IGN

Microsoft pitched Forza Motorsport 7 as the ultimate automotive playset, and it’s hard to argue otherwise. With enough cars to fill a dozen museums and the most generous selection of tracks to date in the series, the amount of driving, experimenting, and racing here is absolutely mammoth. Accessible as always for beginners but crammed with content targeted at lifelong car junkies, Forza Motorsport 7 is Turn 10’s finest love letter to speed and style this generation, no matter what language you speak.

At its best, Fuser feels like the most promising attempt yet to bring back the glory days of social music gaming. The tutorial-like campaign scratches the itch for fast-paced rhythm-based score chasing, while the Freestyle mode could be turned into a true platform for content creation in the right hands. But a dearth of replayable game modes, lack of local multiplayer, and an exhausting grind to unlock more tracks can really kill the vibe.

Demon's Souls en PS5 cumple con dos desafíos a la vez: abanderar el lanzamiento de una nueva consola de nueva generación, estando a la altura de esa circunstancia, mientras respeta con amor la obra original de 2009. El trabajo de Bluepoint Games se convierte por méritos propios en uno de los mejores remakes de la historia del medio, donde no hay ni un solo elemento modificado o dejado inalterado que no haya sido pensado con inteligencia. El nuevo aspecto visual y, sobre todo, su rendimiento y sensación a los mandos, es el mejor de cualquier otro título de la franquicia. La mejor manera de redescubrir la semilla de la que surgió el bosque completo que ahora conocemos.

The Pathless combine un système de mouvement simple et fun avec un monde rempli de secrets à dévoiler.

Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity offers a welcome trip back to a world I’ve clocked hundreds of hours in. Its hugely varied roster of characters, solid combat mechanics, fun progression and clever adaptation of Breath of the Wild’s vision of Hyrule is a joy to play and discover. While there are some missed characterisation opportunities, Age of Calamity is still a blast from start to finish.

For the first time in a console-bound Kingdom Hearts game, there’s a multiplayer element to share with your friends. You can jump into split screen co-op multiplayer and experience everything with a friend on the same couch, or you can go online and compete in the VS Battles mode. Battles are fun but gimmicky; two people go head-to-head and use tricks, like blurring the other player’s vision to trip them up while you ensure your own victory by outscoring them. It’s great that they included it here, especially because we haven’t really seen much Kingdom Hearts multiplayer before.

Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War’s Zombies is as highly polished and tense as you’d expect from a mode that’s been around in some form or another for over a decade now. The iconic brand of frantic zombie killing and interdimensional intrigue is incredibly fun while you’re caught up in the moment, but it doesn’t build enough on what came before. Compared to Black Ops 4’s ambitious Zombies mode that launched with multiple episodes, this single map feels like a disappointment, and the lack of local split-screen co-op is a bummer as well. It should get bigger and better as Treyarch adds new free maps and features, and if so this could become a great year for Call of Duty Zombies.

Astro’s Playroom surprised and delighted me. This PS5 pack-in most certainly hues closer to a technical showcase, essentially a loosely-structured sandbox to mess around in and discover what the PS5 has to offer. But it has enough collectibles, creative ideas, and genuinely exciting uses of the DualSense that PS5 owners shouldn’t brush this one aside in the launch lineup. After months and months of hearing how the DualSense would immerse me like never before, Astro’s Playroom put promises into practice and impressively proved what’s possible with the PS5’s new controller.

I’m a little wary of some aspects being stripped back a bit too much in an effort to please those yearning for an experience almost 10 years old at this point, but I’m definitely looking forward to seeing what innovations the developers have yet to show, and indeed how Cold War will tie into Warzone. With some weapon balancing on the way, and hopefully more maps and modes available during the upcoming beta, I’ll have a better understanding of which way this year's multiplayer is heading. There’s a very thin line between a nostalgic experience and an archaic one, and it’s a line that Cold War is carefully dancing on at the moment.

While MyTeam is more of the same, especially as it pertains to grinding out card packs or spending loads of Virtual Currency to get the players you want, the Play Now experience online was surprisingly fun. Latency still proves to be a problem, but my experience felt much more smooth than it has in the past. The gameplay changes really benefit online play, where defense feels a lot more focused than in the past and using stars like LeBron James to control the offense feels better than ever. I also never had a problem finding matches and didn’t experience any disconnects in more than 10 matches online, which is not something I could have said about the previous gen version.