Around this time of year, the video games industry piles into Los Angeles for , a week-long event showcasing the new releases everyone will be playing in coming months. Below we’ve picked a few of our favourites coming soon to PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.
First up is . We don’t know much about this Blade Runner style role-playing game, but a short trailer released at E3 suggests players will explore a futuristic world of Night City, full of classic dystopian tropes like flying cars screeching through down-trodden slums.
An augmented reality pool, boxing robots and a taxi full of murderous cyborgs all feature, but the most arresting moment is probably a woman putting on make-up who turns out to be a jawless android. Expect deep questions about what it means to be human.
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And then there’s Shadow of the Tomb Raider. Here would-be archaeologists are sure to enjoy the newest entry in the Tomb Raider series, which sees heroine Lara Craft exploring dense jungle and Mayan ruins to solve puzzles and find hidden treasure. Lara’s research methods could use a little refinement, however: judging from the E3 trailer, most of the ancient temples she explores end up destroyed in a fiery explosion.
Fans of post-apocalyptic hell-holes are spoilt for choice this year with the release of Fallout 76, The Division 2 and Rage 2. is the latest in a series of games following a nuclear war that has turned most of the US into a wasteland, with a scant few surviving in fallout shelters. This game sees players working together to rebuild civilisation.
Meanwhile in The Division 2, a smallpox pandemic is responsible for wiping out much of the US population. Six months after the outbreak, the survivors are engaged in a civil war for the nation’s future.
And in Rage 2, an asteroid has wiped out 80 per cent of the world’s population, with those left behind none too happy about it. Footage from E3 sees the main character, Walker, fighting mutants as he infiltrates a derelict space centre. There, he brings a satellite back from orbit in order to gain access to some powerful nanotechnology. All in day’s work, once the world has ended.
The sci-fi conceit of the Assassin’s Creed series is that a device known as the Animus lets people explore their ancestors’ DNA and relive their memories. Needless to say, that’s scientific nonsense, but the games’ richly-detailed worlds are the closest you can get to time travel without a working flux-capacitor.
Having previously explored renaissance Italy, Victorian London and ancient Egypt, the latest entry, Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, dives all the way back to Greece, 431 BC, into the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta.
If bombastic action games aren’t your thing, Tetris Effect might be a nice change of pace. Researchers studying the abstract puzzle game Tetris have previously discovered that people playing the game can find its blocky shapes infiltrating their unconscious thoughts and dreams. This can even help reduce the risk of post-traumatic stress disorder by blocking flashbacks.
Inspired by this phenomena, Tetris Effect is designed to further stimulate your mind with psychedelic imagery like space-borne jellyfish, neon triangles and hypnotic patterns. For the full experience, play it in virtual reality.
