Resident Evil 7, Prey and Sonic Mania: 10 great PS4 and Xbox games coming in 2017
What gamers can look forward to next year
Christmas is right around the corner and no doubt many a shiny console will be under the tree come 25 December. Or, at least some vouchers for popular online ordering services or shops from relatives who no idea what to get you.
Either way, there are bound to be plenty of eager gamers looking to get their mitts on the latest and greatest games. So we've put together a round-up of 10 of the best titles set to land next year and that will likely dominate the gaming charts.
1. Resident Evil 7 (PS4/XB1)
Most people are bored of long-running videogame series. The mighty behemoth Call of Duty is finally starting to stumble as kids in their early twenties would prefer to play DOTA 2 or League of Legends in real-life sports stadiums, and massively multiplayer versions of Nokia's original Snake game are now just as likely to pull people to Twitch feeds as anything published by Activision or EA.
What hope, then, for Resident Evil 7? With the sixth game being best remembered for sporting a logo that resembled a man fellating a giraffe, it's fair to say Resident Evil 6 (or Resident Evil 4 III, as we like to call it) didn't set the world on fire.
Welcome, then, Resident 7, whose producer has been quoted as having "loved" the PS4's breakout, self-poo-inducing haunted house demo P.T. Just as with that (now-cancelled) Silent Hill demo, Resident Evil is being pushed into first person, hindering the player perspective to create a far more contained experience. It worked brilliantly in 2014's gut-churning Alien: Isolation, after all.
Coupled with an icky, uncomfortable Texas Chainsaw Massacre-style ‘redneck family' motif, Resident Evil 7 looks set to be the most immediate entry in the series for many years.
Resident Evil 7, Prey and Sonic Mania: 10 great PS4 and Xbox games coming in 2017
What gamers can look forward to next year
2. Prey (PS4/XB1)
Prey is quite literally history repeating itself. A pseudo-sequel/reboot (although we hate this word) to a 2006 FPS of the same name, Prey has been stuck in development hell for 10 years, which is almost exactly as long as the original Prey, which was first announced in 1995 as a Quake rival.
Originally envisioned as an open-world shooter named Prey 2 that would have picked up where the original left off and allowed the player to explore a wider universe of horrors outside the biological spacecraft of the first game, the 2011-announced Bethesda spin on the game was scrapped in 2014, and replaced with this simple reimagining of the first game instead.
It's unclear whether the utterly mucked-up branding situation will affect the game's successes, but with development duty shifted to Arkane Studios (of Dishonored fame), Prey is a marked departure from the unusual ‘Native American updated by aliens and discovers he has superpowers' theme of the original.
Now, in a curious ‘alternate history' setup to Bethesda's earlier Nazi future-set Wolfenstein: The New Order, Prey is set on a space station in a 21st-century where JFK wasn't assassinated and the Space Race spiralled into intergalactic success.
Except, obviously, there are also invading gooey aliens, and this time players can look forward to them disguising themselves as everyday things like pot plants, sofas and - of course - humans.
While Prey doesn't look startlingly original, It's hard enough to find a decent, story-based FPS these days as it is, so we're more than a little partial to what Arkane and Bethesda have up their sleeves here.
Resident Evil 7, Prey and Sonic Mania: 10 great PS4 and Xbox games coming in 2017
What gamers can look forward to next year
3. Horizon Zero Dawn (PS4)
Guerrilla Games has basically spent its career cracking out titles in the increasingly ignored PlayStation flagship shooter series Killzone, which is essentially a very grey and brown universe in which muscled men shoot huge aliens and ‘do' banter and bravado.
But luckily for the doubtless bored developers who completed their fifth Killzone title in 2013, they've since been allowed to work on something else entirely, and that something else is Horizon Zero Dawn.
Guerrilla has called the game a westernised play on Capcom's classic open world hunting RPG Monster Hunter, and the similarities do indeed seem to be there. Scour the world for small, medium-sized and massive monsters to do in with melee or ranged weapons, and loot their resources to upgrade your armaments.
Monster Hunte r was always quintessentially a mobile console game, despite brief sojourns to console (another is coming in 2017 on the PS4). It's also a game - like many Japanese experiences - heavily characterised by weird characters and dialogue, cat sidekicks and their copious amounts of dressing up.
Can Horizon Zero Dawn break out with its own identity, particularly when coming from a stable of such by-numbers shooters as Killzone? Only 2017 can decide.
Resident Evil 7, Prey and Sonic Mania: 10 great PS4 and Xbox games coming in 2017
What gamers can look forward to next year
4. Shenmue 3 (PS4)
A second sequel to Shenmue was one of those games everybody kept saying they wanted simply because they thought they were never going to get it, but then at 2015's E3, series creator Yu Suzuki actually announced it.
Shenmue 3 raised over $2m in eight hours, which is insane when you actually go back and play either of the original games and realise how they were a great idea, but sorely underdeveloped on the gameplay front, trying to do far too much at once and never really making any particular dynamic feel immediate or essential.
As well as wandering around small towns having stilted conversations, wasting all your money on capsule toys and taking part in surprisingly move-laden Virtua Fighter-style brawls, Shenmue 3 will also offer, according to its Kickstarter page, a "siege game reminiscent of the Warring Kingdoms". By which, we take it to mean the deck building game.
We wish Shenmue 3 the best of luck, launching as it will be in a time way outside its own.
Resident Evil 7, Prey and Sonic Mania: 10 great PS4 and Xbox games coming in 2017
What gamers can look forward to next year
5. Sea of Thieves (XB1)
Poor old Rare. From making most of the 8-bit classics of the Eighties such as Ultimate Play the Game, to bashing out Donkey Kong Country, Goldeneye 007 and Banjo-Kazooie later down the line, they were spitefully snapped up by Microsoft in 2002 in order to - well, basically - make hideously unpopular games for the awful Kinect motion controller.
Now freed from those shackles, Rare immediately got cracking on what looks to be its first decent game (Viva Piñata aside) for years.
Sea of Thieves is an online multiplayer title that lets teams of players pilot a boat around the open seas, hunting for treasure and battling other crews. Collecting maps and comparing them to the world map via landmark, then speeding off to dig up the bounty is the order of the day, although you can also have the treasure stolen by other players en route to selling it.
Microsoft is launching a 'Technical Alpha phase' (or what we used to call a 'demo\ in the 1990s) for Xbox Insiders on 16 December, if you're desperate to get going.
Check out the video above to see a load of irritating American teenagers having a go. "Dude, we're like totally gonna drown! We're screwed!" Delightful young men, really recreating the heady atmosphere of 17th-century seafaring.
Resident Evil 7, Prey and Sonic Mania: 10 great PS4 and Xbox games coming in 2017
What gamers can look forward to next year
6. Yooka-Laylee (PS4, XB1)
Yooka-Laylee is like the flipside of Sea of Thieves. It's what happens when a bunch of Rare creatives - instead of hunkering down and getting on with creating yet another Kinect Sports game - nick off, find a new studio, and start cattily producing spiritual sequels to games they no longer own the rights to.
Banjo-Kazooie, Yooka-Laylee. Get it?
Yooka-Laylee is a crowdfunded 3D platform game that's set to follow in the footsteps of the sort of games that made Rare and the N64 famous, before Microsoft put a somewhat brutal stop to it all.
Colour, chaos, weird characters and an infinite number of collectables will be the order of the day, and we personally believe gaming needs this kind of throwback, simple charm among the murk of by-committee designed ‘future soldier' twaddle that's now the norm on consoles.
Resident Evil 7, Prey and Sonic Mania: 10 great PS4 and Xbox games coming in 2017
What gamers can look forward to next year
7. Red Dead Redemption 2 (PS4, XB1)
Red Dead Redemption was GTA with horses. We're saying that because it's exactly what Rockstar Games tried to stop everybody in the games press saying on its 2010 release of a game very much in the style of its prior urban vehicular chaos games, except set 100 years before and with horses instead of cars.
Nobody knows what Read Dead Redemption 2 is going to be about, or what'll be in it, but that's okay because Rockstar is above marketing, and knows that by saying nothing, it's just causing Twitter and Reddit to go loopy.
But for our money, Red Dead Redemption 2 will contain such delicacies as; Spaghetti Western cliches presented in a hip and knowing way, music that sounds like it's from films, cunning social commentary with the knowledge of foresight, and knob gags.
Top-shelf gaming press will argue for the intellectual value of the latter when the game is awarded 10/10 scores across the board sometime in 2017.
Resident Evil 7, Prey and Sonic Mania: 10 great PS4 and Xbox games coming in 2017
What gamers can look forward to next year
8. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (Wii U/Switch)
When Nintendo launched the Wii U in 2012, the company said there would be a brand new Zelda game on it.
Nintendo didn't lie per se, but the game is now the poster child for the upcoming Nintendo Switch, a console which, by rights, Wii U owners should receive for free because it's a lost closer to the machine they should have been delivered in the first place, rather than the awkward, Fisher Price iPad concept they got instead.
Zelda: Breath of the Wild is the first truly open-world Zelda game (although we're counting Wind Waker, even though it was just sea), and that means trusty hero Link gets to run around all over the place, killing monsters, cooking meat, surfing on his shield and - currently - being the subject of all kinds of senseless arguments on forums as to whether he actually has the Master Sword or not and whether you might be able to play as a girl.
Suffice to say, everybody's quite excited. So should you be.
Resident Evil 7, Prey and Sonic Mania: 10 great PS4 and Xbox games coming in 2017
What gamers can look forward to next year
9. Mass Effect: Andromeda (PS4/XB1)
For anyone who's been trapped in a washing machine for the last year or so, M ass Effect Andromeda, the latest instalment of the popular series from EA, is due some time in the first quarter of 2017.
For the first time in the series, players won't be controlling Shepard, the protagonist of the three existing games. Instead, the main character will be either Scott or Sara Ryder, continuing the fine tradition of allowing players to be the gender of their choice in-game.
Much like the previous games, it'll be a third-person action RPG, but unlike what's gone before, we'll be playing in an entirely new galaxy, because honestly who can be bothered to explore the Milky Way anymore? That's 2016. So, we'll be flying our admittedly rather nice looking new ship (the Tempest, so that's RIP Normandy I'm afraid) around an entirely new galaxy, replete, one assumes, with new races to befriend /recruit/pulverise into dust with some funky biotics.
Besides that, we're hoping for much the same as we enjoyed in (at least) the last two games. And if the multiplayer could resemble what we we're given in Mass Effect 3, that would be no bad thing at all.
Resident Evil 7, Prey and Sonic Mania: 10 great PS4 and Xbox games coming in 2017
What gamers can look forward to next year
10. Sonic Mania (PS4/XB1)
We are totally down with Sega again these days, and the reason for that is, having finally realised they have no idea how to handle their own brands, IPs and character mascots, they've simply thrown their hands in the air and left it up to the fans to make their games for them.
Sonic Mania, then, will be a ‘return' to the never-as-good-as-we-remember-them-but-dammit-if-they-aren't-stuck-so-deep-in-our-hearts-we'll-love-them-forever platforming antics of Sonic's heyday in the 1990s, executed with the kind of fetishistic attention to detail JJ Abrams applies to the likes of Spielberg and Lucas when he ‘homages' their work.
Two superfans (one of whom created some ground-up super-ports of Mega Drive and Mega CD games for console and mobile) are working on Sonic Mania, and from what we've seen, we just can't fault it.
Take a look at the footage below and see if it doesn't bring an embarrassed, nostalgic tear to your eye. µ