Marvel Rivals Officially Brings Avengers: Endgame's Final Fight to Life

Marvel Rivals has comfortably settled into a “thing I played for a couple of months, then never touched again” place in my life, but as an Overwatch diehard, I continue to keep an eye on NetEase’s hero shooter as its success has deeply influenced Blizzard to get its shit together of late. However, in anticipation of Avengers: Doomsday, the game has been holding events recreating big moments from the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The latest one will let you and 49 friends assemble to face off against Thanos and his legion of goons like in the final battle of Avengers: Endgame. The Path to Doomsday – Avengers: Endgame event begins on October 24, and will pit 50 players against a giant Thanos and his army of aliens. Though the big purple guy is larger than your average hero, presumably so everyone can actually get some hits in, he’s also got massive AOE abilities to dish out damage against dozens of players at once. As you can see in the new trailer, Thanos can call down an aerial strike from his ship that can take out a whole army of players at once.

I feel like I’ve been bracing for this moment since seeing Obsession back in May. After the staggering, viral success of the horror movie over the past year, Obsession has undergone the same memetic distortion that every popular thing does. The more its scenes are riffed on in memes, its imagery ripped out of context, and its themes whittled down into the easiest shorthand, the more its iconography and characters become marketable packages to be distributed to the highest bidder. Fortnite, the gaping maw devouring pop culture as we know it so it can feed it into an AI-driven pipeline that cannot resist another skin to sell to its millions of players, is finally bringing Nikki, the titular obsessor, to its battle royale so she can snipe Sabrina Carpenter and a robot who looks like Sonic the Hedgehog and then dance on their corpses. Almost like she’s a puppet with no control over her body. For those that haven’t seen Obsession yet, Nikki is a young woman with big dreams of becoming a writer and escaping the local music store where she works.

Patricia is the former editor-in-chief of Kotaku, where she spent a decade writing and editing. Prior to that, she served as the Culture Editor at Polygon, and as a reporter at The Verge. Hernandez specializes in Pokémon TCG, Nintendo, and offbeat internet culture stories. The trippy new RPG adventure is presented by Bethesda

You've heard of the drill that will pierce the heavens, so introducing: the drill that is attached to an entire city that will pierce the earth. That's the concept for CitaDrill, a roguelite city-builder where the city is encased in a big ole dome, a larger than life drill attached to its base that you dig through an infested planet. It's a lot, of course, but it's got some lush pixel art and a demo you can try out for yourself as part of this Steam Next Fest, too. When you start things off, all you have is your humble drill, and a need to dig downwards. As you do so, drilling up different kinds of blocks nets you a range of resources, all dependent on the colour of the blocks you've crushed up. In typical city building fashion you use these to build up your domed city, with different fixtures providing various bonuses. Perhaps you add in a pressure valve to reduce a pressure buildup status, or you put up some power lines to get certain buildings and modules working. You may even decide to, uh, print a worker to get some jobs done.

Xbox CEO Asha Sharma wants to release a new handheld gaming device in 2027. That’s according to a new profile of the executive in Fortune. The plan suggests a successor to the existing Xbox Ally X manufactured by Asus, though fights over the OS apparently remain an ongoing issue. Fortune states that Sharma wants to release a “next-generation handheld device by the 2027 holiday season,” followed by the next Xbox home console in holiday 2028. Whether the Project Helix “family of devices” includes both is unclear, as is the pricing, though Fortune also reported that Project Helix Xbox consoles could cost as much as $1,800 without subsidies. Perhaps the more interesting tidbit from the article, however, is about an ongoing “turf battle” between the Xbox and Windows teams. Sharma’s team wants software optimized for gaming. The Windows team wants the handheld to use a version of Windows Home as the basis for its OS. Here’s the excerpt: Tensions ran high enough that a senior Xbox executive threatened to scrap the handheld project rather than adopt the Windows build, according to people briefed on the clash.

Austin Manchester is a writer and editor living in New York City. At Polygon, he covers gaming and entertainment news, reviews new video games, interviews behind-the-scenes talent, and more. He enjoys discovering hidden gems and sharing them with Polygon's audience. Previously, he was the gaming editor for AIPT Comics and has written for other outlets like XDA, How-To Geek, and The List. He enjoys soulslikes, character-driven RPGs, and third-person shooters plucked straight out of the Xbox 360 era. He also likes to flex his non-video game nerdy knowledge sometimes, whether that's explaining who's who in the new Wolverine game or recommending a comic book series about a sentient sword.