There’s always one clear sign that the holiday release season is about to begin for video games: The annual coming of Madden NFL. It happens every August, usually with just a week or two before the latest NFL season kicks off in early September. Madden NFL 15 is hardly alone this week, and we’re left with our first blockbuster release week lineup of late 2014.
There’s plenty more to come, but let’s see what this week has in store …
PS3/PS4/Xbox 360/Xbox One (August 26)
EA Tiburon’s latest entry in the 26-year-old Madden NFL series is the first one that has launched for PlayStation 4 and Xbox One before the NFL season begins (2013’s “next-gen” edition of Madden NFL 25 arrived alongside the consoles in November). The game changes an assortment of rules and adds some new features, same as always, though the biggest focus appears to be on making Madden’s defensive game more fun.
Other changes include tweaks to the way Connected Franchise (basically, career mode) works, the end of reserve decks in Madden Ultimate Team, and a deep revision of the Skills Trainer mode, complete with tutorials that teach football strategies and concepts. Find out more on EA Sports’ official website.
PS4 (August 26)
Infamous: First Light returns to the near-future Seattle that we last visited around the launch of the PlayStation 4 in developer Sucker Punch’s superb Infamous: Second Son. The new story, which will be released as a standalone game, explores the back story of one of the key supporting character Conduits (super-powered beings in the Infamous universe) in Second Son. The set of powers that you get should be familiar to fans of the earlier game, but they’re tweaked and built on in First Light.
While you’re not required to own a copy of Second Son if you want to play Infamous: First Light, you can unlock a handful of extra game modes if you’ve got both. Learn more on Sony’s official website.
Mac/PC/PS3 (August 26), Xbox 360 (August 27), iOS (August 28)
It’s been a long, grueling journey for fans of The Walking Dead, and the fifth and final episode of Telltale Games’ second season — titled “No Going Back” — puts a cap on things this week. There’s practically nothing we can say here about the episode or the season that wouldn’t fall into spoiler territory. All you really need to know heading into Season Two is that the world is still a dark, terrible post-apocalyptic nightmare where everyone is terrible and just fighting to stay alive.
If you haven’t played any of the series yet, do not start here. Go back to Season One, learn who Lee and Clementine are, take the journey that Telltale’s writing wizards have carefully plotted out. And if you have been keeping up, play the new episode as soon as you can, before reading any reviews. Thank us later.
PC/PS4/Xbox One (August 26)
Two great games in one package! Metro Redux gathers together the post-apocalyptic shooters Metro 2033 and follow-up Metro: Last Light into a newly remastered package for the latest Microsoft and Sony consoles (and PC). In addition to across-the-board visual improvements — much more noticeable in the older 2033 — Metro Redux also gives players the option to run through the earlier game using Last Light‘s more shooter-oriented gameplay, or run through Last Light using 2033‘s survival-driven systems.
Whatever you choose, you get two exceedingly solid games for the price of a standard new release ($60), complete with touched-up graphics and tweaked play. Check out the official website for more details.
The Call of Duty franchise has held a special place in my heart ever since I played my first Black Ops game back in 2010. That game's campaign was something else, with twists and turns that culminated in a mind-blowing finale. We can all admit that compared to those older campaigns, the recent CODs have been lackluster at best, and a complete and utter disappointment at worst. The reboot of Modern Warfare did give me some hope, as the first two installments were actually quite good, but the third game left such a bad taste in my mouth that I wasn’t exactly expecting much from Modern Warfare 4.
After recently finishing the campaign, I can say that this installment is nothing like the recent releases and instead feels closer to the franchise’s roots. For the first time in a long while, the campaign comes across as well-crafted rather than rushed to hit a release date. It arrives three years after MW3, and you can see exactly where all that time went. It seems the studio finally made listening to player feedback a priority.
Epic Games has just announced the 2026 Epic AI MegaJam, which is looking to see how much game development can be squeezed into a very short window. This is running from November 12 through November 15.
Participants can work alone or in teams of up to five people, build in Unreal Engine or Unreal Editor for Fortnite, and bring along “as many AI agents as you want.” Epic explicitly encourages coding agents, AI-generated assets, audio tools, writing tools, and other AI systems. The official event page literally says "Vibe your way to $50k.”
It’s turning into a pretty good time to be a Monster Hunter fan who plays on a phone. Capcom has confirmed that Monster Hunter Outlanders will launch on Android and iOS on October 29, giving the series a new mobile-first game just as Monster Hunter Rise is also preparing to make the jump to smartphones through Netflix.
Outlanders is being developed by Tencent subsidiary TiMi Studio Group under license and supervision from Capcom. Unlike Rise, which appears to be the full console and PC game adapted for mobile, Outlanders is a free-to-play survival hunting game made specifically for phones.