13 Video Games Coming In 2017 That You Won’t Want To Miss

Thank God 2016 is over, eh? Notable video game releases aside, it's better if we move forward and forget the tragedy that was the past twelve months, burying our head in the nearest console and forgetting that the world has gone mad. To help rid our brains of last year's memories, we've compiled a list of 10 video games that you need to start getting excited for this year. To be eligible, these titles need to have a surefire chance of arriving in 2017. That means there's no room for Star Citizen or God of War. Of course, in the rapidly-changing world of video games, this list could look very different in six months from now, as new games are announced that deserve to be added to the list - Half-Life 3, anyone? - but for now, this is what we've come up with. From more Mass Effect to a highly-anticipated sequel from a little studio called Rockstar Games, these are 13 releases that you're absolutely not going to want to miss out on this year. Trust us! 13) Nier: Automata Platforms: PC, PS4 Release Date: March 7th This spot on the list was originally going to go to Scalebound, but after the sad news of its cancellation, we've had to steer the ship towards new waters. Enter Nier: Automata, an action RPG and the long-awaited follow-up to the 2010 original. Ironically, like Scalebound, this one's a PlatinumGames title too, but we're confident it'll reach store shelves unscathed. You play as 2B, a female android sporting an enormous sword and aided by another robot in a dystopian otherworld-y setting. The dress is short, the sword is oversized and the suggestive symbolism is in full effect here. Automata sports the series' characteristic dark, foreboding atmosphere but expands the world beyond the linear confines of the original with a sandbox to explore allowing for "seamless transition." There are the customary RPG mechanics, full-bodied action to boot and a desire to break ground with this one. Look out, because Automata is shaping up to be a true sleeper hit. 12) Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Wildlands Platforms: All Release date: 7 March A new Tom Clancy game is set for release in 2017 in the form of Wildlands, an open-world romp situated in the forests of Bolivia. You're an elite soldier in charge of a small team of crack commandos deployed to disrupt the big bad cartels. Surprise, surprise, the smugglers are colluding with shady government agents, resulting in bloodshed aplenty. Directed by Dominic Butler, lead level designer on Assassin's Creed: Unity, Wildlands is a slice of open-world fun that, while not inherently original, is worth looking out for in the year ahead. There's the opportunity of wading into battle with squadmates at your side and issuing commands on-the-fly as you experiment with gameplay styles, and thanks to an enormous open world - a veritable playground - you're sure to brush shoulders with emergent gameplay moments. Wildlands might not be too unique, but it's shaping up to be good old fun, and sometimes, that's all we really need. 11) Call Of Cthulhu Platforms: All Release Date: 2017 Little is known about the new Cthulhu game, which draws inspiration from the macabre mind of HP Lovecraft. What we do know is that Cyanide is in charge of development, a French studio notable for... well, a bunch of cycling games and Styx: Master of Shadows. Cyanide's CV might not be faultless, but the atmosphere on show in early previews of Cthulhu is spot on, and if current gaming diets are proof of anything, we have a taste for survival horror more than ever. But it's Cthulhu’s teaser that proves most interesting. "An investigation-horror game with stealth and RPG elements," reads the official website description. RPG, adventure and stealth? That sounds like a good mix, and given the renaissance first-person horror has enjoyed of late, you can expect plenty of scares, too. Though we have little to go on so far, we know it's slated for a 2017 release and handful of gameplay trailers have helped wet the palette. Pencil this one in. 10) Vampyr Platforms: All Release Date: 2017 From the developers of Life is Strange comes a vampire game set in 1918 London. But don't roll your eyes. There's plenty of meat to this corpse of an idea, and an interesting emphasis on story and relationships to boot. You see, sucking the blood of innocent victims is frowned upon in London, even in 1918, and as the good doctor Stephen Reid you have a reputation to protect. Your day job precludes revealing your appetite for blood, so you're forced to stalk in the shadows, choosing your prey carefully, then collecting information on them before striking unseen. Mess it up and you'll change the course of the story for good; resist your urges altogether, and you'll be able to finish the game just fine, but you'll be barred from every levelling up. It's a fantastic moral question and asks you to choose between goodness and greed. Vampyr promises small hub-like areas with mini open-worlds to explore, while you can expect RPG action nasties of the night - who deserve to be slain - to elongate the experience. Given the storytelling success of Life is Strange, Vampyr could be a sleeper hit. 9) Tekken 7 Platforms: PC, Xbox One, PS4 Release date: Early 2017 It's been ten long years since the last canonical release in the Tekken franchise and all the while, Tekken 7 has been dangled in front of us like a juicy carrot. As tradition dictates, the latest Bandai Namco bash-'em-up has been shipped to the arcade halls of Japan and Korea first, with a home console release slated for sometime this year. The console version will boast expanded content, a full-fledged story and VR support. Little is known about the plot, other than the fact that hulking granddad and silver fox Heihachi is back and ready to resolve that ongoing feud with his son, Kazuya. If you didn't know, the feud started when Heihachi tossed him over the side of a cliff — so expect fisticuffs, not kind words. Frenetic hand to hand combat will ensue at the King of Iron Fist tournament. Memorable characters are set to return, like King, Law and Heihachi himself, and there's also also a first appearance for Heihachi's wife, Kazumi, mother of Kazuya. Powered by the Unreal engine, Tekken 7 looks crisp in action. It's the godfather of the fighting genre, and if all goes to plan, it'll be well worth the wait. 8) Detroit: Become Human Platforms: PS4 Release date: Late 2017 It's safe to assume Detroit is bound for PlayStation in 2017, because Sony showed it off in their New Year's celebration of games coming this year. The question is: will it be any good? Cage is a famed perfectionist who believes in the artistry of his brush, but like any virtuoso, he tends to overrate the power of said brush. His best game, Heavy Rain, notably reined in the bloated supernatural excess that ruined the perfectly good Indigo Prophecy. But Cage didn't learn from that because his follow-up title, Beyond: Two Souls, was a science fiction love story between a young girl and her psychic best friend. Utter rubbish. If Detroit can play it straight and offer up a hardboiled detective story in the guise of Heavy Rain, this one will be amazing. It's centered on cops and robots in a futuristic imagining of Detroit, with Blade Runner themes of morality writ large. Fingers crossed Cage stops trying to shoehorn mysticism into his games. The story — and characters — should be strong enough to walk the runtime on their own. 7) GT Sport Platforms: PS4 Release Date: Sometime in 2017 The masters of pixel perfection — Polyphony Digital — are back in 2017 with GT Sport. Every entry in Yamauchi's fabled franchise is like a painstakingly constructed showroom of the world's greatest cars. The showrooms are made from hand, of course, using only imported materials, and the cars have been washed in gold and butter and shined to perfection. GT games are always about the cars first — everything else is secondary. To give you an example: 2013's Gran Turismo 6 featured over 1,000 of them. I mean, really. All racing games like their rides but the GT brand is obsessed with them. In the recent past, though, that hasn't always been enough — and with the increasing might of Microsoft's Forza, Gran Turismo has lost a bit of its prestige. Now, Polyphony are back to take control of the podium and the goal for this year's entry is to pare back the excess and focus on quality, not quantity. The roster of cars for GT Sport has been pared back significantly, with only 140 specimens on offer this time (oh, what am I going to drive?!), each rendered in gleaming detail, right down to the individual nuts and bolts. There are also a scheduled 19 tracks. Clearly the goal is to go back to what made Gran Turismo famous: pure motoring perfection, rather than the obsessive excess that became something of a running joke. The definitive racing game doesn't yet exist on the PS4, but this might be it. 6) Nioh Platforms: PlayStation 4 Release Date: February 9th Hack. Slash. Dodge. Die. Welcome to Nioh, alternatively titled: Ninja Gaiden Meets Dark Souls: 10 Years in the Making. Nioh has endured a tumultuous ride since it was first announced in the early 2000s, enduring several delays and even bigger tweaks. The title began life as a stodgy RPG before switching to frenetic action and has finally been molded in the image of the Dark Souls games, somewhere between the two. The result is an ode to Souls with a dash of Ninja Gaiden for good measure. I sunk five or six hours into the generous Alpha and Beta demos in 2016 and came away suitably impressed. For one thing, Nioh is tough as nails with a deep yet rewarding combat system. The time-honoured phrase "five minutes to learn, a lifetime to master" is apt here, as you can pick up Nioh right away, but besting its challenges could take hours. Still, before you know it, you're navigating the world with greater ease, opening up a map of clever shortcuts and devilish enemies. Nioh stars a flowy-haired soldier named... William (yeah, we're not sure about the name, either) who arrives in Japan armed with a juicy scimitar and bad guys to kill. Time will tell whether Nioh's visuals can match the gameplay (the Alpha and Beta demos took place at night and weren't big on environmental variety), but with a February 9th release date fast approaching, there's not long to wait. 5) Horizon: Zero Dawn Platforms: PS4 Release Date: February 28 It's hard to not be impressed by Horizon Zero Dawn in action. It just looks so beautiful. The robotic precision of its hulking machine beasts set to the backdrop of an untamed jungle is a jarring yet satisfying juxtaposition. Visually, it works. For its unique vision and its beauty alone, Horizon deserves 5th place on this list. But will it succeed as a game? You know, with all the boring stuff you do in between gawking at the backdrops? That's not a guarantee, and I've heard rumblings that it might not be as good as it looks. But let's put fears aside, shall we? With a big open world begging to be explored, Horizon will certainly be a visual feast, and one of the few games to truly warrant an upgrade to the PS4 Pro. New IPs are few and far between these days and I've yet to see one this artistically impressive. As Sony's biggest exclusive of the year, let's hope their faith in Guerrilla Games is repaid. 4) Prey Platforms: PC, Xbox One, PS4 Release Date: Mid 2017 We're getting to the business end of this list and things are heating up. There are few games - if any - I'm more keen to play than Prey, a re-imagining of the 2006 franchise whose fetid corpse has been resuscitated by the geniuses at Arkane Studios. Yes, the minds behind Dishonored 1 and 2 are at the reins and tackling a futuristic space station where a mysterious alien presence is baying for your blood. From the extended gameplay demo I've watched, there's a real whiff of Bioshock in the air (and plenty of System Shock, too). It's decidedly creepy stuff, suffused with a paranormal eeriness and some wildly inventive gameplay touches. The aliens are dubbed Typhon. Some can mimic real-world objects like the ghastly menace from The Thing while others lurch at you like shifting shadows in the dark. Better yet, you can harness their powers, upgrading your gear using "neurmods." Soon you're teleporting like a shadow, or mimicking objects in the world, giving you the ability to shape shift and scuttle through the base unseen. Arkane has a real appreciation for what makes games sing and you can expect an engrossing campaign here that puts the onus on player freedom. The story will take place in the base, with walled-off areas blocking immediate progression. Expect to head out into the inkly blackness of space, too, while you slowly grow your powers and discover what on earth is going on. The atmosphere and gameplay freedom alone have me giddy to play this one. 3) Resident Evil 7 Platforms: PC, Xbox One, PS4 Release Date: January 24th My first reaction to the news Resident Evil was going first person was... "huh?" My second was: "This is stupid." But my oh my, having played the demo and watched game in action, Resident Evil 7 just makes sense. Set inside a plantation owned by a crackpot family of hick cannibals, it's your job to discover what's going on and get the hell out of dodge. We're promised a world of Metroidvania proportions, full of canny shortcuts and mysteries galore with herbs, ammo and typewriters to aid survival along the way. What's great about Resi 7 is that it feels like Resident Evil. All the time-honored sound effects are here, from the soothing jingle of the typewriter to the Pong-era cue of mixing herbs together. Better yet, Resi is back to being about true fear. I thought the move away from a the third-person camera would rob the game of its essential Resident Evil-ness. But it turns out this long-running, much-loved series is about more than awkward camera controls. 7 looks like a smart reinvention of a series that was rapidly veering into overblown Hollywood territory. And it's never felt more right. Resident Evil 6 was a big hot mess, but I can't see 7 being anything other than a contender for Game of the Year. 2) Mass Effect: Andromeda Platforms: PC, Xbox One, PS4 Release Date: March 21 It's not all been plain sailing for spacefaring colonists Bioware as they usher the Mass Effect series into the new generation with Andromeda. In fact, four years since Mass Effect 3, it's a surprise we're so close to seeing a new installment in the revered franchise, and yet, come March, the world will be back at it, exploring an entirely new universe. Promotional footage of Andromeda has been sparse (and dare we say it - underwhelming?). There's been a slow drip-feed of content, but the inevitable flood has yet to surge through the sluice gates, and that might be a bad sign. Bioware has a proven track record but with a new director on board and rumblings of discontent within the bowels of the company, Andromeda is by no means a home run. One's thing for sure though: come March 21, millions upon millions will be settling down to play it. On that front, it's just about the biggest release of the year. 1) Red Dead Redemption 2 Platforms: Xbox One, PS4 Release Date: Late 2017 Really, no other game could top this list. Red Dead Redemption 2 is coming in 2017 and it's the sequel to a true classic. But forget all that. First and foremost, it's a Rockstar game - what more could you want? Arguably the greatest development house in our industry, Rockstar is the company Hideo Kojima called the best in the business. High praise indeed, but not undeserved. With every new open-world entry, the Scottish dev house finds a way to broaden their scope and break new ground. Though little is known about Red Dead Redemption 2, expectations couldn't be higher. Almost certainly we'll be revisiting a member of the Marston family (either John or his son) in a tale about gangland violence, lawlessness and the untamed majesty of the Wild West. We're also fairly sure that we'll be able to switch between characters, too, as Rockstar tells a sweeping tale across varied viewpoints. Little else is certain, but I suspect the team has more than a few aces up its sleeve. It's going to be a long wait, especially after the gorgeous teaser trailer, but rest assured Rockstar will release the very best product possible.