Torment: Tides of Numenera. Sniper Elite 4.
 
 

 

– Best PC Games of |

 

The puzzles and history remain the focus, while the combat never overstays its welcome. After four main Uncharted stories, we were ready for a new take on the story, and The Lost Legacy refreshes the gameplay, the puzzles and the banter in one perfectly packaged experience.

Observer can be a nasty little virus of a game, infecting your mind with its sickly vision of a future. An ingenious blend of Groundhog Day and immersive theater like Sleep No More , The Sexy Brutale requires the player to prevent a string of murders without ever being spotted. If you miss a moment of the story or the opportunity to stop a killing , you can stop and rewind time for another chance.

Despite the clever, mind-bending mechanics, what sticks months after playing The Sexy Brutale is its lovely story of forgiveness and redemption. Yakuza 0 almost feels like the year’s best minigame collection. In between its scenes about family loyalty and gangster drama, our hero Kiryu encounters one hilarious side quest after another. He even helps to produce a feature film. Never underestimate the power of local multiplayer. Splatoon 2 fixes the mistakes of its predecessor by embracing the couch — and reminds us how much fun we can have playing in the same room..

As much as the new characters, clothing options, Splatfests and soundtrack are wonderful additions to Splatoon 2 , nothing feels better than Salmon Run.

The horde co-op mode creates for some of the most intense, heart-pumping, hilarious challenges found in any game this year. Nioh is what happens when you build an entire game around a nearly perfect combat system.

The premise of the mechanics goes something like this: Ninja Theory took the fast-paced character action style that it perfected in the Ninja Gaiden series and mixed it with the precision of Dark Souls, then added fighting stances that made the whole thing four times as complicated. But the game is neither as commercially crass nor artistically ostentatious as the premise suggests.

Instead, Hidden Folks is confident, relaxed and charming. Previously, de Jongh operated within the studio Game Oven, where he created games that explored physical spaces. Sadly, those projects have never found the mainstream audience they deserve.

With Hidden Folks , de Jongh seems to accept that we now live within our screens. Rather than scold us for our obsession with screens, de Jongh creates a space free of gaudy color, notifications and noise. They have stretchy, springy arms. And they come in oddball types. The game flips the script on how you fight. Punches unfurl like Slinkies. Unlike 2D fighters, Arms builds its combat on the quirkiness of 3D space. A punch can come from any direction. What looks like another Nintendo party game is much deeper than the cartoony characters suggest.

There is a hidden cost to doing things if you have social anxiety or depression. The point-keeping system assigns different costs or values to activities like making food or socializing at work. The challenge lies in balancing that point system in a way that leads to a tolerable existence. This is a gentle, caring game about a complicated subject. A joyous little cast of characters speak volumes without uttering a single meaningful word. Last Day of June is also an object lesson in how creative indie developers are shaping worlds that feel like interactive works of art.

You create a commodity, then sell it for cash to buy tools and machines to create more of that commodity, until you become the king of making of cookies or candy or, in this case, paper clips. It works just as well as a critique on capitalism. Who needs AI to destroy the world when you have Excel and middle management?

The player users a sledgehammer to push, pull and pop a bald man in a cauldron up and over a mountain. Ultra difficult games can be demoralizing, asking players to be fueled by little more than pride and determination.

But Foddy converses with the player, encouraging them forward. Foddy is like a parent encouraging their kid as they learn to walk. Designer Jason Roberts has been crafting the puzzle game Gorogoa for over seven years, and yet it seemed to materialize in the world with minimal promotional fanfare. In the last decade, a handful of indie games have taken inspiration from artists who play with perspective, particularly the eye-contorting works of M.

Instead, it plays with visual perspective to explore what intellectual perspective provides us as humans. I think it has to do with the idea that there is hidden structure or meaning in the world. That if you can look at an ordinary piece of the world and rearrange the parts of it in just the right way, you would discover some hidden structure. You unravel the context behind the lost phone through photo albums and calendar entries.

But Another Lost Phone improves upon the original with a more careful and thoughtful story. They should be taken as a pair, showing the growth of an idea and its creator within a single year. And who would have ever expected Mario to hold a gun? And yet, Kingdom Battle works. Cleverly disguised as a bit top-down role-playing game, Rakuen is an exploration of human frailty in the face of tragedy.

It takes place in a dichotomous world where a sick boy travels between his humdrum hospital ward and a colorful land of magic. The game delivers straightforward quests greatly illuminated by a range of characters whose lives represent the anxieties we all face: rejection, loneliness, guilt, fear and pride. Rakuen is a work of truth, elevated by a lovely musical score. Developer Nihon Falcom has always been talented, but Ys 8 represents a new high for the studio, a game where each piece comes together and interlocks in a way that feels damn near perfect.

PES It’s a funny old game. FIFA 18 Getting the ball rolling. Reigns: Her Majesty The queen is dead. Thimbleweed Park Use money on Thimbleweed Park. Tacoma In space, no one can hear you going through their stuff. Hollow Knight Bug’s life. It was also a very evenly-packed year, full of critical and commercials success stories, big and small, from start to finish.

Publishers are finally starting to space out big releases, and it’s all the better for it. Whether your love for video games was reinvigorated by the release of the Nintendo Switch and its distinct exclusives, or you placed all your bets on big games, did not disappoint.

And let’s not forget the Xbox One X console launch. As is the case every year, there have been disappointments and blunders, but you could never say wasn’t exciting. Below you’ll find a big list of all games’ release dates. As always, these reflect Western release dates. January started strong with the return of Resident Evil, sleeper hits like Yakuza 0, and smaller releases like Gravity Rush 2. Ubisoft’s co-op online brawler For Honor made a splash in February, and we were delighted with indies like Night in the Woods, and Hollow Knight.

A couple more bigger releases like Halo Wars 2, and the first beta for Ghost Recon: Wildlands also dropped during the same month. Yooka-Laylee, one of the big Kickstarter success stories, officially came out in April.

May is when things started to quiet down a bit, but that doesn’t mean there wasn’t anything to play. It’s the songbird of cars, the sublime ocean cliffside filling the car poet with wonder and respect. Not much respect for time or skill, but respect for cars at least.

Verdict: Light performance problems and a poor loot box system can’t quite distract from Forza Motorsport 7’s accommodating difficulty, stunning beauty, and lavish racing options. Verdict: Not just for the masochists, Cuphead is a demanding but supremely rewarding modern 2D shooter that looks and sounds fantastic. Underneath, a thumping top-down action game delivers sword-sharp combat, the familiarity of its design offset by the constant urge to simply stand still and drink everything in.

Verdict: Dazzling, dangerous, and dripping in style, Ruiner is a superb, if short, whirlwind of cyber-violence and sightseeing. Warhammer has gone in the opposite direction. We had one large-scale strategy game of turn-based campaigning and real-time battles in the fantasy setting of the Old World, and now a year later we get another, bigger one—with promise of a third still to come.

Verdict: A maximalist sequel that improves on almost every aspect of the first game. I can’t stop regaling friends with my stories of heists gone bad or boasting about my flashes of brilliance in the heat of the moment. Heat Signature is brilliant at teasing these anecdotal threads out of a procedural universe. Verdict: By making excellent use of its procedurally generated world and wacky gadgets, Heat Signature is a mission worth taking.

Larian promised a lot, and it has absolutely followed through, crafting a singular game that juggles a bounty of complex, immersive systems, and never drops them.

My favourite thing wasn’t a mission or an individual section but the chance to see the world react to the events of Dishonored 2, and from a new perspective. It frequently shines new light on characters from throughout the series. Verdict: Not as consistently intricate or surprising as Dishonored 2, but still a worthy epilogue that adds depth and atmosphere to the series’ world. Verdict: Serious racing for serious racers. Extraordinarily convincing at each of the disciplines on offer.

The rumours are true: Sonic is good again. Verdict: A breakneck platformer that uses classic Sonic as a foundation for something fresh and exciting. If the rhythms of XCOM 2 feel stale now, the expansion does enough to shake things up, just expect a slightly slower pace as you systematically pull apart those new alien champions.

Verdict: The new classes and super villains are excellent, even if the expansion bloats the campaign a little. Verdict: It’s like, how much more Nidhogg could this be? And the answer is none. None more Nidhogg. But if you want to be reductive, Rez probably isn’t for you. Accept its big ideas and singular purpose, and it’s like nothing else you’ve played. What Rez does still feels remarkable, but only if you’re prepared to meet it half way.

Verdict: Like having a drunken conversation with a friend who really loves music, but it’s a videogame and good. It’s an uncompromising game that doesn’t make apologies for its high skill ceiling, but isn’t so exclusionary that only those with pristine reflexes can enjoy it.

There’s a quiet gracefulness to managing the Battle Medic’s hoverpack, knowing when to toggle the hover on and off to conserve fuel. It’s a treat to play an FPS where some of the roles demand more left-hand coordination than they do mouse aim.

Verdict: Nimble, graceful, and original, LawBreakers’ movement sets it apart from other FPSes despite a few aesthetic weaknesses. Verdict: The turn-based combat isn’t the best, but it’s a delightfully written RPG absolutely packed with humor.

Beautiful art direction and rich, nuanced sound design bring the deep forests, frozen lakes, and ragged mountains of the Canadian wilderness to life. Verdict: Deep, brutal, and hauntingly atmospheric, The Long Dark is a survival game done right.

Verdict: A smart and thoughtful science fiction mystery featuring a cast of believable, nuanced characters. Your first go of Nex Machina will leave you feeling pleasantly dazed, as this exhilarating and ferociously tough twin-stick shooter sucks you in and spits you back out. Verdict: Slight in form, but deep and consistently satisfying. Nex Machina is a gem of a shooter. As a challenge, they’re fine—there are bosses I can kill without taking a hit, but who’ll still punish a lapse in concentration.

But, unlike in regular play, these encounters mostly remain the same, no matter the build. A better bow may make things quicker, but that only affects the length of the fight, not how I approach it. Despite this misstep, though, Caveblazers is an excellent procedural platformer. It’s slightly looser and less intricate than Spelunky, but it scratches the same itch—offering plenty of variety, and a difficult challenge that’s fun to unravel.

Verdict: A varied, challenging platformer that’s adept at forcing improvisation and punishing mistakes. But as someone who is heavily invested in its world and characters, it is a triumph.