20 Video Games to Watch for Summer 2014

Resogun: Heroes

Resogun was just about the best thing on PS4 at launch, a wonderful little wraparound side-scrolling shoot-em-up, and on June 24, it’ll get an update that adds local cooperative play and lets you create your own ships. Everyone who owns Resogun gets that stuff, but if you want the separate Heroes expansion’s two new game modes — Survival (infinite play like Arcade, but humans now have parachutes and there’s a day/night cycle) and Demolition (described as “Arkanoid meets Resogun” by way of a wrecking ball) — it’ll run you $4.99.

June 24 / PS4

Valiant Hearts: The Great War

Another side-scrolling puzzle/adventure game from Ubisoft, Valiant Hearts: The Great War uses a bleak cartoonish aesthetic (“The Great War” meaning World War I) to tell an adventure story “inspired by actual letters from the time.” The story itself concerns three strangers united through war in their attempt to help a young German soldier find love “in a story about survival, sacrifice and friendship.” (In other words, bring tissues.)

June 25 / PC, PS4, Xbox One, PS3, Xbox 360

Shovel Knight

A horn-helmed knight, a weaponized spade, bona fide chiptunes and visuals designed to make you feel like you nodded off and woke up in 1985 8-bit-land. Shovel Knight‘s Kickstarter was so successful it blew past its $75,000 funding goal to reach over $311,000. Fingers crossed all that extra cash helps this platformer pay out gameplay dividends when it arrives (after a few delays) in late June.

June 26 / 3DS, Wii U, PC, Mac, Linux

Divinity: Original Sin

Divinity: Original Sin, a prequel to 2002’s sleeper roleplaying gem Divine Divinity, is a Kickstarter-funded left turn of sorts for developer Larian. It’s a shift from Divinity II‘s third-person action-angled approach back to a high-in-the-sky camera overview, and includes — all series firsts here — cooperative play, turn-based combat and mod tool support.

June 30 / PC, Mac

Sunless Sea

Heard of a browser-based text adventure called Fallen London? Me neither — until game chat/scribe luminaries Tom Chick and Bruce Geryk (Quarter to Three) put together this podcast of podcasts about that game and its imminent spiritual sequel in which you captain a (possibly doomed) steamship through lightness depths. The game’s billing: “Lose your mind. Eat your crew. Survive.” You want to play this. You really do.

July 1 / PC, Mac

MouseCraft

In MouseCraft, you have to stack blocks shaped like tetrominoes — shapes made out of four squares — to forge “safe” paths for on-the-move mice, guiding them through puzzle-based levels. No surprise: Poland-based studio Crunching Koalas calls it “Tetris meets Lemmings.”

July 8 / PC, Mac, Linux, PS4, PS3, PS Vita

Another World: 20th Anniversary Edition

I adored French designer Eric Chachi’s Out of This World (its right proper name in the States, by the way) when I first played it back in 1992 on a 16MHz CompuAdd 386sx. I missed its souped-up reemergence in 2011 on smartphones and tablets, but I won’t make that mistake — and if you’ve never played it, neither should you — when it arrives this summer for PS4.

July 8 / PS4, PS3, PS Vita

Quest for Infamy

Fans of classic Sierra adventures games, rejoice, or at least get your hopes slightly up at the prospect of a new Quest for Glory-inspired romp through roleplaying-as-burlesque. Developer Infamous Adventures has been working up to this, its first non-remake adventure game, since the warmly received fan-remakes of the King’s Quest and Space Quest series.

July 10 / PC, Mac

Abyss Odyssey

Game genres have the strangest names. “Roguelike.” I suppose it’s more efficient than typing out “action-roleplaying fantasy hack-and-slash with randomly generated levels.” Abyss Odyssey sounds like that with a dash of Street Fighter (it’s a 2D side-scroller with platforming bits) set in 19th century Chile (another game with an unusual-to-gaming backdrop) where you’re fighting a slumbering warlock’s nightmares made real.

July 15 / PC, PS3, Xbox 360

Unrest

Unrest is a roleplaying game staged in ancient India, which instantly earns it backdrop street cred (name the last game you played set in ancient India). Other hypothetically cool-sounding points: combat is possible but discouraged, the game’s impetus hinges largely on storytelling through dialogue choices that interact with character “values,” and if you die, the game simply shifts to another character, your previous one’s death impacting how the story unfolds.

July 23 / PC, Mac, Linux

The Last of Us Remastered

Watching comparison videos, you realize just how much Naughty Dog managed to pull out of the PS3’s hat with The Last of Us (less than a year ago). The PS4 version looks better, in other words, but not dramatically so. That said, if you want to play what’ll surely be the definitive version of this award-winning tromp through an end-of-days, story-twisting zombie shooter, make some space on your midsummer calendar.

July 29 / PS4

Sacred 3

Newcomer Keen Games tries its hand at the third in this Diablo-like fantasy about racing around a giant map, whacking enemies and vacuuming loot. Expect multi-classing, of course, but also “always on” cooperative play for up to four that’ll either draw on fellow players, or — if you’re playing offline — sub in computer A.I. ones.

August 5 / PC, PS3, Xbox 360

Risen 3: Titan Lords

Developer Piranha Bytes’ Risen series — generally lauded for its thoughtful world-building but plagued by technical issues — has struggled to find its footing after the studio’s acclaimed Gothic games (1 and 2, anyway). Risen 3: Titan Lords marks the studio’s third post-Gothic roleplaying outing, this time promising that “every decision changes the course of the story” (a promise easily made, but perhaps most consistently delivered by this studio).

August 12 / PC, PS3, Xbox 360

Tales of Xillia 2

If you haven’t played Tales of Xillia, you’ll probably just find Tales of Xillia 2 confusing. If you have played Tales of Xillia (and you enjoyed it), this direct sequel is aimed squarely at you, transpiring a year later and resurrecting the series’ real-time battle system, that — unique to this duology — allows characters to combine their attacks in linked mode.

August 19 / PS3

Diablo III: Ultimate Evil Edition

What else is there to say about this two-year-old dark fantasy monster-masher? It’s Diablo III (plus the Reaper of Souls expansion), arguably as it ought to have been from the start: sans real money or gold auction houses.

August 19 / PS4, Xbox One

Madden NFL 15

I won’t pretend to love football, but ignoring Madden is like standing next to a speeding freight train with your fingers in your ears, so let’s run through the feature list: improved defensive play, further refined natural-sounding broadcasts, a “player lock” camera, an indicator to help you tell whether you can make a non-aggressive tackle, jumbotrons that now use dynamic camera footage, and Seattle Seahawks cornerback Richard Sherman is this year’s cover athlete.

August 26 / PS4, Xbox One, PS3, Xbox 360

The Sims 4

The Sims 4 continues longtime developer Maxis’ evolution of EA’s mega-bestselling franchise, sprucing up the visuals and nipping and tucking classic world-building features. You’re still essentially babysitting a bunch of babbling sims through a cartoonish approximation of village life, though the character building tools are more granular, and Maxis says its emphasis on emotional states will lend character story arcs more depth.

September 2 / PC

Stronghold: Crusader II

Long before the “tower defense” genre existed, developer Firefly Studios was building games about constructing actual towers and ramparts with elaborate fortifications, then hurling waves of attackers at you to test your architectural mettle. Stronghold: Crusader II is 12 years coming, replete with new units and real-time 3D physics, and this time sporting the option to manage your castle with another player cooperatively.

September 2 / PC

Destiny

Destiny is the summer’s (and perhaps even the year’s) biggest kahuna, the game everyone’s been hearing about for ages, the implication being that it’ll revolutionize gaming as we know it. It probably won’t, but it’s by Bungie, it feels distinctly Halo-like, and it showed well enough when I demoed it at E3: a highly polished, open-world, quasi-solo-multiplayer shooter that’ll work to keep your attention by dropping you onto Guild Wars 2-like playgrounds, routinely trotting out new and varied things to do.

September 9 / PS4, Xbox One, PS3, Xbox 360

NHL 15

For NHL 15, EA’s souping-up the notion of hockey as a full-contact sport. If you’re playing next-gen, the new “collision physics” system support secondary collisions, player pileups (involving all 12 players here) and scrambles for the net. That emphasis on improved physics extends to puck play, which EA’s touting as substantially more granular. The rest is mostly next-gen window dressing: all 30 NHL arenas meticulously rendered, thousands of models making up arena crowds and more realistic physics-impactive clothing.

September 9 / PS4, Xbox One, PS3, Xbox 360