• Clan XP has been reset for Season 7 start.
• A new weekly bonus bounty has been added for Season 7. This bounty is available at the max clan rank.

• The Luxurious Toast emote now allows players to sit for as long as they desire.

• The Eververse storefront has been updated.
• Cayde’s Exotic Stash items have been added to Eververse’s Bright Dust inventory for weeks 1–4.

• The Pursuits inventory has been moved to the Director menu.
• Players may now hold up to 63 pursuits at a given time.
• Catalysts are now tracked on the Triumphs page.
• Updated Taken and Fallen armor mods to follow the same naming convention.
• All shader items have had their icons updated.
• Fixed an issue where the action for applying shaders, ornaments, holograms, or using consumables was getting cancelled and not applying on the first attempt.

• Benedict 99-40
• Relocated to the Annex in the Tower.
• The Gunsmith
• Now offers three daily and two weekly weapon-focused bounties, rewarding Enhancement Cores, mod components, and mods.
• Scrapper bounties will no longer drop when dismantling gear.
• Existing scrapper bounties will remain in your inventory until expiration or completion.
• Xûr
• Now properly offers random rolls on Exotic armor after refusing to do so in Destiny 2 Update 2.2.1.
• We’ve had a chat with him; if something like this happens again, he’ll be in trouble.
• Drifter/Vanguard
• Weekly reward packages from the Allegiance quest have been retired with the conclusion of Season of the Drifter.
• Fixed an issue where some players wouldn’t see updated vendors and bounty lists after the weekly reset occurred.

• The Sony-exclusive Hunter armor set “Red Moon Phantom Suit” should no longer appear in Collections for Xbox and PC players.
• Fixed an issue where weapon engrams were incorrectly appearing as Masterworked in the loot stream if a player’s inventory was full when walking over them.
• Fixed an issue where Arbalest could not be acquired by players who do not own the Annual Pass.

• Further addressed GUITAR errors that could occur in the Last Wish raid.

• Players can no longer win Crucible matches by getting kills after the timer has expired.
• Fixes an issue where a player could hear the audio for a 20-kill streak but not receive the medal if the 20th kill happened after the match ended.
• The Triumph “We Ran Out of Medals” (20-kill streak) will be rewarded if the final kills happen before the match timer ends.

• After activating the totem, killing the weekly wanted targets will now correctly complete the activity and bounty.

• Fixed an issue where players would sometimes load into a different Heroic Adventure on Mars than what was being displayed on the Totem.

• The “Glass” modifier has been removed from Strikes
• The Weekly Challenge has been updated
• Players must match their subclass element to the weekly elemental singe to earn progress

• Fixed issues with two Ghost scannables in the Tower
• “The one about the Speaker’s quarters…” was moved to outside his door along the walkway.
• “The one about Banshee-44 and his old location…” was moved and placed on the ground in the corner.

• Fixed an issue where players on PC were experiencing crashes traversing Niobe Labs and Bergusia Forge spaces.

• Fixed bug where players could freeze the activity timer in Zero Hour mission.
• Fixed bug where the Heroic version of Zero Hour would be available only on the first character to complete the activity on each account.

• Fallen mines are no longer impervious to being destroyed while on the ground.

In Timespinner, the player steps into the shoes of Lunais, a young woman in a nomadic society that trains talented magical youth like her as Time Messengers – people prepared to be flung back in time to warn of dangers to the clan. The spacefaring Lachiemi empire has become one such danger, and is obsessed with possessing the titular Timespinner. The game opens at Lunais’ birthday party, which is inevitably crashed by Emperor Nuvius himself – sans invite, avec death squad – and Lunais barely makes it to the Timespinner before it is destroyed, her mother killed as a parting shot.

Only, the Timespinner doesn’t send you into the past – it sends you to Lachiem itself. With Lunais vowing revenge against Nuvius and gradually learning more about Lachiem in the present and at an important moment in its ancient history, Timespinner goes in some interesting directions with how Lunais’ revenge may take form.

In Timespinner, the storytelling possibilities of the Metroidvania format are used intelligently by the small team at developer Lunar Ray Games. Time travel is, after all, the ultimate form of backtracking, and the large interconnected world map gains an extra sense of place when it can be visited at different points in history. The game’s dense and well-realised backstory is wisely mostly kept to collectable documents, downloads and memories, but completionists will enjoy tracking down, reading and immersing themselves in the materials on offer.

Optional sidequests, meanwhile, focus on the evolving relationships of a small group of soldiers you slowly assemble through exploration, putting a human face on a planet that you don’t actually visit during the course of the game, adding to a sense of a fictional creation larger than its levels.

Perhaps most commendably, you get the feeling that a lesser Metroidvania would have taken Timespinner’s ‘two time period’ gimmick and served Castlevania and Metroid settings with little to no alteration. While it’s true that Lachiem’s past has the castles and its present has labs filled with scientific abominations, the originality of the story keeps the games from veering too far down either well-trodden path. The fantastic pixel artwork seals the deal, with the cities of Lachiem’s present given a more ‘decopunk’ feel, and locations and enemies from both eras reoccurring in visually distinct but connected ways.

Given the time travel premise, there are a few different endings on offer here, but you’ll need to explore the world relatively thoroughly to go down all available paths. Meanwhile, if you’re just here for the action and platforming, the essentials of the story are unobtrusively told through short cutscenes and the world filled with enough interesting gameplay spaces and power-ups to keep you equally entertained. Players who like to explore story-driven games with a less-skilled player two in tow may also be interested to hear that a second player can help out in combat by taking control of one of Lunais’ cute familiars.

Lunais fights with a pair of levitating orbs, and there is significant interest to be found in mixing, matching, and levelling-up the different orb types you discover through your adventure. Each has a different associated magic attack tapped out with ‘Y’, but the real fun comes with the charge attacks on ‘A’ (unlocked by crafting a corresponding ring, and costing ‘aura’ to execute). Getting real use out of them all is likely to take players multiple playthroughs, but there are some real treats on offer – giant magical blades, moon shard shotguns and ‘horizontal lasers of electric destruction’, every one of them landing with a satisfying punch.

The platforming elements are perhaps where Timespinner doesn’t quite push boldly enough into new territory. Lunais has a Symphony of the Night-style back dash on ‘L’, and quickly acquires a graceful pirouetting double jump reminiscent of countless other games. Later additions allow you to frictionlessly glide across the floor to make longer jumps, or to fly skywards like a rocket – all moves that were fun in other action platformers and fun here, but potentially a limiting factor in how the game is shaped.

Most tellingly, the ability to freeze time (with ‘X’), the one thing that should surely be Timespinner’s centrepiece mechanic, feels greatly underutilised. There are a handful of areas where progress requires you to freeze time to hop on an enemy or object, and there are fewer instances where freezing time will get you past dangerous, fast-moving obstacles.

While the time-freezing mechanic also gives you some headspace in a hectic boss fight and allows you to jump over larger enemies, the promise of this feature evolving in new and interesting ways in either platforming or combat terms isn’t realised. Indeed, with the player’s power level trending a little too high by the end of the game, flailing-thumbed users of the Joy-Con’s tiny buttons may find themselves freezing time accidentally more often than intentionally.

Though a particularly thorough 100 percent run may take around 10 hours and exploring is never uninteresting, this is a take on Metroidvania that lacks any high skill-ceiling collectables (think the shinespark gauntlets of everything Super Metroid onwards). Other than some occasionally obtuse destructible wall puzzles, genre veterans are unlikely to find tracking down every last collectable particularly difficult. This said, there’s greater scope for challenge in the combat – there’s an optional challenge dungeon, and an unlockable nightmare difficulty mode that makes use of the time freeze more of a necessity for survival.

Timespinner’s only real weakness is that it’s merely great; this is a genre that is particularly well represented on Switch, after all, and there are plenty of other options that play a little stronger in certain respects, or work in different visual styles that may appeal to you more. However, Timespinner’s well-executed story, frenetic combat system and authentic-feeling early 32-bit pixel art mean that the job of those writing ‘Best Switch Metroidvania’ lists isn’t getting any easier.

Conclusion

Gorgeous to behold and equally delightful to play, Timespinner is yet another top-notch Metroidvania on Switch. A lack of tough exploration challenges and an under-utilised time-freeze gimmick aside, it succeeds in using the popular genre as a vehicle for a genuinely intriguing science-fantasy tale that will motivate players to explore every inch of its fantastic pixel-art world.

You know, I’ve always enjoyed Minecraft. I don’t play often, but every now and then the mood strikes me to fire up the game (albeit, on PC these days) and just jump into a world and build Forts. I like Forts – they’re very versatile and useful defensive fortifications.

In Minecraft you don’t need a cohort of Roman Legionnaires to throw up something decent in half-an-hour or so, and with the recently announced Minecraft Earth, I can spread my defensive network across the planet via the power of augmented reality. You’re welcome.

Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference was last night and Mojang/Microsoft used that as a vessel for the first live gameplay demonstration of the new AR game in action. It makes sense, considering Apple were all about their new ARKit 3 toolbox, which we imagine Minecraft Earth will be relying heavily on for iOS. Apples new AR support will come with a feature called People Occlusion, which allows AR content to handle the presence of a real-person within the virtual world – this will be something unique to the Apple’s version of the game.

Here’s a video of the main presentation:

If you already play and enjoy Minecraft, even the mobile versions, this should be an engaging new way to experience the game. I suspect the minutia of building and destruction may be a bit clunkier with the Pokémon GO style design, but resource collection works by walking around your local environment and visiting key locations. Once you have what you need, the building engine should be as free-form as it is in the main game. What we don’t know at the moment is the specifics of how you summon your designs to the world, and where they can be placed.

Minecraft Earth is so far set to be a free-to-play experience, with a closed beta scheduled for later this summer on both iOS and Android.