WorthPlaying's Best of E3 2018 - Finalists
(in alphabetical order)
Anthem (PS4/XOne/PC)
Like a few others, I wasn't sure what to make of Anthem when it was first announced. The more I saw of it, the more I found myself drawn to the world Bioware is starting to build. The developer has always been a masterful character maker and storyteller, but the Anthem demo shows it can hit all of the sweet spots in pure action gameplay. The Javelin and its combination of combat/terrain agility, firepower and impeccable control appeal to everyone who has ever had any Iron Man or Robotech fly-and-blow-stuff-up fantasies. Within five minutes of piloting the Javelin, you will feel like saying, "Yeah, I can fly." - Redmond Carolipio
Control (PS4/XOne/PC)
Whatever you can say about Remedy's games, they're nothing if not distinctive. From the trippy noir of Max Payne to the Stephen King metarealism of Alan Wake, their games take shooters to interesting places. The latest game from Remedy, Control, has the makings of its best game yet: filled with bizarre and surreal visuals, plenty of creepy set pieces, and offering a level of freedom not seen in their other games. It's Remedy at its most ambitious. It doesn't hurt that the surreal telekinetic powers look like a complete hoot to use in combat. Remedy's always been able to make shooters that are among the most interesting on the market, and Control is no exception. Hopefully, the final version can live up to the huge potential that was shown during the E3 demo.- Chris "Atom" DeAngelus
Cyberpunk 2077 (PS4/XOne/PC)
The world in Cyberpunk 2077 looks like the fully realized vision of everything I ever thought I would want in a game like this. It's actual fantasy that has been given life through CD Projekt Red. I saw fast and clean high-tech combat, a metropolis that's practically a chimera of every dope, century-ahead city I've ever seen in fiction, and that sense of edge and coolness that only the "cyberpunk" style can provide. It feels like CDPR is attempting to create the One Ring of action RPG futurism, and it might actually succeed. - Redmond Carolipio
Dying Light 2 (PS4/XOne/PC)
I have a lot of salt about how the original Dying Light ended. After a multi-hour experience that was, despite the name and the general themes, about hope in the face of overwhelming odds, the game threw that all away in its DLC expansion, The Following, for a choice between two bleak endings. Dying Light: This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things. It was probably a given that we'd get a sequel, and it turns up the parkour and meaningful choices to give us the open-world zombie crossover that Mirror's Edge never seemed to know it needed. I can already tell it's going to be even worse on the motion sickness than the first one was — nothing like a forward somersault in first-person view to get the stomach churning — but it's got zombies, parkour, the freedom of open-world gaming (I really do appreciate a subgenre in which I am actively encouraged to cheat like hell at every opportunity), and kicking dudes off the top of water towers 'cause they're being dicks. As I told the Techland PR people when I gave them the award, there was really no way that I wasn't going to play this game to completion. - Thomas Wilde
Just Cause 4 (PS4/XOne/PC)
My affection for an open-world game is directly proportional to how fun it is to navigate the world, and Rico Rodriguez can fly, parachute, and grapple-hook his way around the landscape at freeway speeds, while simultaneously detonating the entire planet at once. The elevator pitch for Just Cause 4 is basically "JC3 with the Fulton balloon things from Metal Gear Solid 5," and that's really all it had to be. The developers are justly proud of their new Apex Engine, which lets them adequately reproduce extreme wind effects for the player to weaponize, but all you have to show people to instantly get them on board is the ability to turn anything in the game that isn't actually bolted down into your own personal balloon palanquin. Affix a few lifters to the corners, a thruster to the back, and now you've turned this poor civilian's jeep into your own personal rocket sled. It opens up bold new frontiers in being a jerk to sandbox people, and that's all you can really ask for. - Thomas Wilde
Resident Evil 2 (PS4/XOne/PC)
This is me waving my bias in the air like a semaphore flag. Resident Evil 2 is one of the horror games that got me back into gaming after a few years spent away, and the remake is laser-focused on appealing to my nostalgia and genre affection simultaneously. The individual zombies are scary again, the RPD is littered with bodies and ankle-deep in blood, enemies deform and spray as you blast them with firearms, the puzzles aren't quite as out of place as they used to be, and the whole thing is an over-the-shoulder RE4-style, bullet-conserving struggle for resources. You could ask for more — there apparently a lot of people on social media who are busily showing their entire asses because the new RE2 doesn't have pre-rendered camera angles — but what we have here is more than anyone could've hoped for. I really want to get my hands on preview code for this one. - Thomas Wilde