As of this week, fall has officially begun. That means a whole lot of things—changing colors, cooler temperatures, the weirdest presidential election of all time—but more importantly, it means that a truckload of video games are coming out.
And by truckload, I means dozens and dozens for each and every platform (save for the Wii U). But rather than list all of the titles, we’ve decided to round up the best of the best; the ones you really need to be looking out for this fall.
We’re in the home stretch of 2016, and it’s been a busy couple of months for the video game industry. Microsoft brought HDR gaming and 4K video to the fore with the Xbox One S in August. Sony responded with a console refresh of its own in September, along with the announcement that it would launch the first ever 4K gaming console, the PlayStation 4 Pro, in November.
All this time, Nintendo has been eerily silent.
The Pokemon Company’s chief executive has confirmed that his company will develop games for Nintendo’s upcoming NX console. This won’t come as much of a shock to anyone who has been keeping up with the unprecedented success of Pokemon Go, but the company’s ties to the NX were previously just a rumor.
The best compliment that I can pay to Forza Horizon 3 is that I often forgot I wasn’t playing Forza Horizon 2. If you read my review for Horizon 2 back in 2014, you know that it was my favorite game of that year. Horizon 3 is a prettier, smoother, more expansive game from nearly every angle, but it doesn’t lose an iota of what made its predecessor that best open world racing game of all time.
Jak and Daxter is one of my favorite game series of all time.
In fact, I’ve always been drawn to character-driven, 3D action platformers — the games that spawned from Super Mario 64 and its ilk. There’s something infinitely entertaining about running, jumping and gliding around a three-dimensional space when the laws of physics don’t apply quite like they’re supposed to.
This is why I had so much fun playing ReCore, a new Xbox One console exclusive platformer from Comcept. It’s also why I still haven’t given up on ReCore, despite the countless inexplicable design decisions and glaring technical flaws that threaten to derail the experience at nearly every turn.
Another month, another free game from Ubisoft.
Back in June, video game developer and publisher Ubisoft celebrated its 30th anniversary by launching UBI30, a promotion which would bring seven free games to PC gamers in 2016 — one for each month left in the year.
The most substantial PS4 update since launch has arrived.
After years of anticipation, Sony has finally brought some of the most frequently requested features to its latest console, including the ability to create folders and organize your library, overhauls for the Quick Menu and Share Menu, HDR support and a major UI refresh that will change the way you interact with your PS4.
When Bethesda showed off Fallout 4 at E3 2015, the biggest surprise of all was that user-created mods would be coming to both Xbox One and PlayStation 4 for the very first time. It took some time, but Bethesda was finally able to bring mods to Xbox One in May — just a month after their were made available on PC.
Unfortunately, mod support on PS4 had hit a snag, but Bethesda assured fans that it would arrive soon enough. On Friday, September 9th, Bethesda backtracked on that promise, revealing that mods wouldn’t come to PS4 after all.
After originally planning to launch mobile games featuring characters from both the Animal Crossing and Fire Emblem franchises this fall, Nintendo has announced that both titles have been delayed into next year.
In a press release sent out shortly after Shigeru Miyamoto appeared on stage at the Apple event to unveil Super Mario Run, Nintendo confirmed that the Animal Crossing and Fire Emblem mobile games are now scheduled to launch by March 2017, which marks the end of the company’s fiscal year.
Before the end of the year, Sony will have launched not one, but two brand new PlayStation 4 consoles. The slim model will simply replace the launch PS4 as the new standard console on store shelves, but the PS4 Pro will be a genuine upgrade, bringing new features and improvements to the PlayStation 4.
At the keynote event in New York City on Wednesday, Sony spent far more time showing off 4K games than it did actually discussing what the PS4 Pro could do, so we’ve decided to collect every piece of information we could find about the high-end console and wrap it all into a convenient bullet point list.
On Wednesday afternoon at the PlayStation Meeting in NYC, Sony finally took the wraps off of the PlayStation 4 Pro, which it originally announced back in June. The console, as expected, is a significant upgrade over the PS4 (and PS4 Slim), featuring upgraded specifications and support for 4K gaming and video.
Although it had already been repeatedly spoiled by leaks from around the internet, Sony officially announced a new, slim PS4 at the PlayStation Meeting on September 7th. As expected, the sleeker PS4 model isn’t so much an upgrade as a hardware redesign, but there are a few interesting tweaks and additions worth noting.
