Precious few games have been announced for 2016 so far, but there's still a lot to look forward to in the year to come. From role-playing games to shooters that let you turn back time, 2016 is shaping up to be one of the better years for gaming. Here's what you should look out for.

1. Scalebound
An interesting setting, rich lore, and seemingly rock solid combat mechanics, make Xbox One exclusive Scalebound something to watch out for. It is the Japanese role-playing game (JRPG) we never asked for but we're happy to get anyway. Helmed by PlatinumGames, the studio behind Bayonetta and Vanquish, it combines familiar role-playing features like character customisation and skill trees, with a sprawling open-world and deadly beasts to take down. While we're yet to get anything more than a 2016 release window, what we've seen at Gamescom 2015 is enough to keep us piqued.

(Also see: Gamescom 2015 Day 4: Scalebound Fan Demo, PC Mods, and Final Fantasy XV)

2. Deus Ex: Mankind Divided
A controversial pre-order program followed by a questionable six month delay does little to dampen our spirits when it comes to Deus Ex: Mankind Divided's cyberpunk-fuelled dystopia. With a focus on player choice, themes such as transhumanism and apartheid, it just might be the most cerebral shooter you play in 2016. Look out for it on August 23 on the PC, PS4, and Xbox One.

(Also see: Deus Ex's Gameplay Director on Managing Complexity and Player Choice)

3. Mirror's Edge Catalyst
The long awaited reboot of a cult classic, Mirror's Edge Catalyst promises to be a game with no guns, possesses an open-world, and most of all, sweet parkour and traversal mechanics that made its 2008 predecessor a dream to play. Developed by the company behind the Battlefield series and Star Wars Battlefront, it's out May 24 on the PC, PS4, and Xbox One.

4. Uncharted 4: A Thief's End
The Uncharted series is getting a little long in the tooth, but there's no denying the appeal of another Indiana Jones-like adventure starring series protagonist Nathan Drake. With some new gameplay features such as dialogue branching along with heady action set-pieces and a surprisingly good multiplayer mode, March 18 can't come soon enough for this PS4 exclusive.

(Also see: Uncharted 4 Multiplayer: Four Things You Need to Know)

5. Mafia 3
Set in 1960s New Orleans, open-world crime game Mafia 3 oozes atmosphere and a surprising wealth of freedom in gameplay. Although developer Hanger 13 hasn't said more than a 2016 release window, itsgameplay reveal at Gamescom 2015 left us wanting for more. Expect it on the PC, PS4, and Xbox One sometime 2016.

6. Battleborn
Made by the fine minds that brought us Borderlands, Battleborn is a shooter with design sensibilities akin to Dota and League of Legends. It's an intriguing concept that worked well in our hands on preview of the game. Throw in art direction that would put Pixar to shame and gunplay reminiscent of Borderlands, with unique heroes to choose from, and you have one of the more original, inventive looking titles around. Out May 3 for the PC, PS4, and Xbox One.

(Also see: Battleborn Preview: If Dota 2 Was a Shooter With Pixar Characters)

7. Quantum Break
Developed by the studio behind the original Max Payne and Alan Wake, Remedy Entertainment, Quantum Break lets you gun down enemies in third person in addition to manipulate time and duck behind cover. We were surprised with how good this Xbox One exclusive looks, sporting slick effects and gorgeous visuals. Will the gunplay hold up though? We'll have to wait until April 5 to find out.

8. XCOM 2
This oft-delayed entry in the hallowed XCOM turn-based strategy series has looked better with each showing. Featuring a deeper narrative, new character classes, and the same addictive "just one more turn" style of gameplay, you can expect this PC-only exclusive on February 5.

(Also see: XCOM 2 Promises to Bring Calculated Dread One Turn at a Time)

9. No Man's Sky
This space-sim has you going where every sci-fi loving fan has gone before - space. This time however you're exploring its depths minus any heavy-handed direction, trying-too-hard-to-be witty sayings, or any of the other tropes we're tired of from slew of sci-fi movies we've been treated to. In their place is a gorgeous galaxy that has you exploring planets galore, each of which has its own unique environment and creatures. It's been often delayed but hopefully will see a release in 2016.

10. Firewatch
Taking place in 1989, this first-person adventure has you in the role of a fire lookout at the Shoshone National Forest in Wyoming exploring a host of mysterious occurrences. Draped in a fantastic aesthetic and witty dialogues, it's being developed by Campo Santo - a studio formed by staffers who have worked on hits such as BioShock 2, Mark of the Ninja, and Walking Dead. It's out on February 9 for the PC and PS4.

What games are you looking forward to in 2016? Let us know via the comments.

Originally Posted On ~NDTV Gadgets

Looking back at 2015, it has been a fantastic year for gaming. From sprawling role-playing games to action-packed shooters, regardless of the genre you love, there's something for you. With so much to play and even more to choose from, it's been a challenging task to whittle down our list to just ten of the best games of 2015. Here are the ones we loved the most, counting down to our favourite game of the year.

10. Don Bradman Cricket (PS4 and Xbox One)
Don Bradman Cricket is one of the rare sports games that lures you into the zone of thinking "just five more minutes" and then you find yourself in front of your TV half awake at six in the morning. It expertly traps you into this cycle, thanks to great controls, and a sense of freshness even after months of playing.

(Also see: Don Bradman Cricket Review)

9. Life Is Strange (PC, PS3, PS4, Xbox 360, and Xbox One)
Life is Strange merges mature storytelling with meaningful choices, and well-rounded characters that make French studio Dontnod's attempt at adventure a rousing success. In a genre codified and dominated by Telltale Games, it's heartening to see a fresh take on interactive storytelling.

(Also see: Life Is Strange Review)

8. Assassin's Creed Syndicate (PC, PS4, and Xbox One)
The Assassin's Creed series of open-world games really should have overstayed its welcome by now, but Syndicate brings in some much needed changes to refresh the formula. Improvements in the core gameplay and traversal, along with a compelling narrative offset make it one of the better entries in the franchise.

(Also see: Assassin's Creed Syndicate Review)

7. Batman Arkham Knight (PC, PS4, and Xbox One)
Developer Rocksteady claims that this is the final game in the Arkham series. While we find that hard to believe, there's no better way to end the series than with a game like this one. Now if it can fix the PC version completely, that would be nice - console owners on the other hand should not miss Arkham Knight.

(Also see: Batman Arkham Knight Review)

6. Dying Light (PC, PS4, and Xbox One)
Thanks to strong parkour mechanics, Dying Light remains a joy to play even now. The zombie apocalypse maybe a setting that's done to death but Techland proves there's still some life in the concept with Dying Light.

(Also see: Dying Light Review)

5. Volume (PC, PS4, and PS Vita)
With slick level design and attention to detail, this sophomore effort from the creator of Thomas Was Alone is one of the strongest efforts in the stealth genre which seems to be facing an identity crisis right now. Good writing, and enjoyable gameplay make it one of the year's best.

(Also see: Volume Review)

4. Halo 5: Guardians (Xbox One)
As it stands, Halo 5 is near perfect. With a fantastic campaign, and its ambitious Warzone multiplayer mode, it gets little wrong. If you own an Xbox One or plan to buy it, then you can't miss this game - it's a solid reason to buy the console.

(Also see: Halo 5: Guardians Review)

3. Bloodborne (PS4)
If you're the sort of person who is up for exploring a grim, dark, and fatal world and has a high tolerance for failure, you'll be right at home in Yharnam. It might be the video game equivalent of an extremely bad day, but it also gives you the means to fight back, making it more fun than it should be thanks to a responsive, flawless combat system.

(Also see: Bloodborne Review)

2. Fallout 4
Fallout 4 is like a fantastic book or a great TV show or for many, completely and utterly addictive. The difference being, how and when it ends is completely up to you. And the chances are, you'll be spending a lot of time in Boston. We know we have and will be in the months to come.

(Also see: Fallout 4 Review)

1. The Witcher 3
With an abundance of things to do, great combat, engrossing story, and a fantastic world to discover, The Witcher 3 is the video game equivalent to an all-you-can-eat buffet. It's seemingly never-ending and always appetising - without the nasty side-effects that come with overeating. The best game we've played this year and the benchmark for everything else in the years to come.

(Also see: The Witcher 3 Review)

These were our picks for the best games of 2015. What are yours? Let us know via the comments.

Mad Max: Fury Road has bought the Mel Gibson classic to a new age of cinemagoers, and it has done it right. However, usually video game tie-ins to movies always end up in certain disaster. To avert that fate for Mad Max, the game was given to Avalanche Studios, the game studio behind Just Cause games to create the post-apocalyptic classic to life. Let's find out if they've succeeded...

Story and setting



Welcome to the end of the world. A huge network of roads left after the great waters of the world known as seas and oceans receded into nothing. All that's left are warring clans of humans and one lone warrior that wanders the wastes, aimless and quite mad. Max has lost his family and is constantly on the run, when a warlord Scrotus takes away his car -- the mighty black-on-black Interceptor -- and has left him for dead. When all seems almost lost, Max comes across a hunchback mechanic who worships cars, and aids him in building an ultimate vehicle known as Magnum Opus.

The story of Mad Max is pretty normal, filled with people with their mundane quests to do. The best part of it all is the beautiful end of the world, the endless wastes, which inject awe. Your starting few areas and beyond for a while is actually what used to be a sea bed, a realization that slowly dawns on you as you drive through white shell strewn sand, which is a large graveyard of monstrous ships. Such awe abounds in the wastes, as well as lots of people driven to madness with the lack of water and the power of too much "Guzzoline."

Gameplay
The premise is simple, you drive around the wastes to find parts to build your Magnum Opus. A car capable of crossing the suicidal Plains of Silence, except that the hordes of Scrotus want your head. So you have to align with various allied strongholds, to dismantle Scotus's Guzzoline camps to reduce his hold on the region as well as take down the convoys.

The wasteland has hours and hours of fun to lose yourself into. You can take part in various races, scavenge for scrap and parts to get by. Build up your Strongholds to earn the trust of the leaders as well as find hidden spots, collect oil and precious water and a lot more.

As a whole, the gameplay is very repetitive, especially the scavenging for scrap, where each location has 2 to 15 units of scrap. It's annoying to hold the action button every time to pick up scrap. Of course with precious scrap you can upgrade Max and the Opus.



The combat is brutal, employing hand to hand fighting, very much like that of Batman Arkham series. One button to parry, and one button to retaliate. While the hand to hand fighting is great, the car combat more than makes up for everything. A fully loaded Magnum Opus is fun to boost into enemy cars, watching them erupt into a fireball of parts. You can spend hours just driving around discovering the wasteland and destroying enemy vehicles.

The vehicle designs are straight out of the movies, with weathered battle tanks of popular vehicle shapes you go up against. However, having a harpoon helps, yanking off tires off cars at high speeds or yanking drivers directly out of the seats makes for some amazing gaming memories.

Taking down convoys is extremely fun, except there are very few around the world. You actually have to plan your route of attack. Hide on heights sometimes and then surprise attack cars. With a well placed Thunderpoon hits and clever boosting you can actually get a multicar pileup leaving the head car ripe for your picking. Convoys are the high point of the gameplay in an otherwise repetitive but oddly addictive game.

Camps can get repetitive, but as a whole, every camp is different, almost like a puzzle. You can either disable the defenses using your Harpoon or Thunderpoon or you can find Wastelanders, that give you intel on secret back entrances.

Once you enter you have objectives to fulfill. Camps are usually teeming with enemies and if there's a War Crier, the enemies get buffed. Interestingly, killing all enemies but the Crier yields some interesting quotes of the War Crier, who moments earlier was screaming for your blood, now tries to buddy up and convince you not to kill him. Try it, you won't be disappointed.

As you tear across the landscape, you will encounter massive sandstorm hurricanes, like those from the movie. Truly fearsome forces of nature, that are part electric storms and part whipping winds, which will send you cowering for cover. However, for those brave enough, you can venture out into these storms and you can hunt down valuable scrap cases that carry big rewards. Risk and reward.

It helps that Chumbucket, the mechanic, is a very cool guy. Always ready to chime in with funny quips as well as paranoia infused warnings. Through the game he slowly becomes your indispensable friend, who refers to his devotion to a deity called Angel Combustion. Not to mention very covert sexual excuses he gives to spend time with Magnum Opus.

Graphics and sound



Mad Max, like the movie, is a very beautiful game. Not to mention, it runs smooth as butter on any PC. With all effects turned up. The wasteland is so serene, you will at times go to a high vantage point, stop and admire the view. Best seen on a big screen TV. Listen to the wind rustle by across the dry landscape. Jaw dropping, when you drive by old ruins of ships and bridges. Right up to the belching smokestacks of GasTown.

Conclusion
Mad Max has quite a few flaws as well as it can be repetitive. However, in short bursts, the game is addictive fun, not to mention quite therapeutic. Letting you forget your bad day at work, by losing yourself in a worst situation of survival in a dry waste.

If familiarity bred contempt, we'd be thoroughly sick of the numerous Assassin's Creed games over the years. Counting the various spin-offs, there are now over 20 games in the series. Despite this, Assassin's Creed Syndicate - the latest entry in the series - proves that there's still life left in Ubisoft's take on the open-world stealth genre.

The game puts you in the roles of Jacob and Evie Frye, twin assassins who are eager to reclaim London from the grip of the Templar Order. Similar to the first game in the series, you're not a rank outsider on the road to being an assassin, rather you already are one. This allows for a different narrative approach in comparison to the most popular games in the series, such as Assassin's Creed 2, and Assassin's Creed 4: Black Flag. Without spoiling much, developer Ubisoft Quebec has managed to weave a tale that manages to keep you interested from start to finish.

This is partially down to the fantastic set of characters you meet during your adventure. They range from the amusing, such as a pacifist cross-dressing policeman, to the historical, including Alexander Graham Bell. Syndicate's cast is its strength. The banter between Jacob and Evie goes a long way towards establishing them as likeable protagonists. In fact, they're good enough that you can overlook some of the game's rougher areas, such as its setting.

(Also see: Top 5 Assassin's Creed Games to Play Before Assassin's Creed Syndicate)

Much like its predecessors, most of Syndicate takes place in the past. This time you are in 1868 London. The city is in throes of the Industrial Revolution. You'll walk on cobblestoned streets, ride trains, and use horse carriages to get across what appears to be the biggest location for an Assassin's Creed game to date.

Syndicate builds on the scale of last year's Assassin's Creed Unity, what with its fantastic attention to architectural detail. However, while Unity's setting allowed for interesting ways to play such as social stealth wherein you could simply disappear into a crowd, you'll have very little of that luxury in Syndicate. This is because the non-playable character (NPC) count isn't as high as it is in Unity. Social stealth is a lot less viable now, and apart from this, the citizenry don't really stand out as individuals either. The streets of London feel barren and soulless as a result.

The sense of personality is absent and the art direction, while solid, lacks the vibrancy that was a hallmark of the previous games' environments. It's something that long-time fans will notice and it's a nagging point that will stay at the back of your head while playing Syndicate.

(Also see: A Tale of Two Assassin's Creeds)

Nonetheless, its failings in the setting are balanced out by some dramatic gameplay improvements. Traversal, stealth, and combat in Syndicate are all a lot faster than compared to earlier games in the franchise. Getting into cover is easy and getting out of it even more so, since you don't need to tap a button to exit. From one-button assassinations to zip lining across rooftops with a grappling gun, the moment-to-moment gameplay in Syndicate is quick, responsive, and a lot more fun than before. This also frees you up to experiment more in how you tackle the different missions.

And another plus is that there's a lot of variety in the game's main missions. Whether you're infiltrating an asylum, or fighting a gang war on a train, Syndicate pulls out all the stops. It's engrossing fare that will keep you playing. There's even an entire mission that's complete fan service for lovers of Assassin's Creed 4: Black Flag.

And, just like in most other open-world games, Syndicate sees you slowly unlocking and conquering territory to progress. You'll be conquering areas of London known as boroughs. To do so, you'll capture the highest vantage point, discover missions in the area and proceed to finish them one by one. These usually involve killing templar leaders, freeing child labourers, ridding choice locations of its gangs, or turning criminals in to the police.

(Also see: Assassin's Creed Syndicate - 7 Things You Need to Know)

In contrast to the story missions, these missions to take over areas do tend to get monotonous after awhile, but they're crucial if you want to unlock some of the game's more powerful weapons and skills - which are specific to either Jacob or Evie. Both characters control slightly differently, with Jacob being better for for brawling, and Evie focussed more on stealth. It's evident in their fighting styles and traversal, and you're locked to either one of them depending on the story mission you're playing - you can't freely switch between them during a story mission, though you do get to choose between them for the various optional side-quests.

Thankfully, the differences between the two are not so drastic that you'll find yourself at your wits end thinking about how to beat a level, and the mission design is forgiving enough to give you with many ways to proceed by exploiting the environment. You could be releasing crates to cause unforeseen accidents, or shooting hallucinogenic darts at barrels of fire in order to turn an entire group of enemies mad, so there are enough options at your disposal.

(Also see: Assassin's Creed Unity Review: An Almost Perfect Past)

One of the more interesting features of Syndicate is the ability to recruit gang members on various missions. It's handy when you want to complete an objective head-on or as a distraction, but by and large we found ourselves using subtler means of getting the job done, slinking around unseen.

In terms of performance, Syndicate holds up well. There was a single cut-scene that had Jacob and Evie missing, which we could not replicate as it worked fine on rebooting our console. This was after a 500MB patch and before another weighing in at almost 150MB. After applying the second patch there's very little that's overtly offensive in terms of tech. Usual suspects such as minor texture pop-in and a visible frame-rate drop in some of the game's busier areas were evident, and persisted through the game. Load times are long as well but there's nothing game breaking, which is a marked improvement over the early experience most people had with Unity.

All in all, Assassin's Creed Syndicate is welcome iteration in a series of open-world games that really should have overstayed its welcome by now. Improvements in the core gameplay and traversal, along with a host of great characters and compelling narrative offset its historical backdrop and technical concerns. It's not perfect, but its good enough to warrant a purchase.

Pros 

• Better moment to moment gameplay
• Great characters 
• Compelling narrative 
• Varied story missions

Cons 

• London isn't as vibrant as other settings in the series
• Glitches and long long load times 
• Rote side-missions

Rating (out of 10): 8

We played a review copy of Assassin's Creed Syndicate on the Xbox One. The game retails for Rs. 3,499 on PS4 and Xbox One. The PC version will be available on November 19 for Rs. 1,799

~NDTV Gadgets