It’s fall, y’all. Well, almost. Officially, summer ends this weekend on September 22. So this is the last weekend for you to get in some quality gaming time before the trees start to change colors and the weather gets to a tolerable temperature. Even that’s not promised, given the state of global warming. But you know what is promised? Video games. That’s a top tier weekend activity that you can enjoy from the comfort of your own home. Here are a handful of games we’re playing over the weekend, and you can too!
God of War Ragnarök (but on the personal computer this time)
Play it on: PS4, PS5, PC
Current goal: Give it a second chance
God of War Ragnarök did not hit for me the first time I played it in 2022. I adore father-son co-protagonists Kratos and Atreus, but Ragnarök felt somehow bloated and breakneck in its pacing at the same time. Attempting to introduce and wrap up a trilogy’s worth of plot threads left a poor taste in my mouth, as it felt like Ragnarök overcommitted and underdelivered on too much. I missed the 2018 God of War reboot’s conciseness, and despite some highs, Ragnarök never felt quite as impactful. However, all of that changed with the game’s free Valhalla DLC, which distilled the experience down to the best parts. The roguelike felt like the sequel I wanted, and it’s retroactively improved my feelings on the game as a whole. But the game is on PC now, and we’ll have some impressions up sometime next week. In the meantime, I gotta play it and see how it runs. Maybe if I’m not rushing through it to see how Kratos and Atreus’ story ends, I might have a better read on it? I hope so! — Kenneth Shepard
Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands
Play it on: PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, PC
Current goal: Get to the good stuff
I’m mostly playing stuff that I can’t talk about just yet, but while those projects take up the bulk of my time, me and my best friends have been trying to find new co-op games to fit into our rotation. After weeks of deliberations, arguments, and bullheadedness, we finally landed on Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands, the fantasy spinoff of 2K and Gearbox’s storied Borderlands franchise. The announcement of a new one (as well as some sales on the existing ones) piqued our interest in the larger series, and given the fact that some of us really love Dungeons & Dragons, Wonderlands seemed like the obvious choice. It starts a little slower than I care for, but we’ve reached the overworld—which If you don’t know has been fascinatingly reworked into a top-down board game complete with random encounters—and I’m intrigued to see how it further delineates itself from the mainline sci-fi shooters through its classes, structure, and weaponry. Here’s hoping that Wonderlands can still capture some of that early Borderlands magic. —Moises Taveras
UFO 50
Play it on: PC
Current goal: Lose more sleep to this incredible collection
Every year, one or two games come along that I don’t just enjoy or love, but feel reinvigorated by. These are those rare, special games so bursting with creativity and vision that they help reignite my appreciation for video games more broadly. In short, they are the games that remind me why I love games in the first place. Last year, it was primarily Tears of the Kingdom and Alan Wake 2. This year, UFO 50 seems poised to be the game that does this more than any other.
In the shortest and simplest sense, UFO 50 is a compilation of 50 new retro games, and that, in and of itself, might be enough to make UFO 50 great, a remarkable value, a great bang-for-your-buck proposition. But it really is so much more than that, and my appreciation for this aspect only continues to deepen as I play it. UFO 50 really does feel like a window into a pocket dimension in which developer UFO Soft actually existed, and the more I play these games, the more I feel my appreciation for games as an art form being stimulated and enriched. These games are in conversation with each other and with the medium more broadly. They feel like the work of people who were pushing the limits of a burgeoning art form, and who had strange and wonderful ideas about what to do with it. This is a rich, insightful, and extremely fun celebration of one of the most exciting eras in game development history, by some of the designers who are most enthusiastically carrying on that spirit of risk and innovation today.—Carolyn Petit
(P.S. If you’re not quite sold on UFO 50 yet and want to see someone else enjoy discovering some of its wonders first, I highly recommend the recent streams of it by Macaw45 which, as of this writing anyway, you can find here.)
Fortnite
Play it on: The sofa
Current goal: Somehow stop playing
I didn’t mean to. My son nagged us to let him play it for literally years, but we always said no because of the guns. Then at nearly 10, and all his classmates playing, we relented. We are weak. Then he started asking me to play, too.
I love playing games with my son. I don’t necessarily love the games he wants me to play. There’s only so much Minecraft Bed Wars one 40-something can take, and that figure is below infinity. And you know, Fortnite, it’s that trashy game that’s for kids, blah blah, etc and so on. And then I started playing.
Oh god, guys, this is big gaming news, but Fortnite is really good! It’s a top-notch multiplayer shooter that’s embellished with a battle pass and an abundance of quests that contain entire scripted storylines, secret quests, and a Duos mode that lets you play in pairs with your kid. Yes, YES, you already knew all this, but I’m so fucking hooked now. I’m level 91 in the current season, and so close to unlocking the final page of the main battle pass, and apparently I now care about achieving that. I’m thrilled that Luis filed that guide linked above about the secret quest, because I’d run out of Story and Weekly ones, so much am I mainlining a game everyone else was over about five years ago. I blame my son. It’s his fault.—John Walker
Visions of Mana
Play it on: PS5, Xbox Series X/S, PC
Current goal: Gather the last Alm
I’m a huge Mana freak and have been since Secret of Mana on SNES and Final Fantasy Adventure on Game Boy (whose title was a lie to trick unsuspecting Western fans at the time). So I am going to finish Visions of Mana one way or another, but I’ll admit it’s been something of a slow burn. Some of that is being distracted by all the other great games coming out. Detours include Astro Bot, Space Marine 2, and Frostpunk 2, to name a few. And part of it is Visions of Mana’s own choppy pacing. There’s an immersion-breaking number of cutscene interruptions and the pacing of exploration, dungeons, and new story beats is all over the place. The result is that, while I want to play more, it never feels like I need to play more.
All that said, I’m still enjoying the overall package and hopeful that it grows more substantial and compelling by the mid-to-late game. The NetEase-owned Ouka Studios, which was unceremoniously shuttered as soon as the game came out, did an impressive job for such a new team. There’s a lot of cookie-cutter action-RPG stuff in Visions of Mana, but it fits together surprisingly well. There have been a lot of middling Square Enix sequels to legacy franchises in recent years. Between the polished combat and gorgeous world, Visions of Mana succeeds more than most of them. What’s the inverse of damning with faint praise? Praising with faint damning? Despite some flaws, Visions of Mana is scratching my retro-RPG itch right now, and I’m looking forward to (eventually) seeing it through. — Ethan Gach
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