If we spread out the game releases for the first quarter of 2022 over 365 days, it’s still going to be a pretty great year for article games, and we’ve already seen some of the best games we’ll see all year, some sleeper hits and some surprisingly great additions to long-running franchises. And it’s not even May yet, and of course there’s the rest of the year’s offerings, assuming we don’t have any delays, yes, we’ll definitely have delays, but when we get to that point, we’ll cross that bridge, God of War, Deadpool.
Stalker 2 Gotham Knights Hogwarts Legacy Starfield is not a breath of wild air, and even if one or two of those or some other games like him launch this year, it will make us better, but 2022 is so stacked with as many as 15 games launching in the next eight months. If you’re wondering what we’re going to get between those obvious highlights, here’s a bunch of interesting games in random order that I think would be really cool, Eva West has been on my radar for a minute now, and it comes from Flying Wild Hog and Devolver Digital, the latter of which you almost certainly know, they always put out great stuff, while the former you may not be as familiar with.
But they’re busy in 2022, having already released Shadow Warrior 3 and releasing Trek to Yomi early next month, and seem to be planning to deliver a triple threat in 2022, with Wicked West being a game with no set release date, which may make it more likely to be delayed, but it should be mentioned that this game has been pushed from 2021 to 22, and Shadow Warrior 3 has been pushed from 21 delayed to 22 and did not get released until very close to its release date. The Flying Wild Hogs have made some very fun, if inconsistent and flawed, games in the Shadow Warrior series, and I’ve played them all, and Ava West feels like one of those games with crazy action and great twisted enemy design without the off-putting humor that often comes with it.
This game puts you in the role of a tech-savvy western cowboy out to destroy vampires, and that’s the dream. The gameplay looks fun, it’s inspired and the studio behind it is promising, I like the look of it, and I hope it makes it in time for the release date.
This game is really weird to me because aside from Star Trek, it’s an Xbox exclusive for 2022 and it’s being developed by the reputable arcane studio, so it should be sitting on the big boy’s table, but I always forget it’s out so soon. There was no marketing campaign for the game other than that unintentional leak, but it was supposed to come out this summer, which is now, close enough to now that you’d think we’d see more information about it, but we haven’t, which kind of supports that leak earlier this year claiming the game was delayed until a holiday 2022 release when it wasn’t.
World First The game features a campaign and customizable characters that all have their own special abilities, and the description of the game does look like a standard heist shooter, which is a little concerning because some of the recent attempts have been kind of bad. But in the end, I believe Oscar and their complete weirdness will deliver a worthwhile product that has some staying power Speaking of weirdness, while Defiance is described as an upcoming first-person biopunk survival horror adventure game, I can ask if you’re sure you put enough adjectives in that sentence that I remember scoring being shown back to us to get our first round of next-gen games but for some reason, I can’t take my eyes off it, the whole environment feels alive and skewed, even when you’re interacting with the little contraptions there’s a lot of squishy sounds, everything feels like a living organism, the things you touch, the spaces you explore, even the feel of your gun being loaded. While I’m not usually a fan of pure horror games, I have a real morbid curiosity about this game, which comes out in October, and I’m curious to see what it would be like to crawl through dark and creepy corridors in a survival horror shooter.
