Along with the satisfaction of knowing you have good taste, people who buy the excellent new racing game Forza Horizon 3 on Xbox One or PC — my review of which is here — who’ve also played either Halo: The Master Chief Collection or Halo 5: Guardians will get a free M12S Warthog CST from AMG Transport Dynamics they can use in the racing game. Even cooler, the Warthog actually handles better in Forza Horizon 3 than it ever has in a Halo game, and even has its own race events. Sort of.
In real estate, the three most important things are location, location, location. But in the open world street racing game Forza Horizon 3 (Xbox One, PC), location is just one of many important things that make it the best racing game of the year, and one of the best overall games of the year as well.
There are some things you just shouldn’t rush. Fixing a car. Baking a cake. And, as is made painfully clear by the third-person, open world, action/adventure game ReCore (Xbox One, PC), making a video game. Because while ReCore could’ve been a gripping sci-fi shooting adventure, its considerable kinks, easily avoided problems, and seemingly unfinished bits make it feel like something that needed more time to, well, bake.
At first, the video game Tetris seems simple enough. When you really get into, though, you realize there’s a complexity to it that may be subtle, but it’s also substantial. Not surprisingly, the story of how Tetris came to be also seems simple enough at first, but not when you real dig in. It’s a story told in the new book The Tetris Effect: The Game That Hypnotized The World (hardcover, digital), written by CNET editor Dan Ackerman (who, I should point out, is someone I’ve known for years from going to video game press events). But in talking to him about his book, it seems it wasn’t just a love of the game that made him want to write something this substantial about Tetris.
Since its release in 2014, the sci-fi first-person shooter Destiny has constantly evolved, adding new missions and multiplayer modes, and expanding its compelling story even further. With the fourth expansion, Rise Of Iron due out September 20th — both as a download (PlayStation 4, Xbox One) and as part of Destiny The Collection (PlayStation 4, Xbox One) with the rest of the game — I asked Bungie’s Community Manager Deej to give me the lowdown on what this add-on actually adds.
In many top-down, twin-stick arcade games, you either shoot your enemies or smack them, but you usually don’t get to do both. And if you do, it’s just a quick slap because you’ve run out of ammo, but just you wait, when I get more, I’m gonna shoot you so bad. But Livelock (PlayStation 4, Xbox One, PC) largely throws that unwritten rule out the window and the results are game so nice you’ll want to play it twice.
Given how important graphics are to video games, it’s odd how infrequent the colors of those graphics are used as a mechanic. With the exception of puzzles games, colors are usually just used as visual clues; red means “this thing explodes,” and so on. But that’s not the case for the creative and adorable 2D, side-scrolling, puzzling platformer Hue (PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Vita, PC via Steam), in which you change the world you’re in by changing its colors.
Funko have announced that they’ll release a series of POP! toys, plush keychains, pen toppers, lanyards, and Pint Size Heroes all based on the video game Five Nights At Freddy’s.
While it sometimes seems like gaming is full of guys in giant robot suits, fighting it out to save or take over some place, really good mech games are actually rather rare. And the same can be said for aerial dogfighting games. Which is why Strike Vector EX (PlayStation 4) makes me a little giddy. While this mech dogfighting game is far from flawless, it gets enough right to satisfy both itches.