Last year’s Find X9 was one of the best-value flagships overall. Now, OPPO has confirmed that the Find X10 and Find X10 Pro Max will launch this month. The launch is expected a week after Vivo’s X500 series, scheduled for September 21st. The Find X10 Pro Max is already known to have three cameras on the back, each with a 200-megapixel sensor. Before the phone’s launch, OPPO revealed more details about its camera features.

OPPO Find X10 Pro Max Camera Setup Detailed

The OPPO Find X10 Pro Max is expected to focus heavily on camera performance. Reports suggest this smartphone will feature three 200MP rear cameras: a primary, ultra-wide, and periscope telephoto. This could make it the first smartphone with three 200MP rear sensors.

The primary 200MP camera could use Samsung’s 1/1.3-inch ISOCELL HPC sensor. It may feature an f/1.5 aperture and CIPA 6.5-level image stabilization. Moreover, the device could offer up to 17EV dynamic range to capture images in high-contrast environments. The ultra-wide camera could have a 200-megapixel sensor with an f/2.2 aperture and a 124-degree field of view. The camera could capture group photos and landscapes with excellent detail. The third 200-megapixel camera could serve as a periscope telephoto camera with an f/2.1 aperture and 7.5-level stabilization. OPPO could also add 10cm telephoto macro support for close-up photography. On the front, the phone may feature a 50MP autofocus camera. A 3MP multispectral sensor could further help with color accuracy.

Find X10 Series Launch and Imaging Technology

OPPO has confirmed that the Find X10 and Find X10 Pro Max will launch this month. The launch is expected roughly a week after the Vivo X500 series event on September 21st. OPPO has also started teasing the new camera system ahead of the launch. The company will introduce its new Hasselblad Ultra HD Original Camera system with the series. It aims to deliver clearer images, more accurate colors, and realistic lighting and shadows.

OPPO will also use its second-generation Danxia color system for the new camera setup. The system reportedly uses 24 channels for color sampling and offers 15EV dynamic range. The LUMO imaging engine will help process and reconstruct images after capture. OPPO also wants to reduce fake-looking textures created during AI image processing. Besides the cameras, the Find X10 Pro Max could feature a 6.78-inch 2K LTPO OLED display. The panel may support a 144Hz refresh rate. The phone could also use the MediaTek Dimensity 9600 Pro chipset and ColorOS 17 based on Android 17. However, OPPO has yet to confirm these specifications and the phone’s pricing.

American cinnamon roll chain Cinnabon, known for its sweet, gooey buns, will close its last Singapore outlet on Sept 22 after operating for 3.5 years in the city-state.

The chain announced the closure of its ION Orchard store in a post on its Instagram account.

“To everyone who has visited, shared a Bon with us and supported us along the way—thank you for being part of our journey,” it read.

The post garnered mixed reactions, with some mourning the closure, while others weighed in on the cinnamon rolls’ steep prices.

Cinnabon first expanded to Singapore at Raffles City Shopping Centre in Feb 2023, followed by a second at ION Orchard that Sep, and a third at Jewel Changi Airport in Jun 2024.

The Raffles City and Jewel Changi outlets have since closed.

This comes amid a wave of closures in Singapore’s dessert scene: home-grown gelato shop Tom’s Palette announced on Aug 11 that it would shut in mid- to late Oct after 21 years, while Tarte by Cheryl Koh closed both its outlets in April after 11 years in operation.

River Valley patisserie Pantler had previously announced it would close on Aug 30, but was rescued by a white knight and will now remain open.

Vulcan Post has reached out to Cinnabon for comments.

• Read other articles we’ve written on Singapore’s current affairs here.
• Read other articles we’ve written on Singaporean businesses here.

Featured Image Credit: Mon Ami – 新马有好吃 – SM good food via Facebook/ esthereatsmore via Google Reviews

On August 4, Grant De Swardt, an independent AI consultant in East Sussex, U.K., noticed something strange going on with his Claude Max 20x account. He hadn’t been working that day, yet his token usage was climbing.

The next day, he disabled everything he had attached to Claude and did not work with it. Token consumption again increased. “In the clearest controlled interval, it increased from 45% to 55% while I performed no work, scheduled Cowork tasks were paused or completed, Dispatch/cloud execution was disabled, and there was no corresponding active local Claude Code task,” De Swardt told TechCrunch.

What was eating up his token allowance? He had no idea, so he contacted Anthropic and asked for an itemized list. Anthropic didn’t provide one, but it agreed something was off. It suspended his paid account, invalidated all of his sessions and server-side Claude Code tokens, and issued him a partial refund of £44.49 for the remaining time on his $200-per-month subscription.

The suspension wreaked havoc on his business, he told TechCrunch. His job is to help small and mid-size businesses set up agents — a sort of forward-deployed engineer for hire — for tasks like automatically loading purchase-order data from emails into the accounting software.

As a sole proprietor, he relies on agents throughout his whole business, too: daily admin tasks, website design, coding. “Like everything is just running through AI these days,” he said.

After investigating, Anthropic told De Swardt it found the culprit: A compromised Claude session key was used to mint unauthorized Claude Code OAuth tokens. The company told him the account “appeared to have been used by an unauthorized-looking third-party service to handle activity for other people, but they could not determine how it obtained access,” he told TechCrunch. “They say the evidence is consistent either with credentials/session data being taken without my knowledge, or with the account having been connected to an outside service.”

In other words, a hacker was able to obtain access to De Swardt’s account and was covertly siphoning off his tokens. Because account support tracks total usage but not itemized usage, even upon request, this kind of theft could have gone on for months undetected.

He posted his experience on Reddit and after 80 comments, he discovered he was not alone. One person claimed that their account “was auto-upgraded without my consent, my credit card got charged, and the usage shot from 0% to 100% automatically without me even touching it.” Another saw usage go from 0 to 49% in 12 minutes, when all they had used it for was a couple of prompts and a web search.

One Claude user said their account burned through its max tokens every day for three days without them using it at all; this person then created a GitHub report about it. Like with the Reddit post, other users shared similar experiences there, too.

Two of them posted emails from Anthropic where the company had — to its credit — identified and warned them that their tokens were being stolen.

“We have recently become aware of a bad actor that is using common infostealer malware to steal Claude login sessions from people’s computers, then using those login sessions to access Claude accounts and consume their usage,” the email read. Infostealers are a type of malware that installs itself on a user’s computer and steals saved passwords, session data, and login credentials.

When Anthropic saw suspicious activity, it signed the users out, invalidated existing authorizations, issued some refunds, and warned them that they may have malware.

The company also said the malware didn’t come from using Claude itself. Such malware can be picked up from many sources online, from downloading infected software to clicking on infected ads.

Anthropic did not send De Swardt one of those emails. He insists he found no evidence that his computer was compromised and says he still has no way of determining how hackers gained access.

De Swardt’s Claude account was reinstated after about two weeks. But the difficulty of getting speedy help for the matter, plus the lack of an itemized usage, soured him on Claude. He cancelled his subscription in favor of Cursor and its ability to use multiple models, including more affordable open source options.

In his experience, these other models work as well as Claude. “It’s not that much different or better,” he said, adding that he can’t see going back “without [Anthropic] actually having resolved the issue in any way.”

He says Anthropic still lacks tools that allow users to see what’s consuming their tokens. “I don’t think there’s any way that these people can protect themselves.”

When asked for information on how users can identify misuse, Anthropic declined to comment.

A fan who still likes a phone that fits the hand mailed DirectorFeng a tired iPhone 13 Mini. Daily use had worn the battery to 77 percent health, enough that the owner charged three or four times a day. Storage sat at 256 GB and felt tight. iOS 16.2 was still on the device, a leftover most people would have overwritten years ago.

Director Feng, a China-based repair expert with a specialized in board-level work, approached the project as if it were a complete overhaul. Anhydrous ethanol was used to soften the waterproof sealant around the display, making it easier to handle. A unique suction and press apparatus was utilized to carefully peel the screen off the phone without damaging the delicate flex cables. To protect the cameras, plastic film was applied to the lenses to prevent solvents and dust from entering.

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Once the screws and any remaining gunk keeping them in place had been loosened, the speaker, battery, motherboard, and soldered storage component were removed. The speaker and earphone grilles received some TLC because they had become clogged with debris and were causing strange sound effects. The effort then turned to the NAND chip, which is normally connected directly to the motherboard, so some careful drilling was required to remove the previous 256 GB chip until only the circuit pad remained. Restoring the pad to its previous splendor was not easy; it required some skillful movements. A brand-new 512 GB disk was then put on the cleaned pad.

A compact Tianyi 2520 mAh battery arrived, along with an original zero-cycle flex cable to match, so the phone would work properly with the new battery pack and not give any pairing warning nonsense. Adding that little of more capacity increased the weight by only 0.9 grams. The old adhesive was removed from all mating surfaces, making space for new glue and a nice waterproof seal. The display was then placed back in the frame.

When we turn it on, we see 512 GB of storage and 100% battery health, and the good news keeps coming, as a field test revealed that the rebuilt Mini could last 6 hours and 39 minutes without needing to be recharged, all at 50% brightness and volume. That’s what matters to someone who just wants a longer-lasting iPhone, not a bigger one.
[Source]

OpenAI is rolling out ChatGPT Images 2.5, its newest image generation model, and it brings a solid mix of speed and quality upgrades that should make your AI art sessions a lot less frustrating. People are already generating over 3 billion images every week across ChatGPT and the API, and this update is built to make that process faster and noticeably more accurate.

What makes Images 2.5 different?

The biggest wins here are sharper details, more natural lighting, and textures that finally look believable instead of plastic. The model is also much better at sticking to your reference photos, so if you’re turning a picture of yourself into a new scene or style, your face and features should stay recognizable instead of drifting into someone else entirely.

Editing gets smarter too. Ask for one change, like swapping a background or tweaking a product, and Images 2.5 should leave everything else alone. That consistency holds up across multiple rounds of edits, so your earlier tweaks won’t randomly get wiped out a few prompts later. And if speed is what you care about, generation is now up to 50% quicker than Images 2.0.

Sketch lets you draw your idea before AI finishes it

OpenAI added a feature called Sketch that lets you doodle your idea right inside ChatGPT, whether that’s a room layout or an outfit concept, and have the AI turn it into a polished image. Pair that with new templates for posters, flyers, and product shots, along with the option to leave comments directly on images for more precise edits, and you get a lot more control without needing any design skills.

People can also share the exact prompt behind an image now, so if someone creates something you love, you can recreate it using your own photos and details. On the developer side, OpenAI is also launching GPT-Image-2.5 Flare and Sunburst in the API, bringing the same speed and quality gains to apps and products built on top of it.

Images 2.5 is live now for all ChatGPT, ChatGPT Work, and Codex users across desktop, mobile, and web.

security

Adobe also brought goodies to the patch party and they deserve immediate attention

The vulnpocalypse is upon us, dear reader. Microsoft delivered a record number of patches to address 974 CVEs in its own products this month, including two bugs that Redmond says are already under exploitation.

September’s record-breaking collection of security updates come after Microsoft served up 421 fixes in August, and 622 in July. We’ve seen the new normal and we are not impressed. Thanks, but no thanks, AI. 

In addition to Microsoft’s massive patch drop, Adobe on Tuesday issued 10 bulletins addressing 172 CVEs, including a max-severity vulnerability exploited as a zero day in Magento and its successor product Adobe Commerce. Adobe on Monday shipped a hotfix for this one, tracked as CVE-2026-75650 and named StyleSmuggler, that gives unauthenticated attackers remote code execution. 

StyleSmuggler

If your organization has any type of online shop, prioritize this one first as it’s already being abused to compromise stores, according to e-commerce security shop Sansec.

Sansec discovered StyleSmuggler, and reports that attacks started on September 4. Every version of Magento and Adobe Commerce, from 2.4.4 up to and including 2.4.9, has the flaw. 

The bug allows attackers to inject malicious PHP code inside Magento templates using the “styles” properties to evade safety detections. In confirmed attacks, the payload then installs a backdoor that connects to a command-and-control server and waits for instructions. “So far, we have no indication that the backdoor has been weaponized,” the Sansec Forensics Team wrote.

Don’t wait to find out on this one. Put it at the top of your mitigation list.

Microsoft’s 974 CVEs

On to Microsoft’s record-breaking 974 CVEs, which according to Tenable is not many fewer than the 1,130 CVEs Redmond issued in 2025.

Two are already being exploited as zero-days.

First up: CVE-2026-85880, a privilege escalation bug in Windows Advanced Local Procedure Call (ALPC). Successful exploitation can result in the attacker gaining SYSTEM privileges.

“An attacker who can execute code in a low-privilege AppContainer could exploit this vulnerability locally to escape the sandbox and elevate privileges on the affected system,” Redmond warned. “No additional user interaction is required.”

No word yet on who is exploiting this bug, and to what end. The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency on Tuesday added CVE-2026-85880 plus a second Microsoft security hole (and the Adobe Commerce and Magento zero-day) to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities Catalog, and set a September 22 deadline for federal agencies to fix both new Microsoft bugs and a September 11 deadline to patch the Adobe flaw.

The second Microsoft bug found and exploited as a zero-day is CVE-2026-81963, another privilege escalation vulnerability. This one affects the Windows Update Stack. We also have very little detail about this flaw, other than it also allows attackers to gain SYSTEM-level access.

“More likely is that this bug is being combined with a code execution bug to spread malware or ransomware,” opined Zero Day Initiative’s Dustin Childs, who advised users to “Patch this one quickly.”

While those are the only two (so far) under active exploitation, Childs rated CVE-2026-55007, one of nine Exchange Server flaws disclosed this month, as “the most important” patch for the messaging server. 

It allows a remote, unauthenticated attacker to execute code on a vulnerable Exchange server by sending an email with a malicious Visio attachment. No user interaction is required, and the code executes when the server processes the attachment during content indexing.

Redmond says it’s “difficult to reliably trigger,” but as Childs points out: “The attacker only needs to get it right once. Schedule your downtime and update your Exchange servers with haste.”

Childs also said he counts 20 patches for wormable bugs, so be sure to read his full Patch Tuesday review for those. “While some might be more exploitable than others, having 20 of them in a single release is something else.”

The missing CVE

While Redmond addressed nearly 1,000 security holes this month alone, it’s also worth pointing out one that isn’t this month’s Patch Tuesday roundup: CVE-2026-85046. Google patched this bug in Chrome on September 3, and at the time warned that it “is aware that an exploit for CVE-2026-85046 exists in the wild.”

The high-severity, type confusion flaw exists in the V8 JavaScript engine used in both Google’s Chrome and Microsoft’s Edge browsers. And yet Microsoft still hasn’t published a security advisory for CVE-2026-85046.

“If you’re patched, you are protected, but if you rely on advisories to know which vulns exist, you could miss this zero-day vulnerability altogether,” Adam Barnett, lead software engineer at Rapid7, told The Register.

“A patch without an advisory is perhaps marginally better than an advisory without a patch, but keeping track of exposures without reliable advisory materials is not straightforward,” Barnett said. “Chrome patched 11 other vulnerabilities at the same time as CVE-2026-85046, but it’s not yet clear if those are patched in Edge. Until Microsoft sets the record straight, the only safe assumption is that these vulnerabilities (e.g. CVE-2026-85045) remain unpatched in Edge.” ®

Alison J Derbenwick-Miller of the Association for Computing Machinery explores how, in a time of transformation, computing can be a significant force for good.

Deciding what you want to do with your future is no mean feat and often, when you are navigating your post-secondary education you can find that the subjects and career routes you envisioned are no longer aligned with your current interests. 

This was the case for Alison J Derbenwick-Miller, the CEO and executive director at the Association for Computing Machinery. During her senior year of university she happened to take a graduate level course on constitutional law and society, sparking an as-of-then undiscovered interest in how law and legal theory interact with social systems.

She told SiliconRepublic.com, “I ended up abandoning my initial plan to pursue a PhD in Soviet History to explore a potential career in law. My first post-college job was as a legal assistant at Oracle. 

“This was in the early 1990s, just as computing was becoming increasingly important in industry and society and I quickly realized that understanding the intersection of law, technology and society would be essential to shaping the future. 

“At the same time, I was struggling a bit with an internal need for my work to have meaning and do good in the world, which I sometimes found difficult to reconcile with the realities of working in a fast paced, for-profit industry.”

Eventually, she found herself in a graduate course, studying intellectual property law and public good and soon moved on to roles in Oracle’s philanthropy organisation and at the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), which is reportedly the world’s largest educational and scientific computing society. 

She added, “That same desire to use technology in service of the public good is part of what drew me to ACM, whose global community works to advance computing as a science and profession and to ensure it benefits society.

“I built a career around pursuing things I cared about, seeking intellectual challenge, and learning to build sustainable organisations that prioritise the greater good.”

Building a better world

That is an element of her work that particularly motivates her, especially in a global landscape where “we’re facing unprecedented challenges and opportunities, and increasingly powerful computing and emerging technologies are giving us new ways to address them”. 

She added, “AI is an obvious example of this, but there are other very exciting advances happening across disciplines and industries in areas like quantum computing, advanced robotics, renewable energy innovation, genomic sequencing, and more.”

Derbenwick-Miller believes that the computing community, now more than ever before, has the power to create, innovate and be responsible for the kind of work that benefits humanity. 

She said, “That’s one of the reasons I’m so excited to lead ACM. Our organisation brings together researchers, practitioners, educators and students who are helping shape how computing develops and how it serves society now and into the future. I believe there is enormous potential in what that community can accomplish together.”

Staying skilled

But how can one person stay skilled enough to operate consistently at the intersection of research, education, professional development and scientific collaboration, when each moves at near lightning speed?

A self-confessed “endlessly curious, geeky generalist”, Derbenwick-Miller explained that a love of learning new things has kept her skilled and ready in a transforming landscape. 

She added, “I love talking with experts and working with really smart teams and I thrive on solving knotty and wicked problems. I’m never afraid to ask questions, and I enjoy thinking at a systems level to figure out how to best change or improve the bigger picture. 

“Ultimately, I think working at the intersection of any set of disciplines, fields, or industries is less about developing specific skills and more about how you approach learning and problem solving. Be curious. Be humble. Listen and communicate authentically and well.”

Cohesion and teamwork

Strong team leadership and a commitment to partnerships is also critical to maintaining a skilled and productive environment in computing. Derbenwick-Miller explained she once worked in an organisation that held the mantra ‘great people do great things’ and it has stayed with her all of her career. 

She said, “Leading is not about telling people what to do or how to do it. It’s about creating a collaborative and respectful culture, having a vision, setting clear goals, respecting what each person brings to the table and empowering the people around you to do what they do best to achieve those goals. 

“In a dynamic environment, being transparent and open about what is known and what is not helps create confidence and flexibility within the team to test, learn, adapt and iterate. The path to the vision may change, but the vision remains the north star that enables collaborative action.”

And this is all bolstered by the establishment of impactful partnerships across academia, industry and government, “at all levels, not just at leadership levels”.

Derbenwick-Miller said, “In many ways, computing technologies don’t recognise boundaries and borders and actions can have far-reaching and unintended outcomes. 

“This makes it difficult to act with lasting success within one’s own silo. It also presents a huge opportunity to develop deeper understandings of the needs of others and to imagine and build solutions that benefit more people more efficiently. 

“The more we can develop collaborative relationships and communities across sectors, the more we will understand each other and the more good we can do.”

For the people working within these close communities it is also critical that you understand your own limitations so that you can make use of the wider collection of shared skills and knowledge. 

“Even within close communities, we don’t always understand things the same way, use the same words the same way, or have aligned goals and incentives. It’s all too easy in today’s busy world to get focused on our own projects and to limit what we do, see and hear to what is easiest, most recent, or closest to what we already think. 

“Across the computing ecosystem, we have to build trust, work to understand where we can align and where we must act independently and maintain and foster the ability to communicate openly and honestly.

“We are living in a time of transformation and computing can be a force for tremendous good with a vital role to play. I’m honoured to be part of the computing community and ACM at such an exciting time, with the advent of generative AI, quantum computing, advanced robotics and smart health tech at a scale we’ve never seen.”

Don’t miss out on the knowledge you need to succeed. Sign up for the Daily Brief, Silicon Republic’s digest of need-to-know sci-tech news.

Garmin’s first smart ring could be closer to launch than expected, after a Brazilian regulatory filing revealed 10 different product variants that may belong to the unannounced Cirqa Smart Ring.

The listing comes from Brazil’s National Telecommunications Agency, where Garmin filed 10 mysterious model numbers under the same certification. While the company has yet to confirm that these are smart rings, the sheer number of variants is a strong clue. Smart rings typically come in multiple sizes to fit different finger measurements, making 10 versions more plausible for a ring than a smartwatch.

Sometimes founders search high and low for the right startup idea, while other times it comes to them. Federico Felici and Jonas Buchli are two of the lucky ones.

Over and over again, they heard the same thing from fusion companies: “We would ideally buy many of the components to make our our control system, but there isn’t really anybody providing them — and especially there isn’t anybody who speaks the language of fusion,” Felici told TechCrunch.

For years, the two founders have worked to develop new ways to control experimental fusion devices. “We spent quite a lot of our time solving exactly the problems that our customers need to solve,” he said. “It felt like the right time.”

To capitalize on the opportunity, Felici and Buchli founded Lausanne-based Fusionality this year and quickly raised a $3.7 million (CHF 3 million) pre-seed round from Founderful and Playfair. Felici serves as the company’s CEO, Buchli its CTO.

Fusionality is part of an emerging supply chain that has popped up to serve the burgeoning fusion power industry. Some startups, like Kyoto Fusioneering, are developing components that will help fusion startups turn their engineering breakthroughs into electricity for the grid, while others are existing manufacturers with the skills required to turn out high-precision parts.

Yet few companies specialize in the hardware and software required to control the fusion reactors themselves. “Across the industry, many companies make their own control systems from scratch,” Felici said. “But actually, 80% of each company’s control system is really exactly the same.”

Fusion power plants generate electricity by harnessing the energy released when two atoms fuse, which is more likely to occur in a superheated plasma. But plasmas are fickle, and maintaining the proper temperature, shape, and fuel level requires split-second decision-making. 

The control systems used to maintain those conditions are complex to develop and deploy, but much of the fundamental physics is consistent across reactor designs. Fusionality plans to build off that commonality to develop a suite of control systems and simulation environments which startups can then fine-tune to work with their specific design.

Felici and Buchli met while teaching AI to control an experimental tokamak — a donut-shaped device researchers use to study fusion power. Felici was working at EPFL in Switzerland, which houses one such tokamak, while Buchli was working at Google DeepMind. Later, Felici moved to Google DeepMind, where he developed simulations and machine learning interfaces for fusion devices.

Felici said AI will “play an important role in future control systems,” but that it’s not quite ready to tackle the entire challenge. “I wouldn’t be somebody who advocates for AI to take the role of controlling the entire fusion reactor,” he said. Today, AI is more likely to “complement or enhance or optimize” parts of the system, he added.

For now, Fusionality is focusing on a branch of fusion power known as magnetic confinement, an approach that uses powerful electromagnets to keep fusion fuel dense enough and hot enough to feed a power plant. Commonwealth Fusion Systems, Realta Fusion, Proxima Fusion, and Type One Energy are examples of startups developing magnetic confinement devices. Eventually, the company will develop systems for other approaches, Felici said.

Fusionality’s pre-seed funding will help the team, currently seven strong, develop a “tightly selected number of technologies,” Felici said, though he declined to specify which. He likened them to Lego blocks. “We start with a few of these blocks and then we build out more,” he said. “We have the ambition to serve the really wide range of technology that you need to operate a fusion reactor.”

When I’m piloting a big robot in a video game, I want it to have a big personality and an even bigger punch. After playing an hour of Gundam: Rogue Orbit, it seems the game will have both. But there’s still a lot to discover about Bandai Namco’s next entry in the giant robot franchise, due out March 5, 2027.

My virtual preview offered two missions and three premade mobile suits (the franchise’s name for the piloted robots) to choose from. The hour was enough to run through both stages with all three mobile suits, each equipped with a different melee weapon. One stage was an enemy gauntlet ending in a miniboss, while the other was a full-fledged boss battle. In the final game, you’ll be able to customize your robot kits, but we didn’t see that functionality because Bandai Namco wanted us focused entirely on the gameplay.

One thing was clear: This isn’t another Armored Core copy. While I loved 2023’s Armored Core 6: Fires of Rubicon, its dizzying array of parts and weapons could be a chore to optimize for the game’s blindingly fast, three-dimensional combat. From what I saw in the preview, Rogue Orbit takes a different, simpler approach. Forget about the Z-axis; just worry about jumping and dashing around, as in most modern melee action games.

True, I had to suspend my disbelief that my mobile suit was hopping around with normal-feeling gravity on the outside of a space station, but I’m betting this trims away a lot of zero-g bother to avoid the awkwardness of floaty jumps. 

Unlike other mech games filled with long-range beam cannons and missiles, Rogue Orbit’s fights seem constrained to melee range only. Whether that was the result of our preview being limited to a trio of mobile suits with swords, lances and whips, or reflects the whole game, I didn’t mind. Ranged combat was limited to support equipment, like a set of orbiting drones that fired when I dashed.

Throughout the preview, I ran across space stations cutting and stabbing through an assortment of enemies, using different skills tuned to my weapons. The sword got a rad slash with trailing explosions, while the whip could be uncoiled for slightly longer-ranged swipes and the lance got a drill-dash to reposition my mobile suit. The combat felt polished, even with half a year to go before the game’s launch, with every attack triggering a momentary pause on contact — a satisfying touch that let me relish the damage I was dishing out and savor my assortment of rad skills.

Ultimately, Rogue Orbit’s combat gameplay felt like Dynasty Warriors or Virtual On (without the twin stick controls), using special skills until my ability gauge ran out and peppering in normal attacks until it charged back up. I had an ultimate attack as well, which, in the preview, gave me unlimited dashes for a limited time until I pulled the ability’s trigger, sending a volley of beams lancing down at my target. In the full game, players will be able to switch between different ultimate attacks.

The short preview was more a tease than a dive into the complexities of the game, and it sure was fun to pummel foes with something that looked like a mobile suit. But the big question I left with was: Does this feel like a Gundam game yet?

How much Gundam is there yet to discover in Rogue Orbit?

Given the brevity of the preview, I didn’t expect to get much context about the characters or plot. Like most latter-day Gundam media, Rogue Orbit is set in a new universe, so don’t expect to see anything from the Federation or Zeon of the original Universal Century setting. Haro, the friendly green, ball-shaped droid from the first Gundam show, does appear in the marketing. (I’m also praying that a masked, Char Aznable-like character will show up, a recurring feature of the franchise.)

From details dropped in the recent trailer and the preview, players will control RE-X, a seemingly human male who was “created” to control a Gundam, the franchise’s special category of humanoid robot mobile suits (his is called Gundam Helix). There are a few other characters in your ship’s crew, including the commander April and the heroine Sophia, who will accompany you. 

Where many Gundam shows and media lean into a political clash between factions of humanity and their armadas of mobile suits, Rogue Orbit seems to be setting up a xenomorphic threat. The enemies I attacked in my preview all seemed organic and monstrous rather than mechanical. While the skulduggery and power clashes result in some of the best conflicts and themes in Gundam, centering Rogue Orbit on a humans-versus-aliens threat (or enemies looking like aliens) opens the door to some intriguing opportunities — by which I mean, huge fantasy-esque bosses that aren’t mechanical Mobile Armors.

At the end of the first mission on the space station exterior, I was clashing with an ogre-like humanoid mini-boss labeled The Giant, who had his own health bar and stagger meter. Similar to other games with those features, once I whittled the latter down enough, the mini-boss went down for a few moments to let me get a few hits in. When I whacked a limb enough, it became disabled, limiting the boss’s attack capabilities.

The second mission was entirely set around confronting a massive alien dragon called the Drake, which took awhile to wear down. In addition to dodging swiping claws and avoiding strings of beams, the Drake has a tail and wings I could hit hard enough to break to temporarily disable some of the meaner blows of the scaly boss. Neither mission was too difficult and I finished both multiple times, but during the preview I only had the three premade kits and no additional difficulty levels to try out. 

From what little I saw, there’s a lot waiting for action-combat fans, though there’s plenty of mechanics, kit customization, story details and encounter complexity left to be revealed about the game. I’m still on the fence for how “Gundam” it may end up feeling in the long run, but the combat’s polish is promising — and enough to have me looking forward to when I can climb into the cockpit again.

Gundam: Rogue Orbit will release on March 5, 2027 for PC, Xbox X/S and PS5.

David Lumb

Managing Editor, Mobile

David Lumb is a managing editor for the mobile team, covering mobile and gaming spaces. Before CNET, he covered tech, gaming, and culture for TechRadar, Engadget, Popular Mechanics, NBC Asian America, Increment, Fast Company and others. As a true Californian, he lives for coffee, beaches and burritos.

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