Our 20 Most Anticipated Spring Video Games

You’ve come unstuck from time in this temporally twisted action game about a man grappling with the terrifying implications (but also tactical side benefits) of a botched time travel experiment. (Check out our review of the game here.)

PC, Xbox One

April 5

After last year’s tryst with a PlayStation-exclusive (Bloodborne), studio From Software returns to its multi-platform Souls series roots for what’s either the fourth (counting Demon’s Souls) or fifth (counting Bloodborne) in a sequence of closely related, brutally exacting action games.

PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One

April 12

A reboot of studio Insomniac Games’ buddy platformer about a Lombax (think bipedal cat) and his robot pal Clank battling intergalactic scoundrels, timed to celebrate the forthcoming film.

PlayStation 4

April 12

In the crowded, novelty bereft roleplaying genre, Bravely First‘s unusual borrow-or-save battle system stood out, so sequel Bravely Second keeps all of that and carries on the story.

3DS

April 15

The first China-developed video game for PlayStation 4, Koi looks a bit like Flow, or maybe the opening stage in Spore. You play as a fish in a polluted lotus pond, solving puzzles and collecting bits and bobs to remove the taint and restore harmony.

PlayStation 4

April 19

It’s an alt-history sci-fi game (designed from the ground up for virtual reality) where Kennedy was never assassinated and NASA and Russia established a permanent moon base before expanding to the outer reaches of our solar system. In Mindfield’s Pollen, you explore the Saturnian satellite Titan, sleuthing for clues and solving puzzles to learn what hides beneath the moon’s surface.

PC

April 20

Fling capital ships the size of star destroyers at your foes in this epic-scale real-time strategy game staged in Games Workshop’s indefatigable Warhammer 40,000 universe.

PC

April 21

Delayed from last November for some extra polish, the newest installment in Nintendo’s longstanding space shooter about a squadron of chatty anthropomorphic animals has to win over Wii U GamePad skeptics nervous that having to fiddle with a second screen while pulling off precision maneuvers might be too much to juggle.

Wii U

April 22

Developer Soren Johnson is probably best known for his design contributions to some of the most acclaimed Civilization games, and of late he’s been chipping away at this much-praised (based on early access betas) economic real-time strategy game, where “money, not firepower, is the player’s weapon.”

PC

April 28

Space fantasy Battleborn is mostly a team-based first-person shooter, but with smaller groups (five versus five) and goals tied to map control logistics that might see a match swing back and forth repeatedly.

PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One

May 3

Imagine all the crazy complexity of studio Paradox’s grand strategic history simulations extrapolated to the farthest reaches of space and you get Stellaris, a mind-bogglingly vast game of space exploration and empire management.

PC

May 9

Uncharted fans get one last chance to play as (and say farewell to) series protagonist Nathan Drake, in the fourth and final chapter in studio Naughty Dog’s acclaimed treasure-hunting series.

PlayStation 4

May 10

This reboot of id Software’s formative shooter welcomes us back to Mars by way of fiery foundry levels, long, steaming corridors garnished with hellfire, demons and screams, and all the evisceration-slash-spatter fans of horror-themed run-and-gunning adore.

PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One

May 13

The sequel to 2011 first-person shooter Homefront, which imagined what might happen if a unified Korea invaded the Western U.S., takes place four years later (in 2029) as you struggle to retake an open-world version of Philadelphia from the Greater Korean Republic.

PC, Mac, Linux, PlayStation 4, Xbox One

May 17

If you missed this fantastic World War II-era turn-based tactics game when it landed on PlayStation 3 back in 2008, this is your chance to make amends by way of beautifully remastered, high fidelity visuals.

PlayStation 4

May 17

Mirror’s Edge Catalyst reboots EA DICE’s 2008 first-person parkour game, dealing with why original protagonist Faith became a surveillance-evading “runner,” delivering messages under the nose of her city’s dystopian overlords by zipping acrobatically (but surreptitiously) across urban skylines.

PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One

May 24

Blizzard’s latest idea lets teams of six players shoot it out in a kind of post-Terminator scenario, where our evil robot overlords have been defeated by a global peacekeeping force, but where the force’s remnants have apparently become factionalized.

PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One

May 24

Does a franchise feel better suited to adaptation for Creative Assembly’s 16-year-old Total War real-time tactical series than Games Workshop’s celebrated Warhammer fantasy-verse?

PC

May 24

What might’ve happened had Japan opened up a second front when the Germans invaded Russia? What if Germany had acquired a nuclear bomb first? What if the Allied invasion of Normandy in 1944 had failed? Paradox’s newest all-around improved version in its series of award-winning World War 2 grand strategy games promises to let you find out.

PC

June 6

Leap between foreground and background as Nintendo’s pink puffball Kirby in the second full Kirby game for Nintendo’s handheld system, this time using the coopting the robotic technology of your foes to use against them.

Nintendo 3DS

June 10