After a six-year hiatus from the racing sim branch of the series, Turn 10 Studios returned to the track, bringing a sort of reboot to Forza Motorsport. By stripping the numbers out of the title and moving the series to an evolving game format, Forza Motorsport is more of a platform for Xbox Racing Sim, but it's a complete and satisfying racing experience from the start.
The most meaningful change is the RPG-style progression system, which naturally pushes you to become a better driver. There are levels for every corner and every area, and you'll get the driving experience accordingly – so with each lap, you'll try to do better and learn from your mistakes. Before you know it, you're crossing a route and getting the most out of your car as you outrun your competitors. Upgrading your car is also a more personal endeavor. You no longer struggle with money and no longer make everyone on the track anxious for a bunch of upgrades. Gaining automotive experience ensures that you understand the fundamentals of driving a particular car, and while this may slow things down, it creates a more rewarding driving experience, both literally and figuratively.
When Microsoft acquired Tango Gameworks as part of its massive acquisition of Bethesda, it was a studio that had already proven its acumen in the horror genre. It looks scary all the time, but Tango surprises everyone with its high fidelity in 2023. Clearly not horror, Hi-Fi Rush is a completely original hack and slash and rhythm game. It's easy for anyone to start playing this game and immediately enjoy banging on the robot bolts, but it's much harder to master the action in time. Fittingly, the main character, Chai, resembles a master of destruction, wielding his guitar made out of garbage in the air, directing the world's most violent rock documentary.
Hi-Fi Rush was unexpectedly launched in January, without any previous announcements, and the ** forces within the studio caused quite a bit of chaos for the game. Non-undead and monster faces in **?But that confusion quickly turned into joy, as Hi-Fi Rush is one of the funniest, most exciting, and funniest games of the year. Tango Gameworks has fully established itself as a wild studio, and its capabilities go far beyond horror films, and as long as no one hits the brakes, its future looks very bright.
A few years ago, an unexpected branch of party games was born: slimy little ones doing silly things. I don't really know what to call this genre, it encompasses things like gang beasts, human depravity, etc., but party animals are the latest and arguably the greatest. Launched on Game Pass, Party Animals instantly became one of the prettiest of all similar games, with each of its silly anthropomorphic animal characters boasting a level of realism never achieved by its peers. But visual fidelity is just a nice bonus for the most important thing a cute party game.
If you've played such games, you'll see some familiar game modes: arcade sports, royal rumble elimination mode on a moving plane, pvp matches where players score points for their own team while destroying others. In this genre, the controls are necessarily clunky, as the fluttering of these mascots means something unavoidable, but the good thing is that they are just a little bit more reliable here, creating a small skill gap without sacrificing the carefree nature of this type of game.
No matter how intense a round gets, or how wheezing your cough gets as each chaotic round unfolds, it always ends in a tiny, big-planet-style camera pose, which allows four, five, or even more players to crawl over, bump into each other, and headbutt each other again to win the center of the frame. These stills, which are at the end of each game, perfectly capture the atmosphere of the party animals, where losing is more enjoyable than winning some races.
Planet Lana, a 2D mini-game with a gorgeous palette of ocean tones, a family-friendly (albeit catchy) Siblinghood story, and a series of platformers that will stump players but may never let them down.
In Planet Lana, an alien invasion resembling World War is seen through the eyes of a child whose once-beautiful village has been destroyed while the creatures capture the inhabitants, including the siblings of the playable characters, for unknown purposes. There is little to no dialogue - and no language heard from Earth, anyway - you will begin to rescue your siblings before the alien threat leaves her. Sometimes a little darker, but never more than Ghibli tried to get to the middle school.
Add a cat-like companion to help you solve puzzles, a mechanical and narrative layer that helps take Planet Lana out of the crowded space of cinematic platforms and become one of the more special samples in the subgenre. While its purpose is first and foremost to be an emotional and narrative-driven game, the puzzles and platforming elements never become annoying, and they feel challenging enough to provide satisfaction for completing each section without getting into bothersome puzzles or unreliable mechanics.
It feels like an event when a new Bethesda RPG drops, and that includes Interstellar Field. The long-awaited space RPG from the team behind The Elder Scrolls and Fallout is undoubtedly a big game, and it's easy to get lost in the interstellar journey from planet to planet and unravel so many quest threads. While there is something satisfying about adventuring in space in itself, the combination of satisfying FPS combat, dogfights with customizable ships, base building on any planet, and conversational decision-making creates a stream of mission after mission.
In Bethesda RPGS and Starfield, the main story is often not the main process, it's similar - there's a lot to discover in the universe, like interesting side quests that will take you down unpredictable paths, intense firefights that give you the chance to show off your ** library. Throughout, the feeling of landing on a new planet and immersing yourself in the atmosphere constantly instills a sense of awe in its impressive scale. Starfield has its drawbacks that hinder its greatness, but any owner of Xbox Series X or S should play it to experience one of the Xbox blockbusters.