Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, a third-person, single-player action-adventure game by Respawn Entertainment and EA, will give you the chance to follow the journey of a former Padawan named Cal Kestis in the wake of Order 66, giving fans a brand-new story in the Star Wars universe that explore the galaxy during the dark times of the Empire.

After losing everything — his Order, his friends, his Republic — Cal survives by hiding who he is and living a solitary life, but that can only protect him for so long from the Empire’s Jedi-hunting Inquisitors.

Racing across distant worlds, exploring the ruins of a long-lost civilization, and fighting the Empire at every turn, Star Wars fans will experience what it’s like to be a Jedi on the run. To survive, you’ll need to master your Force abilities and learn new ones that will help you keep the Imperial forces at bay while working with a team of unlikely allies, including your droid companion BD-1.

We’ll have more to share about Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order throughout the year here on Xbox Wire.

Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order is available for pre-order today on the Microsoft Store for Xbox One and will release on November 15, 2019. Click here for additional details.

Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment has today released another Shazam! level pack for LEGO DC Super-Villains, providing a second dose of content based on the new movie.

Both downloadable packs add new levels and DC characters inspired by the film and are part of the Season Pass (which you can pick up for $14.99 if you don’t already own it). This new second pack adds the villainous Dr. Sivana as well as the entire Shazam family; we’ve got the full details for you below:

The SHAZAM! Movie Level Packs 1 and 2 offer players the chance to master the powers of favorite characters based on the Shazam! film including Billy Batson and Freddy Freeman who can transform into their Super Hero Shazam form, and unlock four characters embodying the sins of man unleashed by Dr. Sivana including Gluttony, Wrath, Pride, and Envy.
The second pack adds villainous, Dr. Sivana, and the entire Shazam family to help you defeat him including Pedro, Eugene, Darla, and Mary, alongside the powerful, Wizard Shazam. Both packs expand the main game’s already large roster of over 150 iconic DC characters.

If you’d rather purchase the Shazam! Movie Level Packs without getting a Season Pass, they can now both be purchased together in a bundle for $5.99.

Have you seen Shazam!? Will you be tucking into this new LEGO content? Tell us below.

The retro video game convention Midwest Gaming Classic celebrated its 18th year in Milwaukee, WI a little over a week ago, and we just so happened to have been in attendance! The convention is host to hundreds of pinball and retro arcade games that are all open for free play, a vendor hall where you can buy almost any game you can think of (yes, I found and almost purchased Zelda: Wand of Gamelon) and also features a number of panels hosted by game creators, personalities and other members of the industry.

The convention does a great job of highlighting the best games of the past, but also shows off some pretty important gaming relics too. From the power suits used in the Nintendo World Championships to the unreleased Nintendo Playstation prototype, you’re bound to see some pretty crazy stuff here.

Needless to say, we had a great time playing games, checking out the dealer’s wares and meeting some industry vets. Check out our highlight video of the Midwest Gaming Classic and let us know if you’ll be booking tickets for next years event! Maybe we’ll see you there.

Bandai Namco has announced that Doraemon Story Of Seasons will be launching on Nintendo Switch in North America and Europe in autumn 2019.

You might remember our story from earlier this month, in which we shared all we knew about the upcoming title. Essentially, the game is a crossover game between Story of Seasons (which used to be known as Harvest Moon) and Japanese manga series Doraemon. We’ve got some PR below to give you a little more detail:

The popular anime character – Doraemon meets the hugely popular Story of Seasons series in a brand new game DORAEMON STORY OF SEASONS. Players will be able to enjoy traditional Story of Seasons activities like growing crops, cultivating their farm, exploring, bug hunting and many more.

Nobita and other familiar faces from the Doraemon franchise will take part in a heart-warming journey across the games original town. Players will develop the town and their own farm while interacting and forming bonds with the other inhabitants. Of course, Doraemon’s secret gadgets will be there to help them along the way!

Are you excited to get your hands on this one? Glad that it’s coming to the west? Let us know in the usual spot.

After 15 Pro Circuit events and a total prize pool of $3 million, the final Gears Pro Circuit event of Gears of War 4 is here. With $300,000 on the line, the top pro and amateur teams from around the world will gather in Boston on April 26-28 at the Hynes Convention Center to take home the trophy and bragging rights leading into the next season of Gears Esports, set to debut following the launch of Gears 5 later this year.

There is no shortage of storylines coming into this event. Perennial favorites OpTic Gaming are looking to claim their 13^th Pro Circuit trophy and further prove why they should be considered the most successful esports team of all time. Team Reciprocity (formerly Denial) is looking to avenge a devastating loss in Mexico City where, despite sending OpTic Gaming to the losers bracket, they couldn’t secure the victory in the grand finals. Rise Nation is full of confidence as they are bringing their complete roster for the first time since they placed 2^nd at the Columbus Invitational last fall. Ghost Gaming, the top ranked Latin American team, and Elevate, the top European team, both dominate their regions and want to prove they can compete with their North American counterparts.

In addition to the 5v5 Escalation action, there will be the Gears Pro Circuit 2v2 tournament where 128 top teams can compete for a dedicated prize pool of $20,000. The action kicks off on Saturday, April 27 with key 2v2 matches played on the feature stage. The 2v2 tournament is free to join and open to all attendees. Registration takes place at the venue from Saturday, April 27 from 1:00-3:00 PM EDT.

Watch all the action at http://live.gearsofwar.com starting at 2PM EDT on Friday, April 26 and then again on Saturday and Sunday at 10:00 AM EDT.

Visit www.gears.gg and follow @EsportsGears on Twitter to keep up-to-date with the latest information about Gears Esports and the Gears Pro Circuit Boston Open.

Solar Settlers is an extremely well-built machine, a solitaire optimization puzzle par excellence. To prove the suitability of an ever-changing set of planets, colonists (‘the player’) will explore, mine and terraform (or aquaform, or geoform) said planets until they are settled and this pocket of space thoroughly domesticated. This project must happen in a set number of turns, and in general the game becomes a question of building an engine to get those enterprising folks into their new homes. Then the engine is actually, to fine-tune the metaphor, rather like a multi-stage rocket, with each step having its micro-objectives, trajectory and fuel requirements. Oh, and it plays in about twenty minutes, full of crunchy decisions and easily-crunched small numbers. It’s a grand game to fit in your pocket.

It is clever, in a way that greatly recalls the creator’s previous game, Minos Strategos. But whereas the latter’s elaborate card formations and position requirements meant always settling for sub-ideal (but still technically ‘optimal’) choices, Solar Settlers has a much more finely-tuned mechanical foundation. The system of planets is represented by a series of cards, with the homeworld dead center. Every game starts with one homeworld, three citizens and an open field of possibilities. Move to an adjacent card and explore a nearby one. This takes hydrogen. At the end of the turn, any unsettled citizen will need one unit of oxygen to live.

Upgrades and a few other effects often require metal, which is comparatively rarer than other resources but also very effective in its niche. Cards can be discarded for resources but are generally more useful for planning upgrades to planets. Some upgrades produce resources each turn, others offer enhanced movement or just settlements. Oh, and there’s a ‘military’ resource as well, but this is only used as a skill-check on exploring the outer edges of the gameboard. The center is cozy and easy to rapidly develop, but the outer fringes will need military presence to keep them defensible from threats (that’s the thematic explanation, anyways).

You need to be ambitious ramping up the workforce and exploration early, but then there’s a turn towards sustainability. Workers generate resources by activating planets but also require oxygen to live and fuel to get into a useful position. Not to mention the game’s central twist: to win you must remove workers from the board by settling them. So there’s a natural production curve, but its inflection points are particularly interesting, especially for a game this short. Do I double-down on metal this turn and stockpile it for later, or do I explore that top tile in hopes it’ll be a gas giant I can instantly upgrade into a cloning chamber for free bodies? The layout makes it almost like a city-planning game, with efficient pathing and build order rubbing up against the imperfect circumstances of random draws and uncertain tile discovery.

It is vast. There are so so many cards and mechanics to unlock through a persistent experience system. And there a seven total races, each with unique starting planets and bonus goal cards which radically change game strategy. There’s an insect species which benefits from stacking upgrade over upgrade to create huge nesting spires and a reptile species which gets extra oxygen and other bonuses from exploring with the rare mechanic of ‘de-exploring’ tiles.

The others I still haven’t unlocked yet, unfortunately, but it seems like they’ll only get weirder and even potentially harder to use from there. The baseline vanilla Humans are kinda like training wheels in that regard. The game’s variety of cards and species gives it huge replayability, but the payout curve for experience per play is a little stingy. It would take thirty hours or more of play to unlock everything, which is a little excessive for a game without a campaign, just a variety of very good standard single player modes. On the flip side, the unlocks are all distinctive and rewarding, easily memorized which is essential for a game like this. Just like a stage magician has their favorite deck of cards to manipulate for legerdemain, the player will have certain combos or cards (planets) they know like the back of their hand.

It is scalable. With every victory, the difficulty ranks up, which means more people have to be settled in less time. Just as each game has a production curve, the game overall has a slow-paced learning curve, wherein new techniques or tools are slowly doled out and incorporated into the player’s repertoire. With early levels, mistakes or misunderstandings won’t ruin a player’s chance of victory, but starting around level ten and upwards, the margin for error shrinks significantly. As a solitaire-style game Solar Settlers has introduced elements of uncertainty and randomness to keep players on their toes. What this means in practice is while a certain combo is mouth-wateringly efficient, the opportunity to implement it might not be practical in a given game depending on the randomized layout and card draws, so the best choice in a given moment is always slightly different.

This player likes to be a stick in the mud, though, having found tried and true approaches and more or less sticking with what I’ve decided is my bread and butter. A brief spurt of early exploration and card draws to create some bonus production, then using the same few cards for endgame settling. Rather than purely incentivizing variety, the game simply makes repetition sub-optimal to force versatility at higher levels of play. In multiplayer worker placement games like Agricola, players are forced into sup-optimal choices later because of direct competition for slots; here, imperfect knowledge means making calculated gambles between the ideal and the provisional. I usually dig these kind of trade-offs immensely, but here it’s a little grating. Maybe if I had newer cards faster I’d be more eager to experiment and risk failing, but because I know I need to have perfect wins over and over to see the ‘full’ game, I’d rather play it safe to shave off hours from my personal quest to unlock everything the game has to offer.

When my mind kicks into gear with an optimization puzzle, sometimes it feels less like a concerted effort of higher brain functions and more like a lizard brain reacting based on highly patterned stimuli by merely regurgitating what I know works. Seek red planet early, park one worker on it. A bunch of small heuristics my mind invisibly constructs and then uses to make playing Solar Settlers a smooth flowing experience, the kind that gives real pleasure and steals away hours without much notice. It’s been given consistent support and updates since its release with no sign of stopping, and is a great game to have on rotation. Don’t be a completionist or perfectionist and you’ll enjoy Solar Settlers a great deal.