to make a big push into personal AI agents that can do things on your behalf.

On Wednesday’s Q2 2026 earnings call, CEO Mark Zuckerberg previewed a high-level vision of how the company is thinking about personal agents and what it will do to make them viable for users — and how it will convince less technical people to give them a shot:

Soon we will have agents that can work 24/7 on your behalf to help you achieve your goals and improve your life, your health, your relationships, your finances, whatever you want. The first domain that agents have really taken off in is coding. But engineers are more technical and willing to spend time making those agents work, so to build great personal agents, this needs to be a great consumer product that just works out of the box and is easy enough for billions of people to adopt and use.

Zuckerberg seems to be trying to differentiate his vision from that of companies like Anthropic and OpenAI, which have invested heavily in agents focused on coding and enterprise work. Google has also made a push into personal AI agents with its Gemini Spark tool, which I found to be very good but to an almost creepy degree, and it’s unclear right now how Meta’s potential agents might compare.

However, Meta could have an uphill battle in personal agents. Its AI efforts still lag behind the bigger AI labs. Unlike Google or Microsoft, it doesn’t have ecosystem access to people’s email or documents in the way Google or Microsoft do. And Meta is dealing with a different creep problem right now with smart glasses, and general distrust toward Meta might make people unwilling to use its agents.

The company will have more to share about its personal agents “soon,” Zuckerberg said. Earlier in the call, he said that personal agents will be “the foundation for our next wave of products and revenue lines in the months and years ahead.”

Zuckerberg also highlighted Meta’s business agents that are available on WhatsApp and Messenger, and he said that more than 1 million businesses are using them every week. The business agents are being rolled out to Instagram as well, Zuckerberg said.

Meta’s big move into agents follows the launch of its Muse Spark AI model last quarter, which it recently updated with a 1.1 update that offers better coding capabilities. The company has restructured itself to focus heavily on AI, reportedly moving 7,000 staffers to work on new AI initiatives, though it also laid off about 8,000 people in May. The company is also investing heavily in compute, noting in today’s earnings that it expects to spend $130 to $145 billion in capital expenditures in 2026. Yesterday, it announced that it’s building a 1 gigawatt data center campus in partnership with BlackRock.

During the Q2 2026 earnings call, Zuckerberg also said that Instagram now has more than 2 billion daily active users.

AI leaders sign a statement asking the government to do something about automated AI

2026-07-28T19:14:53-04:00

Employees of OpenAI and Anthropic, as well as Google, Meta, Thinking Machines, Microsoft, Mistral, and other leading AI labs, have written a statement to the US government supporting a potential slowdown of sorts for frontier AI development — or at least a speed-up of global coordinated governance efforts.

“Al could help create a dramatically better future, but that outcome is not guaranteed,” the employees wrote in the statement. “The world’s leading Al companies believe they could be close to automating Al research. It is hard to predict exactly how much this will accelerate Al progress, but there is a real risk that capability development rapidly accelerates beyond our ability to understand or control the resulting systems.”

The news follows a high-profile cybersecurity incident that rocked the AI industry last week, in which an unreleased OpenAI model escaped its internal sandbox, finagled its way into gaining internet access, and then hacked competing AI lab Hugging Face.

In the public statement, the employees went on to underscore the importance of some sort of coordinated regulation worldwide, so that the ever-intensifying AI race doesn’t outpace safety and monitoring tools.

“To realize Al’s potential, industry, government, and society at large may need the option to buy time to address emerging risks, develop security measures, and strengthen oversight,” they wrote. “But each company—and country—is under intense competitive pressure not to unilaterally slow that acceleration. And today, the world lacks the technical and governance tools to deliberately pace frontier-wide progress. Building on work already underway to monitor frontier model releases: We request that the U.S. government support an international effort to develop the technical and governance tools needed to deliberately pace the frontier of automated Al development.”

Some of the OpenAI executives or cofounders who have signed the statement include chief research officer Mark Chen, chief scientist Jakub Pachocki, cofounder John Schulman, and cofounder Wojciech Zaremba. As for Anthropic, cofounder Jack Clark, cofounder Chris Olah, cofounder Ben Mann, and chief science officer Jared Kaplan have all signed, as well as Boris Cherny, who created and leads Claude Code, and Ethan Perez, who is Anthropic’s alignment team lead. OpenAI’s former chief futurist, Josh Achiam, and the former colead of its now-defunct superalignment team, Jan Leike, both also signed.

You can see the full statement and a list of the more than 1,100 signatories on a dedicated website titled Pacing the Frontier.

HBO Max is putting on vertical shorts

2026-07-28T11:59:37-04:00

Warner Bros. Discovery is bringing a vertical video feed to HBO Max to help you find something new to watch. Streaming platforms like Netflix, Disney Plus, and Peacock already offer TikTok-like vertical video feeds to surface content that might be interesting to users, and now HBO Max will have a similar feed of its own.

The feed, called “HBO Max Shorts,” will be accessible from an icon on the bottom navigation menu. It will show you things like trailers, clips, and bonus content from the HBO Max library, and it’s tailored to you based on your watch history. You can jump into a show or movie right from the HBO Max Shorts clip or add it to your list if you want to bookmark it for later. HBO Max Shorts will be tested first with “select iOS users” in the US before coming to more markets and devices.

Here’s WBD’s explanation of how it makes the clips for the feed — it relies on a mix of an AI tool and HBO Max editors:

The clips for this feature are powered by an AI tool built in-house, which helps human editors select and verticalize content by using machine learning algorithms that utilize scene-level metadata to comb through thousands of hours of titles and suggests the most compelling, high-impact scenes for discovery. Once the tool has suggested these clips, HBO Max editors decide which best represent the stories viewers love and capture jaw dropping moments, pivotal plot twists, and visually stunning sequences. These clips are then rendered in a new vertical video experience to ensure seamless playback. Looking ahead, “HBO Max Shorts” will expand to include additional devices and markets, incorporate sports content, and refine as users interact with the feature.

WBD is also testing an “experimental conversational search experience” for HBO Max that lets users search for content with natural language queries, and it’s available first for adult users on Android in the US. Netflix is testing a similar feature.

Xbox’s huge outage even blocked games on disc

2026-07-27T19:53:34-04:00

An extended Xbox outage that began Sunday evening didn’t just cause issues for people trying to play digital games — it blocked people from playing their disc-based games, too.

Xbox’s status page initially reported the outage on Sunday at about 11PM ET, and it also prevented people from logging in, launching apps, or finding games on the Xbox store. This morning, the page also noted that users “may have problems” playing their digital and disc games, which posts on social media confirmed. During that time, my colleague Richard Lawler was able to launch digital games he owned, but trying to boot up games tied to Game Pass popped up error code 0x87e107df, indicating the license couldn’t be verified.

However, at 6:48PM ET, Xbox finally confirmed that the issues had been mitigated. “You should once again be able to launch games, sign in, and complete purchases,” the company said on X. “Thanks for sticking with us through a long one.” The status page also says that “All services up and running.”

Good news — the earlier Xbox issue should now be mitigated. You should once again be able to launch games, sign in, and complete purchases. Thanks for sticking with us through a long one. Let us know if anything still looks off: https://t.co/SoIhwJAdqC https://t.co/IvuWb8tsBT
— XBOX Support (@XBOXSupport) July 27, 2026

Our own Tom Warren recently reported that Xbox is also testing a feature that will grant users a digital copy of games that they own on disc. Outages like this, however, are showing the potential downside of a system that ties authentication requirements even to physical copies of games.

The outage follows major layoffs at Xbox that were announced earlier this month.

Updates, July 27th: Xbox says the issues have been mitigated.

What Surrounds Us will make you think a lot about circles

2026-07-09T18:09:37-04:00

What Surrounds Us takes its title literally. You play as a circle surrounding a hole in its middle — it looks like a donut with frosting. You work together with other sentient moving circles, sometimes helping them joyfully meet with others. And you traverse a large map that’s composed entirely of, you guessed it, a series of circles. But the circles everywhere aren’t just an artistic choice; they underscore the game’s themes about working in connection with the environment and the things around us.

Despite the trippy design, What Surrounds Us has a familiar format. I kept feeling echoes of The Legend of Zelda as I trekked across three distinct regions and solved lightweight puzzles to get from place to place. Over the course of the game you’ll get new powers, like the ability to traverse gaps by charging up a big leap. Later on, you’ll have to find ways to get around a glitchy substance that frequently snakes around the world and blocks your path.

The Zelda inspiration helped me settle into a game that offers little in the way of instructions. There’s basically no text and only a few onscreen prompts to explain controls. That means that most of my time was spent exploring the world, seeing where I ended up, and experimenting with the limited tools I had to see what happened. That often led to happy surprises, like learning that using a ping near a dark circle would open up new paths forward. Sometimes, it got me in trouble, like getting too close to an aggressive enemy circle that would eat me.

Without frequent video game crutches like overly obvious hints or chatty sidekicks, I mostly had to figure out the rules on my own. Like in many Zelda games, however, trying something just to see if it works — and finding that it would — was usually pretty satisfying. That experimentation also helped me better figure out how things in the game related to one another.

Like what you actually do in the game, its meaning is left for you to figure out as well. Because everything in the game is a series of circles, you have to interpret what they represent, like learning that dark red circles that block your path essentially function as walls. When I brought over a lonely circle pal to another group of friendly circles, it spun and chirped in a way that I can only describe as jumping for joy. Even the music “surrounds,” in its way; it’s ethereal and ambient, never overpowering your senses but also often humming quietly in the background as you wander around.

What Surrounds Us manages to do a lot of interesting things, both thematically and with its gameplay, and it does it all in a tight, three-hour playthrough. Who knew a cute little donut had so much depth?

What Surrounds Us is now available on PC via Steam.

The future of physical games is not looking great

2026-07-24T13:14:35-04:00

Grand Theft Auto VI release won’t offer a disc. | Image: Rockstar Games

This is The Stepback, a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more on video games and physical media, follow Jay Peters. The Stepback arrives in our subscribers’ inboxes on Sunday at 8AM ET. Opt in for The Stepback here.

How it started

As a kid, I relished trips to Best Buy, GameStop, and the nearby mall so that I could browse video games. I loved sifting through games and chatting with my friends at the store about upcoming releases. On the lucky days I actually got a new game from the store, I treasured reading through every page of the manual on the drive home. Over the years, I built up a collection of games that I was proud of.

That was a long time ago. Shortly after college, I sold my collection of older games and hardware because I wasn’t using them and wanted the money for other things. (Probably weekends out.) Starting with the Nintendo Switch in 2017, I started buying games digitally because it was easier to just download stuff, and I wouldn’t have to accumulate physical game cases. Now, I don’t own any physical games: My Switch, PlayStation, Xbox, and Steam libraries are all digital.

I’m not the only player who has moved to mostly digital games. Digital libraries are increasingly convenient, especially as console makers have made efforts to keep backwards compatibility across generations. Some players can’t play physical games at all, as PlayStation and Xbox launched the PS5 and Xbox Series consoles with all-digital console options that were cheaper than the versions with disc drives. On PC, digital libraries through platforms like Steam have been the reality for quite some time. Capcom, one of the biggest publishers around, reported that an astounding 93 percent of its game sales were for digital copies in its last fiscal year — a figure that it expects will rise to 95.4 percent over the fiscal year. Many of the most popular games are only available digitally, like Roblox and Fortnite.

For better or worse, video game players overwhelmingly buy and play digital games. But in the span of a week, two industry giants put nails in the coffin of physical games — or perhaps even poured concrete into the grave.

How it’s going

On June 24th, Rockstar Games finally put a price tag on Grand Theft Auto VI ahead of its scheduled November 19th release on PS5 and Xbox Series X / S: $79.99 for the base edition and $99.99 for the Ultimate Edition. The prices themselves weren’t too unexpected, as even Nintendo has dabbled with $79.99 games for its biggest titles. But what was more shocking was something buried in Rockstar’s post: The physical version of the game won’t have a disc, instead containing a download code in the box.

The announcement was a worrying sign for physical games. Selling games as codes in a box isn’t a new concept, but GTA VI will be the biggest game to do it so far. Rockstar’s choice could push more publishers to do the same for their future titles. By making the game only available on digital storefronts, players can’t easily share it with a friend or sell the game when they’re done with it.

It’s also becoming increasingly clear you can’t rely on digital storefronts. Titles can get pulled for things like licensing or the store closing down. This may not be a problem for GTA VI, as Rockstar will almost certainly make sure the game is easily available on many digital platforms for the foreseeable future, especially if it wants to give the game the same kind of legs as the 13-year-old GTA V. But with digital storefronts, you also have to hope that you aren’t locked out of your account, even by mistake, and lose access to your games. (In 2023, some PlayStation users were unexpectedly banned through no fault of their own, though Sony eventually restored access to their accounts.)

Speaking of PlayStation, just days after Rockstar’s news, Sony dropped an even bigger bomb: It announced that, starting January 2028, it would not make physical discs for any new PlayStation games.

The decision led to widespread criticism online. Sony and PlayStation got yelled at everywhere online, as Kotaku reported, and the PlayStation account didn’t make a new tweet until six days after its announcement about dropping discs. The comments section of Sony’s famous 2013 PS4 game sharing ad where one person just hands a disc to another — an ad made after Xbox announced restrictive DRM plans for the Xbox One — is filled with new comments taking jabs at Sony. Heck, Sony itself showed why killing discs is a terrible idea by, on the same day as the disc news, saying that it would be closing the digital stores for the PS3 and the PS Vita.

Sony’s announcement also drew criticism from retailers and games preservationists. “This is unfortunate news for those who still prefer buying games on physical media, and is certainly a significant hit to consumer rights, the resale market, and game creators whose businesses rely on the physical market,” said Frank Cifaldi, executive director of the Video Game History Foundation.

Sony’s own statement was clear as to why it’s making the change. “This is a natural direction for Sony Interactive Entertainment to adapt to consumer trends as the general preference for digital media significantly outpaces physical discs,” Sony said in its announcement. “This transition will enable us to align more closely with how most of our community prefers to access and play games today.” The company’s numbers prove it, too: In the fourth quarter of its 2025 fiscal year, Sony reported that the “Full game software digital download ratio” of games on PS4 and PS5 was 85 percent.

What happens next

We have to see if Grand Theft Auto VI actually releases on November 19th and if it will ever come out on disc. Despite two major delays, it seems likely the game will at least launch as planned, especially because Rockstar gave the game a price and is pushing preorders.

We’ll also have to see what Microsoft and Nintendo might do. Xbox hasn’t announced what it’s thinking about for discs for Project Helix, its next generation console, but The Verge’s Tom Warren reports that Xbox will “likely soon” stop making physical discs for Xbox games. However, Warren reports that the company is testing a feature that would let you digitize your physical game collection.

Nintendo will probably stick with physical games for a while. According to its last fiscal year report, digital makes up 54.6 percent of game sales, so physical is still a big part of its business. The Switch 2 is also only a year old, and it seems extremely unlikely that Nintendo would stop making physical games for hardware it will be supporting for a long time to come. However, with the Switch 2, Nintendo gives developers the option to sell game-key cards, which are physical carts you can borrow and resell but don’t actually have a game’s data on them. Instead, they serve as keys to let you download a game to your system.

Game stores and preservationists also have to adjust to the fact that physical games are going to be harder to come by. Cifaldi noted that museums and archives have already been preparing for this kind of future “with the expectation that putting discs on a shelf isn’t going to be a long-term solution for preserving new games.” But he called on trade groups to offer solutions to legally preserve digital content for research — efforts that the Entertainment Software Association has previously opposed. “The industry needs to meaningfully come to the table on this issue, because asking museums to download a copy of Grand Theft Auto VI and hope it’ll run in 50 years is not a preservation solution,” Cifaldi says.

Sony now has to navigate an awkward period where it’s launching new games but dealing with pushback from players wanting physical discs. While Sony has been subject to severe blowback after its announcement, it seems unlikely it will reverse course. It’s already repurposing its last PlayStation disc-making factory, after all.

By the way

The PS5 Pro, Sony’s top-end PlayStation, does not come with a disc drive; that costs an additional $79. Following a recent price hike that spiked the PS5 Pro’s cost to $899.99, that means a PS5 Pro with a disc drive costs nearly $1,000.
PlayStation’s own studios are now in the awkward spot of having to confirm that physical versions will be on disc, as Insomniac has for September’s Marvel’s Wolverine and Santa Monica Studio did for God of War Laufey. That Laufey confirmation also signals that the game, which hadn’t been given a release window, will launch before January 2028.
For music, physical media sales — including CDs — are reportedly on the rise.

Read this

Comedian Trevor Noah weighed in on PlayStation’s news, saying that “for a lot of gamers physical discs are the only way they could afford to play games because they could get them secondhand. You can also give games to your younger siblings, which is a great way to introduce them to the games you were playing.”
In a post titled “Sony Nerfs Videogame Ownership,” the Electronic Frontier Foundation points out that “Unlike other digital media like film and TV, video games require a ton of storage. Access to high speed internet is still abysmal in the US, making the high-speeds needed for digital game downloads a luxury some of us may take for granted.”
A day after the GTA VI news, Circana analyst Mat Piscatella posted a chart that neatly sums up what’s going on: sales of physical games peaked long ago, back in 2009.

More games should be on rails (literally)

2026-07-09T17:36:39-04:00

It’s been a good few weeks for games on rails. Nintendo’s Star Fox remake wisely kept the tightly scripted, action-packed levels from Star Fox 64 largely the same, and they’re still fun to fly through nearly 20 years later. Denshattack!, a new game from Undercoders, similarly features levels packed with carefully orchestrated sequences to great effect. Except instead of flying through space as an unnervingly realistic anthropomorphic fox, you’re flying — and flipping, and spinning, and grinding — through Japan while driving a blindingly fast train.

Calling Denshattack! a train game radically undersells what you actually do. Across a bright and colorful version of Japan, you’ll tear and trick your way through towns and landscapes like you’re playing a supercharged version of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater. You fly through levels like a bullet, drift around corners and try to catch a boost, and leap off ramps to do skateboarding-inspired stunts. Imagine if Sega made a cel-shaded Sonic game for the Dreamcast where he drove a train, and you’re in the ballpark of what actually playing Denshattack! feels like.

Even in its early stages, Denshattack! is thrilling, but as you explore the game’s 10 worlds, you’ll slowly get new abilities that turn you into a supercharged acrobat. Before you know it, you’ll be grinding rails, riding on graffiti-filled walls, looping around tunnels, catching wind currents to fly through the air, and flipping your gravity to drive upside down, sometimes all in succession. If you fill up an energy bar by scoring enough points, you can even ride a magical rainbow track that unfurls in front of you like some kind of magical Rainbow Road. And it’s all backed by an upbeat, catchy soundtrack.

I loved barreling through the game’s levels, and I eagerly awaited each turn of the track to see what unexpected surprise I’d run into. Just a very limited selection of highlights: grinding along a swordfish’s nose, precariously dodging blades in a sawmill, and hitting baseballs back to a gang leader in her track-filled baseball stadium — and then, in a later level, challenging that leader again as she piloted a sandworm train.

It works so well because it’s all on rails. For the most part, you don’t have to worry about how you get from place to place. The track will generally take you where you need to go. What matters more is how you react to the twists, turns, and unexpected obstacles the game throws your way — and which sick tricks you’ll pull off with a flick of a joystick as you leap from track to track. That gives the developers a lot of leeway to toss you into action-packed scenarios and tightly plot out the sequences of everything you’ll have to deal with. Each level is typically just a couple minutes long, which helps keep things snappy.

At times, it can be a lot. You go really fast, so you have to respond to things quickly. The game helpfully signals turns and obstacles with various signs that pop up on screen. But as you learn new mechanics, there are a lot of different moves to remember, and in the moment I’d often trip up and press the wrong button or just slam into whatever was in the way on the track. Thankfully, checkpoints are generous and bring you back in a second or two, so you can tackle a tricky section repeatedly without much penalty.

The game also lets you make it as hard or as easy as you want. After you finish each level, you’ll see a results screen that grades you on things like how many points you earned, how quickly you finished the level, how many collectibles you found, and if you completed any of the per-level “dares.” If you want to chase medals on all of those, you can. But you can also ignore them completely and just focus on finishing each level, which is what I did.

Like other on-rails games, however, Denshattack! occasionally felt repetitive. Each region has the same general structure, meaning you’ll tackle the same types of levels over and over again. The game also has a lightweight story, but I mostly mashed through it. Like Star Fox, this isn’t a game you’ll be playing for the narrative; it’s all about the levels.

But those are nitpicks. The sheer maximalism and expertly crafted levels meant that every time I started a new one, I couldn’t wait to see where the rails would take me next.

^{Denshattack! is available now on Nintendo Switch 2, PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X / S.}