Guide to the games of 2017
Last year saw the incredible steam and other versions of the game. Welcome to 2017, a new game may come out every time you blink. Mapped out looking forward to this year, we have collected a huge list of games out.
Ghost Recon: Wildlands
Release date: March 7, 2017
Developer: Ubisoft Paris
Take an open world with its 100-year Cry-type outpost of the task, and jump some cooperatives to the partners-Tom High, finding June that Ubisoft’s upcoming third-person tactical shooter is full of fun and emergency chaos. Ghost Action: The wasteland takes place in the continent of Bolivia, where four players form a military task force to disrupt the drug cartel and the government unanimously. While the player may have a specific missions-either steal some of Intel or kidnap an informant-how they choose to fix it. Or, as often happens, if there is no invisibility to cause the fire?
Ghost action open world first ten-game history-promises Diversified environments like mountains, forests, deserts, exploring through ground vehicles, helicopters, and parachutes. Set close to the modern, so the weapons and equipment are not the same as the future has been in the early reconnaissance game. Ubisoft’s promising player selection will affect the world, not violence and npc insurgents and civilians will interact with the mission and objectives. If your friends do not, you can play with a single person using AI real teammates.
Prey
Release date: 2017
Developer: Arkane
New Prey has nothing to do with the old Prey, or Prey 2, which was cancelled back in 2014. Now in the hands of Arkane’s Austin studio, Prey is only familiar in name. Set in an alternate history where President Kennedy was never assassinated, the Soviets and the States continued their rivalry, until one took control of the Kletka Program, a space installation meant to control an alien threat. The project is eventually abandoned, and a corporation takes over (uh-oh), turning the station into “a cutting edge innovation center” called Talos 1. Big surprise, things don’t go well.
You play as Morgan Yu (with a gender of your choice), who happens to be on board when the alien threat gets particularly threatening. From there, it’s a matter of survival and getting to the bottom of what went wrong. Expect plenty of shooting and exploration, and most interestingly, shape-shifting. You and the alien threat can take on nearly any form. An inconspicuous mug or trash bin might be an alien in wait, or if they’re hunting you down, try the mug life for yourself.
Red Dead Redemption 2
Release date: Fall 2017
Developer: Rockstar Studios
Rockstar has done it again: announced a highly-anticipated game without mentioning whether or not it will come to PC. The original Red Dead Redemption never came to PC, but this feels more like a repeat of GTA V than that.
Assuming we’re right, we seem to be looking at a Magnificent Seven approach to the western—or at least, there are seven riders conspicuously featured in the debut teaser. Rockstar is also touting multiplayer, which will presumably look something like GTA Online, but with people running you over with trains instead of cars.
Rising Storm 2: Vietnam
Release date: 2017
Developer: Tripwire
We loved the asymmetry of Rising Storm, the authenticity-focused WWII shooter we named our Multiplayer Game of the Year in 2013, and it’s even more dramatic in the Vietnam-set sequel. The Americans are loud and fast, skimming the treetops with helicopters, while the Viet Cong spawn in squad tunnels, appearing behind capture points and ambushing LZs. More than being a good shot, strictly managed teamwork remains the key to success. Tyler tried his hand at both piloting helicopters and manning their guns, and found it nigh on impossible to hit anything without spotters and direction over comms.
The addition of modern, automatic weapons might be an even bigger shift for the series than helicopters, though, as part of the Red Orchestra and Rising Storm identity has been their demand for precision aiming with bolt-action and semi-auto weapons. But the quest for authenticity hasn’t changed here. Rising Storm 2: Vietnam’s guns aren’t easy to handle by any means, and scoring kills still sometimes means picking out specks on the horizon and taking cautious, well-planned shots. Read more about Vietnam’s helicopters, guns, and new mode in our hands-on preview from August.
Resident Evil 7: Biohazard
Release date: January 24, 2017
Developer: Capcom
The spooks come early in 2017, with a first-person Resident Evil that, so far as we can tell from our recent hands-on, reclaims some of the series’ older staples, namely backtracking and secret hunting, and takes the words ‘survival’ and ‘horror’ much more seriously. The shiny blockbuster action of recent Resident Evils turns grimy and decayed here, with an axe-wielding murderer chasing a bloodied protagonist around a car. There’s also some fun-sounding time play, with VHS tapes that suck us into new perspectives and then spit us back out where we were, but not necessarily when we were.
Bulletstorm: Full Clip Edition
Release date: April 7, 2017
Developer: People Can Fly
A remaster of a wildly over-the-top, inventive FPS that asks you to electro-whip enemies into spike traps and explosions and your big-ass boot as often as you shoot them. It’s still a blast if you missed it the first time around. The old version’s cheap on Steam, while the new Full Clip edition includes remastered graphics and audio, a campaign mode that gives you every weapon from the start, and more levels for the score attack Echo mode. Oh, and you can play the whole campaign as Duke Nukem, with new dialogue that probably includes a lot of cuss words.
Sea of Thieves
Release date: 2017
Developer: Rare
Rare’s ambitious pirating MMO adventure (or, more accurately, massively co-op adventure) aims to let you do whatever you’d expect from the pirate life alongside a crew of your best mateys. That means searching for treasure, drinking grog, sailing, and fighting ship battles against other pirate crews, but Rare still seems to be working out the exact scope of your activities and how this living pirate world will work. The most interesting choice is the bold lack of UI. You’ll find almost no sign of reticles or health bars or maps or any of the usual clutter in Sea of Thieves.
Friday the 13th: The Game
Release date: Spring 2017
Developer: Gun Media
Link: Official site
Delayed a few months so the devs could include a single-player mode with bots, this asymmetrical multiplayer game pits one player—as the unstoppable movie slasher Jason Voorhees—against the rest, who play as campers at Crystal Lake, the one place everyone should know by now is not a great place to camp. Jason will enjoy all manner of brutal means to dispatch his prey, be it smashing their faces into a tree, impaling them on spikes, or just going hog-wild with a machete. Campers won’t be entirely helpless, however, and we’re promised that by working together it is in fact possible not to simply elude and survive, but to actually take Jason down.
Sniper Elite 4
Release date: February 2017
Developer: Rebellion Developments
If you don’t have a date for Valentine’s Day, no worries: you can spend your the romantic holiday shooting Nazis in the nuts. We got a look at Sniper Elite 4 during 2016’s GDC, and the World War II third-person sandbox shooter featured stealth, melee kills, and a whole lot of disturbingly graphic slow-motion x-ray sniper shots the series is famous for. The maps look impressively large this time around, with its smallest still three times bigger than any map from the previous game.
Strafe
Release date: Early 2017
Developer: Pixel Titans
Strafe is a deliberately antiquated FPS, borrowing from the bread and butter simplicity of Quake’s breakneck template. It’s not just a nostalgia trip, though: Strafe is also pulls from Rogue. That genre’s interminable revival is starting to grate on a lot of people, but if Pixel Titans manages to achieve the fluidity of the ye olde shooters, playing this over and over again will be a joy. Plus, it’s genuinely funny and, with its rough 1990s aesthetic, quite beautiful too, if you came up during that era.
Dusk
Release date: 2017
Developer: David Szymanski
An ode to southern gothic horror and Quake-era FPS design, Dusk is aiming for the low-poly scares and hectic precision shooter action a good chunk of PC gamers grew up on. So far, it’s pitch perfect, throwing chainsaw-wielding maniacs, witches, and all sorts of occult enemies your way in massive levels hiding secrets rooms, weapons, and bosses in every corner.
Metal Gear Survive
Release date: 2017
Developer: Konami
A four-player co-op stealth game with zombies that is also Metal Gear? Well, OK. We expected things would change at Konami post-Kojima, and this is certainly a change. After being sucked out of Mother Base by a rogue wormhole, you wake up in an alien landscape that looks suspiciously like the Middle East, and must battle hordes of the undead with your fellow grunts. There’s plenty of MGS 5-style stealth, fulton devices, and both base infiltration and defense in the 15 minutes of gameplay you can see below.
Desync
Release date: Early 2017
Developer: The Foregone Syndicate
Coated in the neon colour schemes of 1980s cyberpunk, Desync is among the most visually striking shooters you’re likely to see in 2017. Developed by Melbourne studio The Foregone Syndicate, Desync is a precision-oriented twitch shooter with a focus on performative gameplay: basically, it rewards you for pulling off kills in the most spectacular ways possible. The studio is also working on a bafflingly granular leaderboard system, incentivising stylish play. If you can imagine a strange meeting of Hotline Miami, Lovely Planet, and Quake, you’re close to how Desync plays out.
