2022 was a stacked year that featured indie darlings (Immortality), blockbusters (God of War Ragnarok), and smaller, surprise hits (Marvel Snap), so it shouldn't be a shock that a game or two slipped under your radar. But the biggest blink-and-you-miss-it release might be late November's Need for Speed Unbound, the latest entry in EA’s long-running street racing series. With Criterion Games (of Burnout fame) at the helm, Unbound had the potential to be one of the best racing games of the year—or a return to series form after a few missteps. But while aesthetically pleasing and featuring cross-platform play with PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S, the $69.99 PC game lacks satisfactory car handling and a thriving, in-game world.
The first entry is always the pin's source. Overall confidence is a weighted average of how firmly each reference supports the start and end times used above; a reference counts half as much for every 180 days older than the newest.
Date has passed, but pcmag.com does not confirm it happened then; unverified.
Wikipedia's Need for Speed Unbound article gives the Criterion/Frostbite infobox and describes takeovers, the weekly cycle, the new handling slider and "143 different cars from 32 manufacturers" at launch.
Engadget's October 6, 2022 article confirms Need for Speed Unbound "revives the racing series on December 2nd," matching the pin's stored date about two months ahead of release.
The page could not be fetched, but Polygon's own headline and October 6, 2022 publish date corroborate the same December 2 release-date announcement described by Engadget[3], matching the pin's stored date.
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I wouldn’t expect roller skating and third-person shooting to be a chocolate and peanut butter situation, but Rollerdrome proves it can be just that. By essentially inventing a new single-player sport, OlliOlli World developer Roll7 has found enough ways to make both sides of this unique coin shine without getting overwhelming. Wrap that package in an intriguing world with more going on beyond the sport than you might expect, and I’ve found myself lost in match after match of skate-shooting mayhem.
Modern Warfare 2's greatest strength is that it doesn't have a gimmick, because it doesn't need one.All Modern Warfare 2 needs to be is a great shooter, and it delivers. This is the Cal
Modern Warfare 2's greatest strength is that it doesn't have a gimmick, because it doesn't need one.
All Modern Warfare 2 needs to be is a great shooter, and it delivers. This is the Call of Duty experience, deconstructed, reconsidered, and obsessively optimized over 15 uninterrupted years of iteration. I know when I'm playing a Black Ops game because it has offbeat arcade modes and the latest iteration of Nuketown. I know I'm playing a Modern Warfare game because the shooting is so finely tuned that I want to take my Gunsmith build out to dinner. Infinity Ward has officially mastered the instant gratification of aiming down sights and deleting targets.
That goes a long way, though some of Modern Warfare 2's biggest swings, such as revamped progression and a genre-bending campaign, are less elegant. It also suffers from an obtuse UI, fits of crashes, weird bugs, and the unexplained absence of basic features like stat tracking. But altogether, it's a good year for Call of Duty.
You almost have to admire the hedonism of looking at The Last of Us Remastered, which is still visually impressive eight years later, and saying, “Yeah, that looks pretty good, but we can do better.” There’s very little left to be said about the original The Last of Us, a potent, post-apocalyptic cocktail of stealth, survival, and slaughter that’s revered for its haunting storytelling in an amazingly well-crafted world. You almost certainly knew that. It’s widely lauded as one of the best games of all time and one of the few to get a 10 from IGN, but I reckon you knew that, too. In fact, it’s a game so nice they built it thrice, which is where we find ourselves with The Last of Us Part I – now the third version of Naughty Dog’s 2013 masterpiece to arrive inside a decade.
Successful sequels build on their predecessors in multiple ways – think Mass Effect 2, Assassin's Creed 2, and Uncharted 2. They all improve what came before them by conjuring up exciting new gameplay mechanics, developing characters through engaging stories, and switching up mission design to offer variety. In other words, they take a solid base and combine with new elements to create more advanced bonds, much like an alloy… or in this case, an Aloy. Horizon Forbidden West does this with aplomb, building on the already impressive foundations of 2017’s Horizon Zero Dawn to tell a thrilling story full of familiar explosive combat against elaborate robotic foes and blockbuster action sequences, but also adding Witcher-like settlements to the map and filling it out with great side quests. There’s a genuine sense of exploration and loads of completely involving lore behind it all to uncover. The result is a fantastic open-world action-adventure that, despite falling into a couple of its old habits, emphatically delivers on the promises made five years ago.
A delightful cat-based platforming adventure in a cyberpunk world worth exploring.
Silent protagonists are nothing new in video games, but Stray certainly pushes that concept to an interesting place. Part platformer, part traditional adventure game, this cyberpunk world full of neon-soaked robots transforms into a giant jungle gym from your perspective, which is just one foot off the ground. The concept of putting you in the paws of an average cat may be a silly one on the surface, but Stray uses that furry vehicle to tell a genuinely compelling story with some entertaining action along the way. Not all of its ideas land on their feet, but it was impossible to shake the fuzzy feeling it gave me right from the adorable opening minutes.
Like many of developer Supermassive’s previous games, The Quarry is clearly made both by and for people who love horror movies. From the start, it slowly builds tension and atmosphere, getting you invested by constantly asking you to make small decisions that will guide its teenage cast of potential murder victims. By the time the blood started flying, every choice felt like one more step in a rolling disaster, and that made it nearly impossible to put down. When I went back to replay it again, however, it was impossible to ignore just how non-interactive much of The Quarry actually is. As a spiritual sequel to Until Dawn, it's a better movie, but a worse game.
You follow the story of nine camp counselors who get stuck in the woods for one more night at the end of the summer, with nothing to do but throw one last party before they go back to their lives. There's something stalking them from the treeline (because of course there is) and your choices determine which, if any, of the counselors will be able to survive the night. This setup layers three fairly textbook horror plots on top of each other as you progress, but you can tell that Supermassive Games had a lot of fun figuring out how to connect them together. When you play, you may think you're in one type of horror movie, but you're often in another.
A proper remake might be rising from the grave next year, but the festering corpse of Dead Space has come lurching back to life early in the form of The Callisto Protocol. This spiritual successor to the sci-fi survival horror series recreates the haunting blood-streaked hallways and space zombie-slaying hallmarks first established on the USG Ishimura back in 2008, and injects the gore with more awe than ever before thanks to some strikingly detailed splashes of blood and guts. Unfortunately, while the mutant dismemberment has never been more vivid, The Callisto Protocol’s shortcomings appear just as clearly. Occasional control annoyances, imbalanced combat, and a general absence of innovation result in a roughly eight-hour massacre that’s gratifyingly gruesome, but never quite as great as the series that inspired it.
When it comes to over-the-top roleplaying games, it’s hard to beat the bonkers worlds and stories I’ve come to expect from the Xenoblade Chronicles saga. With Xenoblade Chronicles 3, massive improvements have been made to combat, quest design, and the RPG sandbox, while retaining the absurd and awesome environments, and a laser-focus on great characters and an impressive (if convoluted) story. Of course, while this third entry evolves in some key areas that make the epic journey more consistently fun than the two mainline games that came before it, it also repeats some of the same mistakes, including sloppy writing, weak bosses, and graphics that often leave something to be desired. Even so, Xenoblade Chronicles 3 is already competing for the spot as my favorite iteration of this beloved series.
Whether you play on PlayStation, Xbox, Nintendo Switch, PC or even mobile, we've picked out the 25 best games of 2022 that you should check out right now.
As the video game industry continues to adjust to post-pandemic life, more and more excellent games continue to grace every platform.
Sony dropped some of the biggest first-party blockbusters of the year, including the superb God of War Ragnarok, the expansive Horizon Forbidden West and the revamped The Last of Us Part 1. Meanwhile, Microsoft and Nintendo got a few major exclusives under their own belts with standouts like As Dusk Falls and Bayonetta 3. Between all of those were phenomenal third-party releases, including Elden Ring, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 and Need for Speed Unbound.
From the very first punch, Sifu is utterly uncompromising in its design. Absolver developer Sloclap’s latest martial arts beat-em-up is bold, its combat exquisite, its animation top-notch, its music outstanding, and its story – while very simple – is poignant and elegantly told. It’s also unforgiving and unapologetic, with pockets of frustrating moments during which I was certainly not in my happy place. But by the end, Sifu offered me a nearly unparalleled sense of mastery and accomplishment, and I can’t imagine that I would’ve enjoyed it half as much if it pulled its punches.
It is still unbelievable to me that after 26 years of linear, straightforward RPGs, developer Game Freak really looked Pokémon players dead in the eye and said, “It’s fine, go wherever you want.” In the lead-up to the launch of Pokémon Scarlet and Violet, I thought this claim would end up being a marketing gimmick, a little joke, something we’d all be mad about later. But from the moment I left the hallowed halls of Uva Academy, that promise has been wonderfully fulfilled, with open-world, open-ended gameplay serving as a shining beacon for the future of this beloved franchise. And yet, a finger on the cursed Mankey’s paw has curled anyway – Scarlet and Violet’s wonderfully innovative design is dramatically undermined by the numerous ways in which they feel deeply unfinished, with issues ranging from an incomplete world to massive and ubiquitous technical problems. So even though I want to celebrate how this generation reinvents and reinvigorates the world of Pokémon, I can’t without putting a great big warning label on it.
