Ghostwire: Tokyo offers a bleak and spooky version of Japan’s most well-known city, but it’s still a hell of a lot of fun to explore. As a matter of fact, this version of the famous location is littered with secrets to uncover and unconventional mechanics to engage with, resulting in a unique gaming experience worth investing in fully. While the game is approachable, it nevertheless presents a lot to take in during the opening hours, so we’ve compiled a few tips to help you get started on your journey through this mysterious world.

Buy the Fudo and Kukurihime skills as soon as possible

When you do enough damage to an enemy, you’ll have an opportunity to remove its core (essentially its heart) in a cool and flashy manner. You’ll be using this action constantly throughout the game, so you’ll want to invest in skills that make it more efficient. Most importantly, since your core extraction will be interrupted if you take damage, anything you can do to speed up the process or keep enemies stunned longer is a huge boon.

Luckily, the skills Fudo and Kukurihime do exactly that and can be purchased very early in the game. The former increases how long enemy cores are exposed, giving you more time to get in a position that will let you extract them safely. Meanwhile, the latter increases how quickly you can extract the cores, which is a lifesaver during the game’s more densely-packed combat encounters.

Purchase Katashiro frequently and in bulk

Absorbing spirits and turning them in at phone booths is one of your main methods of gaining experience and Meika (the game’s currency). But being able to store the spirits requires Katashiro, and you don’t begin the game with very many, meaning that you’ll have to make the trek back to those booths constantly if you want to be able to absorb new spirits.

This is easily remedied, however, as many of the merchant yokai cats scattered around the city sell Katashiro. Each one you get will grant you one extra slot for absorbed spirits, so make sure you purchase these as often as you can reasonably afford to do so without leaving yourself completely broke. The last thing you want is to be in an area filled with spirits and have no space to grab them.

Take on errands from feline yokai pals for extra cash

While most yokai cats around the city just sell specific items, sometimes you’ll come across one that will have a list of items for you to track down in exchange for a solid payout of Meika. In addition to the cash you earn from individual turn-ins, hitting certain milestones also results in extra rewards that range from more Katashiro to pieces of cosmetic gear, so finding every item will be vital for completionists.

Set these as “active” so you can see the item locations on your map.

You can track the items the yokai cat needs by setting each one as “active” in the vendor menu. This will place yellow circles on your map which dictate the area in which you’ll find each item, which obviously makes finding it far less frustrating. Even so, some items are better hidden than you may expect, so be thorough in your search.

Consistently explore the rooftops

A significant amount of Ghostwire: Tokyo’s secrets, collectibles, and spirits are found by navigating the city’s rooftops. You can explore these heights by finding Tengu–an aerial yokai who makes loud sounds to alert you of their presence–flying around the city that you can grapple to in order to quickly land on a nearby roof.

A bit later in the game, you should look into purchasing the Amenotori X skill, which lets you summon a Tengu out of thin air that you can immediately grapple to. It goes without saying that this is a much easier method of getting to rooftops than wandering around seeking out an existing Tengu in a predetermined location.

Upgrade your glide early

You’ll acquire a gliding ability very early in the game, and it’s an invaluable tool for getting around the city, especially when moving across the rooftops mentioned in the point above. When you first get the ability, you’ll only be able to glide very briefly, though, so you’re going to want to invest in upgrades to extend your air time.

You can purchase your first gliding upgrade early in the game, which will extend your time in the sky to 3 seconds. After a few hours and some side quests, though, you should look into upgrading to the final tier, which increases that time to 5 seconds. With that out of the way, you’ll be able to reach more secrets and spirits than ever before.

Use donation boxes to find Jizo Statues easily

Praying at Jizo Statues scattered around the city grants you an extra use of a corresponding elemental attack. Because those elemental attacks are your primary damage source and have limited reserves, finding these statues should be one of your main priorities. Luckily, there’s a fairly easy way to get them to show up on your map.

Some Torii gates will spawn donation boxes after you cleanse them. By making the maximum donation, you’ll be granted a wish that can assist you on your journey. Especially during the opening hours of the game when your reserves are at their lowest, you’ll benefit greatly from choosing “find more Jizo Statues”, which will then place a new statue icon on your map for you to go check out.

Target crystallized items for ether

As you make your way around the city, you’ll notice copious amounts of crystallized items floating around, such as computer monitors, refrigerators, or even massive cars. These are ether deposits, and you’re definitely going to want to destroy them every time they cross your line of sight.

If an item is glowing like this, destroy it for extra ether.

Each crystallized item that you destroy will release ether, which you can then absorb to replenish your elemental attack resources. Green ether replenishes wind resources, red ether replenishes fire resources, and blue ether replenishes water resources. Considering how easy it is to run out of this elemental ammo for your attacks, this is an almost mandatory way of keeping yourself stocked up.

Feed dogs to earn useful rewards

You’ll notice dogs hanging around all over Tokyo, and you’ll no doubt want to pet them. However, giving them a scratch on the head is only one way to interact with the adorable pups. You can also feed them dog food, which can be purchased from shops and occasionally found in the open world, to earn some cool rewards.

Feeding dogs will make them happy and give them a reason to like you. Shortly after finishing their meal, they’ll usually wander off and dig up some Meika for you. And from time to time, you may find that they lead you to something even more substantial. But let’s be real–you’re just going to pet the dog over and over, aren’t you?

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Near the end of my preview of Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga, I started laughing hard enough that I had to pause and make sure my Discord microphone was muted so that the company rep wouldn’t hear me and think I’d lost my mind. I was playing through Episode IV: A New Hope, and Obi-Wan’s snooping around the Death Star was almost spoiled by the untimely, boisterous arrival of C-3PO and R2-D2. The nearby Stormtroopers wandered off after briefly investigating, one commenting that maybe the noise had been “another drill.” After Obi-Wan ensured the coast was clear, he turned to address his droid companions, revealing that C-3PO had found and activated an electric drill.

It’s such a silly, low-hanging fruit of a pun. And yet it took all I could muster to stifle my laughter long enough to mute myself. I still don’t know exactly why that particular joke is the one that got my traditionally stoic gamer face to break, though I’d wager it was the slow pan to C-3PO–as a droid, his head is always frozen in the same appearance, which in the context of this particular scene was used to great effect to emulate the look of a shocked deadpan expression. Regardless, the scene was all I needed to see to know that The Skywalker Saga may turn out to be pretty good.

I’ve been playing Lego Star Wars since the first in the series, which my sister and I got as a gift alongside our first console, a Nintendo GameCube. As my mom and dad didn’t know much about video games, they didn’t know that the GameCube needed a memory card to retain game data, and so my sister and I spent the rest of the week off of school playing Lego Star Wars and having to start over with zero progress every time we turned the console off. And yet I loved it, enjoying how well the game reinterpreted my favorite movies (put your pitchforks away–I was 12 and you’re allowed to love the prequel Star Wars trilogy when you’re only 12 years old) to be humorously goofy.

Goofy storytelling has been the biggest strength of the Lego Star Wars series (as it is for many of the Lego games), and the best entries are the ones that manage to retell the stories of their source material in a way that feels like the source has always been a comedy. That’s not too difficult with Star Wars–it’s an absurd science fantasy franchise that requires only the gentlest of pushes to transform into something ridiculous. If my preview is any indication, the team behind The Skywalker Saga understands that, with the core story beats all seemingly remaining intact. The changes that it does make are like the aforementioned drill pun, noticeable but still small. I think this is ultimately going to be an excellent way to enjoy Star Wars, regardless of whether you’re a longtime fan or a new face in the galaxy far, far away.

The Skywalker Saga is not a collection of Lego Star Wars: The Video Game, Lego Star Wars II: The Original Trilogy, and Lego Star Wars: The Force Awakens–this entirely new entry in developer TT Games’ series features brand-new and original levels, cutscenes, voice acting, hub areas, and gameplay mechanics. Each of the nine episodes can be played in any order, and the storylines of each episode have been tweaked to incorporate details from beyond the nine mainline movies. For instance, the opening of A New Hope has been adjusted so that the episode begins with the final moments of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story.

That means there are plenty of Easter eggs and references for longtime Star Wars and Lego Star Wars fans to point out, but each storyline is seemingly kept pretty tight and only covers the main plotlines for each episode. This is still a game aimed at kids, so you don’t need an encyclopedic knowledge of the past 45 years of Star Wars to understand what’s going on.

TT Games has taken steps to evolve the gameplay of the Lego Star Wars games in this latest entry as well. A new over-the-shoulder perspective and cover system aligns The Skywalker Saga to be a bit more like your traditional third-person shooter. A combo and block system also allows you to pull off a variety of moves in melee and lightsaber combat.

These new mechanics don’t change the Lego Star Wars formula as much as they’ve been advertised to. You can still very easily take out whole legions of enemies by fighting out in the open, given that everyone you fight aims like a Stormtrooper, negating the need for cover. And spamming random combos is still an incredibly effective strategy when you have a lightsaber in your hand–enemies can block you but I didn’t go up against anyone in the preview that encouraged me to be strategic in how I fought.

So as cool as it can be to occasionally engage in these systems, they feel superfluous. They aren’t detracting from the overall experience of what it’s like to play a Lego Star Wars game, but they aren’t actually adding anything either and so I felt little desire to engage in them. And that left me wondering why they were even there in the first place.

In most games, I’d assume that systems like this foreshadow a gradual increase in difficulty, with later levels presenting tougher foes that encourage you to be more strategic in how you fight–but again, The Skywalker Saga isn’t a linear game. The preview did not detail whether the difficulty of episodes would increase as you completed each one, or if the game would include multiple difficulty settings to allow players to crank up the challenge and better engage in the new combat systems. If either of those are the case, my qualms with the seemingly unneeded adjustments to combat might end up being unwarranted.

If anything, The Skywalker Saga seems to most excel in its puzzles. All characters are divided into one of nine classes–Jedi, Hero, Scavenger, Scoundrel, Bounty Hunter, Villain, Dark Side, Astromech Droid, and Protocol Droid–and each possesses unique movement mechanics and abilities that allow them to navigate around different types of obstacles and interact with the environment in various ways. A Jedi can use Jedi Mind Trick to control the actions and thoughts of other characters, for example, while a Villain has the special clearance to access specific computers and can use grenades to blow up seemingly indestructible Lego bricks.

The Skywalker Saga’s best puzzles task you with figuring out how to mix and match these abilities. For instance, as Obi-Wan Kenobi (Jedi class), you can use Jedi Mind Trick to take control of a Stormtrooper (Villain class), and then maneuver them over to a computer to access it and open a gate that’s halting your progress.

Beyond the more rudimentary puzzles, each of The Skywalker Saga’s 45 levels also has three challenges, which encourage you to replay levels and discover clever ways of circumnavigating problems. In the first level of A New Hope, for example, you are presented with some Lego bricks that allow you to build a way to break into the room you need to get into (which is filled with Stormtroopers) or douse the flames leading into an adjacent hallway. You can’t do both–you have to pick. Doing the latter leads to a terminal that can be hacked into, which opens an airlock and jettisons the room of Stormtroopers out into space, allowing you to forgo a direct confrontation.

Not all of these challenges are so clear-cut, either-or situations, though. Later in A New Hope, when Han, Luke, and Chewie are sneaking into the detainment level of the Death Star to save Leia, I found a way to dim the lights and then use Han’s special ability as a Scoundrel to deduce how to drop the short-circuited overhead lights on the guards. Doing so allowed me to, essentially, stealth my way through the encounter without anyone the wiser–not actually how that scene in A New Hope plays out, but it felt pretty cool to pull off nonetheless. And I still ended up needing to jump into the trash compactor to escape, so overall events still played out as they should.

The game doesn’t highlight the locations of these challenges, motivating you to pay attention to how your Lego surroundings have been built and how to utilize the unique skill sets of your party to best pull it apart or build around it. The solutions aren’t obvious and are enjoyable to think over, making them rewarding to solve.

Overall, I finished my preview of Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga a bit perplexed over the changes it makes to the Lego Star Wars games’ combat, but pleased to see that the series’ innate silliness and goofy nature is intact. And I was pleasantly surprised at how much I enjoyed the puzzles, especially the episode-specific challenges that are built around characters’ unique class skills. I’m looking forward to playing the full game, which launches for Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, PS5, PS4, Switch, and PC on April 5.

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Fortnite Season 2 has arrived. And while that means a whole heck of a lot of new stuff is now in the game, it also means reliable weekly challenges are here to grant you a bundle of XP in a hurry. The debut seasonal quests include using new features like tactical sprinting, spending good old-fashioned gold bars, and opening chests on IO airships. Here we’ll guide you through how to complete all of the Week 1 Fortnite challenges.

Fortnite Season 2 Week 1 challenges

There are nine weekly (seasonal) quests in Week 1. Each is worth 20,000 XP for a total of 180,000 XP, a slight increase over last season’s weekly gains.

Spend gold bars (500) – 20,000 XPCollect a Drum Shotgun and a Combat SMG in a single match (2) – 20,000 XPMantle onto a ledge within three seconds of sprinting (3) – 20,000 XPUse a Repair Torch to fix a vehicle (200) – 20,000 XPSearch chests on IO airships (3) – 20,000 XPDeal damage to IO forces (500) – 20,000 XPLaunch yourself 150 meters from a Siege Cannon (150) – 20,000 XPSearch chests or ammo boxes at named locations (10) – 20,000 XPDamage opponents with a shotgun or SMG (1000)IO airships hover over all IO-controlled regions.

As soon as you drop in, look for a place to sprint and mantle three times. Your reach is pretty athletic and there’s no shortage of qualifying locations. I completed this one around Chonker’s Speedway by jumping to rock ledges, for what it’s worth.

You can spend gold bars the same way you always would: Collect them by completing bounties and searching in beds and couches, then buy items from upgrade stations, NPCs, or vending machines. Collecting a Drum Gun and an SMG is simple luck of the draw, but you can speed up the process by searching chests, which are usually packed with a few weapons each. Do so within named locations and you’ll work toward that related challenge too. Deal damage with either to work toward the last challenge in the list shown above.

Searching chests should also get you a Repair Torch eventually, and despite what the challenge says, you can actually use it on cars that have taken no damage, so find a nearby car or truck and “fix” it the same way you’d fill it with gas. IO forces are stationed all over the island, including Doctor Slone and some cronies south of Logjam Lumberyard, but if you drop onto one of the baddies’ airships, you can deal 500 damage to the henchmen while also opening chests for two separate challenges. These airships also contain Siege Cannons, making the related launch distance challenge trivially easy.

In all, this week’s challenges are pretty straightforward once you learn where all the new toys are located. For more on Fortnite Season 2, check out our weapons guide, battle pass overview, and map changes breakdown.

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In Fortnite Season 2, the Omni Sword is sure to be a popular battle pass cosmetic thanks to its 42 unique customization options spanning four categories. The Omni Sword won’t be unlocked right away with purchase with the battle pass–though Tsuki 2.0 will be–but after you tier-up and earn a few Battle Stars, you’ll unlock the new pickaxe and begin to receive Omni Sword quests in your quest log. Here’s all you need to know about the Fortnite Omni Sword and Omni Chips.

How to unlock the Fortnite Omni Sword and Omni Chips

The Omni Sword costs seven Battle Stars. That means you’ll need to get only to Tier 2 in the battle pass to earn enough stars to unlock it, as it costs seven stars and you get five with each tier. If this special item is important to you, make sure you spend your Battle Stars on it first, rather than on some of Tsuki 2.0’s other cosmetics on the first page of the battle pass, or else you’ll need to keep playing to earn more Battle Stars.

Once you’ve unlocked it, you’ll have Omni Sword quests available in your quest log. According to the in-game timer, four new Omni Sword quests will be available each week, and completing each quest will grant you several Omni Chips, which you can spend on the sword’s customization options. Those options include 14 blade styles, seven handle styles (guards), 14 colors, and seven sounds.

Omni Blade quests

While we can’t see future weeks’ quests, we can safely assume the debut Omni Sword quests are indicative of what kind of tasks you’ll need to perform in order to unlock all of your Omni Chips this week. Like the Color Bottles of Chapter 2, Season 8, these Omni Chips are stashed in groups of three around the island. Each quest tells you vaguely where to go, and as you approach the right area, your mini-map will place the collectibles more specifically, making them easy to pick up–unless enemy players get in your way.

Customize the Omni Sword how you see fit.

Omni Sword quests – Week 1

Collect Omni Chips at Mighty Monument (3)Collect Omni Chips at Logjam Lumberyard (3)Collect Omni Chips at Greasy Grove (3)Complete Season quests (1) – 2 Omni Chips

As you can see, you’ll collect nine Omni Chips around the map, and you can earn two more Omni Chips for completing just one season (weekly) quest, giving you 11 to unlock each season. Expect this pattern to continue all season long, albeit with maybe some more demanding seasonal quest milestones in time.

For more on Fortnite Chapter 3, Season 2, don’t miss our complete battle pass overview, our tour of the map changes, and a look at the new and unvaulted weapons.

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The new Fortnite Season 2 weapons have been revealed, and the loot pool this season looks primed to shake up last season’s SMG meta by re-establishing the shotgun as a viable close-quarters option. Along with that, a ton of weapons and items have been unvaulted, bringing back some fan favorites with some new mechanics in some cases. Here’s the full breakdown of Fortnite Season 2 weapons.

Fortnite Season 2 weapons

The loot pool has gone under heavy revisions this season, including a ton of unvaulted items especially. After the totally brand-new weapons we saw at the start of last season, this season’s weapons may be nostalgic for some players. On top of that, these returning weapons have been revised in some cases to suit the “Resistance” theme of the season.

Unvaulted weapons

Thermal Scoped Assault Rifle (semi-auto, fires faster, reduced damage, increased recoil)Drum Shotgun (fires slower, slightly increased damage, tighter spread, better falloff)Revolver (fires faster, reduced damage, higher accuracy)Remote Explosives (increased damage against vehicles)Thermal Scoped Revolver (Exotic weapon)Storm Scout Sniper Rifle (Exotic weapon)Shockwave Grenades

Returning Season 1 weapons

Ranger Assault RifleStriker Pump ShotgunAuto ShotgunSidearm PistolStinger SMGHunter Bolt-Action SniperShadow Tracker (Exotic weapon)Marksman Six Shooter (Exotic weapon)The Dub (Exotic weapon)Boom Sniper Rifle (Exotic weapon)

The Drum Shotgun should give shotty fans an old favorite when they want to pack a heavy punch up close and personal. Meanwhile, the Scoped AR has been given a first-person ADS camera much like last season’s MK-7 Rifle. The Thermal Scout Sniper Rifle returns after a season away and should fit right in with the militia-heavy season. What’s going to be your go-to weapon this season?

For more on the new season, here’s everything new in Fortnite Season 2.

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