![]() There is plenty of positional strategy to calculate, yet Total War is more about sitting back and enjoying the grand viscera when your cavalry executes a perfectly timed flank. Like the previous games, Warhammer puts you at the helm of a marauding army eager to meet its rival force on the open field of battle. But developer Creative Assembly pivoted to orcs, elves, and demons with 2016’s Total War: Warhammer, and six years later, we have received the conclusion of the trilogy. We wreaked havoc from Napoleon’s front lines to the Oda clan of feudal Japan, forever bound by the limits of planet Earth. Total War was once a franchise consumed with historical dogma. It’s a remarkable game and a watershed moment for environment design in the industry. This is an open-world game built to the most exacting standards possible - every inch of the atlas glows with bespoke authored adventures, excising the repetitive simulacra that gum up the average Assassin’s Creed journey. With the game’s world map that rivals the scale of Grand Theft Auto’s Los Santos, FromSoftware throws its conservative linearity out the window and deftly extends its mythic, Souls-ian grandeur in every direction. Elden Ring is the company’s boldest evolution yet. ![]() Dark Souls, Bloodborne, and Sekiro turned us loose in fascinating universes replete with devastatingly difficult bosses and a teeming underbelly of secrets, Easter eggs, and branching paths that continue to prod at your imagination long after the credits roll. After so many co-op experiences that treat us with kid gloves, you remember what it’s like to truly fear death in Extraction.įromSoftware spent the past ten years creating some of the greatest single-player action games ever made. Did you leave behind one of your friends in the churn? Next mission you gear up to free them from the clutches of the parasite, or else they’ll suffer a punitive progression tax. I went into Extraction with exceedingly low expectations, and I found a game that evoked the morbid, white-knuckle thrills of the best high-stakes XCOM missions. The antiseptic halls and corporate antechambers crucial to the franchise’s muted aesthetic have been overrun by oozing pustules, curdled zombies, and infectious muck - think John Carpenter’s The Thing with SWAT teams - as you and two friends attempt to complete a trio of challenges before succumbing to the horde. The game includes the same arsenal and characters as Ubisoft’s venerated first-person shooter Rainbow 6 Siege, but it trades the squad-based multiplayer for a horror-flick romp through an obscene, viscerally unsettling alien apocalypse. Rainbow 6: Extraction feels like a generous expansion pack. It will likely be a long time before we get another Uncharted game, and that’s probably for the best. (It’s one of the best action games of the past ten years.) And The Lost Legacy, the mini-chapter that focuses on two of the franchise’s most beloved characters, found Naughty Dog experimenting with an open-world gestalt that still has me excited for whatever the company is cooking up next. The Uncharted series typically presents Nathan Drake as an unruly man-child who grows weirdly petulant whenever he doesn’t get his way, but the fourth and final game in the narrative was the first to actually scrutinize his selfishness. But if you missed Uncharted 4 or The Lost Legacy when they first arrived in 20, The Legacy of Thieves is absolutely worth a look on the spiffy PlayStation 5. Naughty Dog frequently rereleases its back catalogue, so it was no surprise that the great PlayStation developer bundled its PS4 Uncharted games in a package that coincides with the mediocre film adaptation. Here are some favorites for what’s shaping up to be a marquee year in gaming, listed in chronological order by release date. I much prefer our current predicament to the challenges of 2021, when the release schedule dried up entirely. That’s a good problem to have, obviously. To follow the gaming industry is to constantly contend with an overflowing backlog lingering in your Steam library, but rarely has it gotten this dire this quickly. The COVID bottleneck is loosening up, studios are operating at full capacity, and suddenly Namco and Sony are somehow releasing two of the biggest games on their respective dockets in the same week, long before the prime real estate of autumn. Still, I don’t think I’ve seen anything quite like the beginning of 2022. Developers who can’t meet the deadline for the holiday season often cut bait and shunt the fruits of their labor into January or February to buy crucial time for some extra polish. The first few months of a new year are always lousy with new video games.
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