Prime Day is now officially live in the UK, and you know what that means – free stuff! One of our favourite Audible deals is back and it's gotten an upgrade for Amazon Prime Day 2022. Prime members can 3-months of Audible for free from now, all the way up until after the end of Prime Day on July 14.
3-months would normally put you back almost £24, so getting this for free instead is an absolute bargain. Just so you know, you'll need a Prime membership to take advantage of this deal, and it's also only for This for new Audible members. (Those in the US can also get the same deal at the moment, 3-months of Audible Premium Plus, absolutely free for Prime members.)
Early Prime Day Deal: Get 3-Months of Audible for Free
What's Available on Audible? The Sandman, Dune, and More
Throughout the 3-months, you'll get three separate book tokens entitling you to any audiobook on the Audible service at no extra cost.
There are some seriously great choices on there as well, including The Lord of the Rings, Dune, The Sandman (Act 1&2), Game of Thrones (A Song of Ice and Fire), the Harry Potter series, and so much more. The Sandman is my personal favourite, as it is a full blown audio drama, featuring actors such as James McAvoy, David Tennant, and more.
Prime Day 2022: Sign Up for a 30-Day Free Trial
This is the perfect time to sign up for an Amazon Prime 30-day free trial, as you'll be covered for all the early deals coming this week, alongside the massive shopping event next month on July 12-13.
More Early Prime Day Deals: 3-Months of Kindle Unlimited for Free
This is one of the best deals we've ever seen on the audiobook service, and definitely the absolute best discount so far in 2022. This is the best deal we've ever seen on the audiobook service, as it's the usual deal during Black Friday or Prime Day is 99p for 3-months. But this time, it's absolutely free for new users, which is an outstadning discount.
Audiobooks have become an increasingly popular way to consume all kinds of media. The convenience of listening to them whenever, wherever, no matter what you're doing is rather appealing, and it helps that services like Audible are so easy to pick up and use.
What Do I Get with Audible?
So it's quite simple, every book you buy on the Audible service is yours to keep, there's the entire Audible podcast range to listen to, 80% off exclusive audiobooks, and one audiobook, every single month, regardless of the price. For example, you could pick up Neil Gaiman's The Sandman usually costing around £30, for absolutely no extra cost.
Audible is also available on iPhone, Android, Windows, or on Fire Tablet, Fire TV or Amazon Echo. So you can listen, whenever, wherever.
More Black Friday Deals
Robert Anderson is a Commerce Editor and deals expert for IGN. Send him awesome gaming screenshots @robertliam21 on Twitter.
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Despite battle royale fatigue inching its way into the collective gaming consciousness in recent years, Naraka: Bladepoint is proof that the last-fighter-standing formula still has loads of unexplored potential. This high-flying third-person brawler blends the tight sword clashes of Soul Calibur with the frantic supply gathering and ever-constricting circle of Apex Legends to glorious results. After sinking 35 hours into the full release, its superb melee combat and exhilarating gravity-defying antics are still making me grin, even if irritating network connection issues and lifeless bot matches sometimes hinder the fun. Naraka: Bladepoint isn't afraid to punish you for not respecting its mountainous skill ceiling, but once you find your footing, putting it down is a challenge in and of itself.
In standard battle royale fashion, Naraka: Bladepoint pits 60 combatants against each other on a war-torn isle, each controlling one of seven unique heroes either in teams of three or solo. Instead of scavenging for assault rifles or bullet-proof kevlar, however, you'll search for spears, daggers, katanas, and tons more sharp-as-steel lethal instruments along with breastplates and magical trinkets called Souljades that add passive buffs. The loot-and-scoot way of life will be familiar to anyone that's played Fortnite or Call Of Duty: Warzone before, but the similarities end once the time comes to put up your dukes. Battling other players means engaging in wild, up-close brawls that flow more like a fighting game than any battle royale.
From the instant an opponent parried my first sword swipe, sending me face-down into the dirt, I knew Naraka: Bladepoint took a healthy degree of skill to "get good" at. Charging into battle with no plan in mind against players that know what they're doing will almost certainly yield similarly humbling results, as frantically swinging melee attacks leaves you open to counter attacks and air juggles. Taking time to learn the differences between standard, special, combo, and charged attacks while keeping an eye on your weapon and armor durability (which depletes quickly) is vital to success. It is equally important to monitor the competition's body language, waiting for the perfect opening to cut them down. Once I got into Naraka: Bladepoint's lighting-fast rhythm and strategic duels, though, I started having an absolute ball parrying and dodging with the best of them. Those initial encounters may have been a smidge embarrassing, but it's all part of the learning process, and sticking with it will yield endless hours of breathless yet rewarding brawls.
There are also ranged weapons like bows, muskets, and hilariously gargantuan flamethrowers to find if popping folks from a safe distance is more your thing. This isn’t a shooter though, and killing enemy players solely through those means is tricky. In my experience, crossbows and the like are better for last hitting someone trying to flee after a close-range tussle rather than an entirely different means of fighting. Still, proficiency with them can come in handy, especially during team fights when you might be able to more safely fire shots while your allies take all the heat.
Hero toolkits are diverse and allow for creative combinations.
Practice in all of Naraka: Bladepoint's various disciplines pays off big time once you hop into trios. Initially, I was skeptical that any 3v3 scenario would devolve into a mess of crane kicks and spear stabs. In practice, however, they're more akin to the tactical team fights of League Of Legends than a lawless royal rumble. Coordinating your hero's unique abilities along with those of a teammate can lead to diabolically amusing results. My favorite hero thus far is Matari, a stealthy assassin that can vanish and teleport around the battlefield. In an ideal scenario, I'd get friends to charge right at an opposing team while I skulked around behind them, unleashing vicious combos before they knew what happened. That plan of attack doesn't always work, of course, and in those moments I could (hopefully) dart away with a blink, or hope my buddy could intervene as Tianhai, a tanky hero able to soak up excess damage once he transforms into a giant beast called the Vajra. The hero toolkits are so diverse and meld together so well that I'm sure we'll see creative matchups for months to come.
If you're someone who loves a good backstory to their multiplayer avatar, though, it might be best to look elsewhere. Even after using Matari for hours upon hours, I couldn't tell you a single thing about her personality. Everyone of her mid-match quips is woefully cliche or lacking any enthusiastic delivery, and none of the other heroes fair much better. Sure, there are little snippets of lore sprinkled throughout the menus, but it's always dry exposition with almost no flavor. With how enjoyable and expressive heroes are in battle, I wish there was more to their stories.
Despite how joyous Naraka: Bladepoint's deep melee fights against other players are, however, bots can suck the fun right out of it. For your first few hours of ranked play, you'll almost exclusively face dullard AI-controlled adversaries that barely put up a fight. They'll happily eat a katana to the face and often don't bother putting up a counter-attack of their own. Developer 24 Entertainment insists that bot matches exist to ease new players into Naraka: Bladepoint since the skill ceiling is so high, but you'll likely learn next to nothing from these insipid encounters. I prefer to get blitzed by an actual person, learning from what I did wrong, then mindlessly wail on idiotic bots – and while other games have been known to use a similar tactic to start, you’ll face bots for much longer here with no warning.
If nothing else, at least bot matches allowed me to gracefully swing about the map without a care in the world thanks to how incredibly scalable Naraka: Bladepoint's terrain is. It doesn't matter if you're marching up tiny hills or leaping up towering cliffsides — if it's within sight, you can climb it, especially once grappling hooks come into the equation. Like every other item, they're found throughout the map and are as important as healing herbs or the finest blade. There were several instances where I forgot to fight anyone because hook-shotting from treetop to treetop was so blissful, and as long as your grappling hook reserves are full, you'll never have to touch the ground. It ends up feeling like if Spider-Man threw in some wonderfully overly dramatic Naruto landing poses every once and a while.
But no matter if you're swinging across the heavens or locking horns with an enemy, Naraka: Bladepoint can fall apart at the seams if the servers are acting up. Now, while that's true of almost any online multiplayer romp, it's especially noticeable here when so much of Naraka: Bladepoint relies on pixel-perfect precision. Frustration sets in fast when a parry maneuver goes unnoticed due to lag, but thankfully connection woes have been a pretty infrequent since its admittedly rocky release day. Hopefully that stability will remain from here on out.
The Skate franchise is officially coming to PC. The next game in the Electronic Arts franchise will launch on PC in addition to consoles.
Electronic Arts and Full Circle developers shared a video on Twitter to accompany the announcement, posting footage of a skateboarder performing a kickflip over a computer monitor. The display turns on to reveal the Skate logo.
The Skate franchise had been a console-exclusive series until this point. The first three games launched on PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. The series has been dormant since Skate 3's launch in 2010, though developers shared a behind-the-scenes teaser last month to assure fans that the fourth Skate game is still in development.
Details about the upcoming Skate game are still sparse. An official title hasn't been revealed yet. However, EA's trailer from last month teases an open-world design akin to the seamless downhill map of Skate 2.
Starfield fans discovered three unlisted videos from Bethesda that reveal the lore behind some of the locations players might visit in the upcoming space RPG.
Earlier today, social media users began sharing three unlisted videos by Bethesda that offer a brief insight into locations in the game including cities called New Atlantis, Neon, and Akila.
While these videos are unlisted, Bethesda confirmed to IGN that these videos were actually shared with members of Constellation, a community club that people can sign up for on the Starfield website. Constellation members will get some new info, like these videos, first.
While these videos are now floating around online, they’re all quite brief — less than 50 seconds per video.
They offer a nice summary of three locations players will encounter in Starfield. This includes the metropolitan New Atlantis, the capital city of the United Colonies who are the most powerful and established military and political faction in the game.
There’s also Akila City the capital of the Free Star Collective, a loose confederation of three star systems and a bastion for personal freedom in space. And finally, there’s Neon, a pleasure city that began as a fishery before the ZenoFresh Corporation discovered one of the native fish species has psychotropic properties, transforming this outpost into a vice city.
Bethesda officially unveiled Starfield earlier this year as an Xbox exclusive and so far it's sounding very much like “Skyrim in Space.” Check out everything we know about Starfield so far in the video above, and keep an eye out for more potential news drops from Bethesda.
Matt T.M. Kim is IGN's News Editor. You can reach him @lawoftd.
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Turn-based JRPG fans, rejoice. Bravely Default 2, previously confined only to the Nintendo Switch since its release earlier this year, is coming to PC via Steam very, very soon. It's coming on September 2, 2021.
This makes Bravely Default 2 the first main Bravely game to venture outside of Nintendo consoles, with both Bravely Default and Bravely Second staying on the Nintendo 3DS.
There have been a few spin-offs, such as a browser-based sequel to the first game called Praying Brage and mobile game Bravely Archive, as well as an upcoming new mobile game called Bravely Default: Brilliant Lights. None of the spin-offs have made it West so far, however.
Bravely Default 2, despite its numeration, is not a direct sequel to either Bravely Default or Bravely Second. It's a standalone story following four new "Warriors of Light" who must recover four elemental crystals that were stolen from their homeland and restore balance to the world. It's a turn-based JRPG in every classical sense but adds on the "Brave" and "Default" systems allowing players to bank turns while defending from attacks, then use those saved turns at strategic moments for high-damage turns.
