The PlayStation 4 had a great 2014, but that’s all behind us now. Whether you’ve had a PS4 since launch of you just received one for the holidays, you’re looking at 2015 to figure out which games you need to buy, so let’s take a look at the games that should grace your console over the next 12 months, in addition to obvious favorites like Uncharted 4. Some you may expect, but others could surprise you.
Bloodborne
From Software redefined the meaning of difficult when it began the Demon’s Souls and Dark Souls series. While Dark Souls 2 will see a PS4 release in 2015 (with all of the DLC included), Bloodborne is the developer’s new baby. Take everything you know about Demon’s Souls and Dark Souls and throw it out the window. Aside from the challenging difficulty of the series, Bloodborne reinvents what From Software created with Demon’s Souls.
Bloodborne plays much faster than any of the Dark Souls or Demon’s Souls titles. You use multiple weapons at a time, even switching between weapons in the middle of combos. But it’s not a simple as finding a weapon you like. The weapons all have specific functions and some enemies will be much harder to defeat if you’re not using the correct weapon or even the correct form of the weapon. That’s right, you can alter the form of your weapon to give it a different function.
From Software also put an emphasis on co-op multiplayer in Bloodborne. You’ll venture through randomly generated dungeons that change every time you enter, and continue to change as you make your way through the dungeon. The decisions you make and the directions you go will influence how the dungeon plays out to ensure you never have the same experience twice. Don’t venture too far from your friend, though. He or she may have a weapon you need to take down an enemy or boss character.
Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain
When you think of Metal Gear Solid, visions of stealth missions and exclamation points probably appear in your head. When you go back and play many of the previous games in the series, you may feel as though something is missing. That something is the power of the PlayStation 4. Kojima has finally been able to create the Metal Gear title fans have been waiting for.
As an open-world Metal Gear, you have a ton of ground to cover and explore. You’ll be able to use various modes of transportation to travel between areas, and you’re no longer attached to rails like in previous games. Granted, previous entries in the series allowed for a bit of exploration, but you still had to go from point A to point B. In The Phantom Pain you aren’t restricted to point A and point B. You can go from point C to point X if you so choose.
If you’ve already played Metal Gear Solid 5: Ground Zeroes, that gave you a taste of what to expect in The Phantom Pain. However, the world of The Phantom Pain is 200 times larger than what you played in Ground Zeroes. This is the Metal Gear Solid game Hideo Kojima always wanted to make, and you’ll finally be able to play it in early 2015.
No Man’s Sky
If you like first-person shooters and exploration games, No Man’s Sky is the only game you will need on your PS4 in 2015. The small development team at Hello Games designed a title that is larger and more creative than almost anything else that has graced Sony’s shiny new system. Take your spaceship and warp across the universe to discover incredible new planets.
Let’s try to put this into numbers you can understand. No Man’s Sky features over 18 quintillion possible planets. In raw number form that would be 18,000,000,000,000,000,000 planets. Think about that for a moment. That’s one billion, billion planets to find and explore. You could easily pick up No Man’s Sky in 2015 and still be playing it and finding new planets by the time the PlayStation 5 releases in a decade or so.
Of course, finding and exploring planets isn’t the only thing you’ll be doing in No Man’s Sky. To “beat” the game, players will need to reach the center of the galaxy. To do so, you need to find the necessary resources as you explore each planet. The availability of resources improves as the player gets closer to the center of the galaxy. You’ll need to collect, sell and trade resources to acquire better ships and more fuel so you can explore the more-centralized areas of the galaxy. If that’s your only focus in the game, it will still take you between 40 and 100 hours to reach that goal.
Dragon Ball Xenoverse
Let’s face facts here. A majority of gamers were also anime fans at one point (if they’re not still anime fans), and most anime fans began their passion with Dragon Ball. What Namco Bandai has planned for Dragon Ball Xenoverse is making it the one DBZ game that you need to own. It’s about as close as we’re going to get to a DBZ MMORPG on consoles anytime in the near future, and the combat system is very similar to the popular entries in the Budokai system.
You know the combat is going to be solid, and with the power of the PlayStation 4 the graphics look like a high-definition version of the anime. If that weren’t enough, the game features almost every character that ever graced the Dragon Ball universe and every single form. There are even two different Vegeta characters, each with their own set of forms. That’s right, there’s a Dragon Ball GT version of Vegeta with all of his Super Saiyan forms, and a DBZ Vegeta with all of his forms from that series. Goku gets the same treatment.
In addition to all of the characters included in the game, you can make your own based on almost every race featured in DBZ. The races and even genders have varying attributes, but don’t worry, you can create multiple characters. Once you’ve made a character or selected one of the existing characters, you can play through the DBZ storyline with friends, or keep the action offline and play through the story mode alone. This Dragon Ball game basically has everything a fan could want.
