Photo-Illustration: Vulture/Splatoon 3 – Nintendo; God of War II – Sony Computer Entertainment; Monitoring 2: Blizzard Entertainment; The Last of Us Part 1 – Sony Interactive Entertainment; The Callisto Protocol – Krafton Inc.
The start of 2022 was dismal with new game releases. A number of high-profile projects that were targeted the previous fall were pushed back to February and March as COVID continued to wreak havoc on development schedules. That led to a ridiculous bottleneck. We received elden ring, Horizon: Forbidden Westand a Destiny expansion in the same week. It was crazy, and our backlogs have never fully recovered.
Fortunately, the second half of the year is giving us plenty of free time to catch up. There are still a number of games worth getting excited about before we hit 2023, but a host of delays have cleared the deck. There’s only one actual megaton left, with a notorious god of war, on the docket, and the other new entries on this list include a holy remaster, a quasi-sequel, and a spiritual successor with massive cult appeal. The video game business is cyclical, and nothing could really match the height of February’s big glut, so it’s a testament to the sheer scale of the game business that we’ll all have plenty of things to play, even as the calendar. latent. See the list below.
Photo: PlayStation/YouTube
The last of us tells one of the best stories in video games. You take control of Joel, a gruff Texan who is one of the few humans still alive during a viscerally nasty fungal zombie armageddon. Joel has been hardened by decades spent on the edge of the world, which is why he was tasked with escorting a young woman named Ellie through the scarred wreckage of America. The two become close, opening up about their respective personal histories, culminating in a sobering ending. (If you don’t believe me, ask HBO, which is currently putting together a The last of us adaptation for 2023.) the last of us part one is a remastered version of the game, optimized for PS5. So if he hasn’t experienced Joel and Ellie’s stay for himself, now is the perfect time to get involved. Departure on September 2.
Photo: Nintendo
splatoon is an unlikely success for Nintendo. After decades of exclusively developing Mario platformers, lucid Zelda adventures, and intrepid Metroid complexes, they radically changed the genres in 2015 with an honest to God. shooter. In splatoon You play as a punk teen armed with an arsenal of ink-based weapons. Your goal is not to eliminate the other players (although you can), but to cover most of the map with your team’s shade of paint. this has done splatoon an excellent entry point for players who have struggled with the super-sharp reflexes required in the shooting of, say, Obligations either counterattack — especially if you don’t like the idea of pulling the trigger on your friends. Splatoon 3 proudly carries on that same tradition. Bring him home for the holidays and you’ll be amazed at what his mom can do. Out September 9.
Photo: Blizzard Entertainment
the deployment of surveillance 2 it’s been weird. Blizzard’s team shooter is a modern classic, and when the company announced a sequel in 2019, they promised that players of both the original game and the new game would be able to compete in the same multiplayer matches. That was already hard to conceptualize, and Blizzard muddied the waters even further by making surveillance 2 free-to-play, which seems to threaten the very definition of a sequel. (The new addition, a co-op mode in which four friends team up against the sinister androids that color the game’s story, won’t be available until 2023.) Regardless, when the October release date rolls around, we hope everyone takes notice. Supervision fever again. This remains one of the best multiplayer games ever made, and the summer of 2016, when seemingly everyone on the planet was tearing up the matchmaking ladder, was a truly euphoric time. Departure on October 4.
Photo: Sony Computer Entertainment
the 2018 God of War reboot inserted a heartbroken Kratos into the tundra of Midgard, where his goal wasn’t to bring down a Pantheon or assassinate his fellow deities. No, the main character was just trying to get his dead wife to his graveyard without any trouble from the irritating forces of the Celestials. He was a far cry from the blood-soaked viscera of the original trilogy, genuinely considering the path of destruction and pain Kratos left in his wake. The sequel promises to further unravel where he sits in this universe of interconnected gods of war. The last game ended with a very unhappy Thor knocking on his door; Someday soon, Kratos will pay for his sins. Departure on November 9.
Photo: Krafton Inc.
the Callisto Protocol The development team is made up of people who worked at EA Dead space series, which itself was a meaty, haunted love letter to the abyssal fables of space horror that the Alien pioneer franchise. Dead space was frozen by EA in 2013, and The Callisto Protocol proudly carries its banner. The game casts us as an inmate in an interplanetary prison colony on Jupiter’s moon Callisto, where something went very, very wrong. A creepy intergalactic parasite is tearing at the flesh of our fellow inmates, and players will do whatever it takes to get back home in one piece. The Callisto Protocol not for the faint of heart, but for those who adore heavy machinery, esoteric mutilation and the callous insignificance of humanity, you will be right at home. Departure on December 2.
