Well folks, it’s been a long week. The Nintendo Switch 2 finally got revealed. David Lynch passed away. The world is quite literally burning. It’s a lot for one person to take in. Thankfully, a much needed weekend is here and it’s prime video game time for anyone in need for some stress relief (I know I am!). January is a quiet time for new video games, though, and we’ve yet to see many exciting new releases pop up. So what’s worth playing?
As someone who played over 180 new releases in 2024, I’m here to help. I’ve got some recommendations for newly released games that you can sink into this January. Whether you’re looking for some bombastic action to relieve your stress or something a bit brainier, these are the three games on my own playlist this weekend.
The first big game of the year is here, and it’s Dynasty Warriors: Origins. The action-RPG is a bit of a soft reboot of the Dynasty Warrior series, which adapts Romance of the Three Kingdoms into giant hack and slash battles. It’s a daunting series that has numerous entries, but Origins is the perfect place to start if you’re a newcomer. It better introduces players to its long historical setting and all its characters thanks to a greater emphasis on cutscenes. The real meat, though, is its sharp Musou combat that’ll have you slicing up thousands of people over a series of thrilling battles. It’s not perfect, especially if you’re looking for a sensible story. Origins suffers from a disjointed narrative that doesn’t exactly fit its violence, but it’s a perfect game to zone out to none the less. I imagine I’ll be returning to it this weekend to blow off some steam.
Dynasty Warriors: Origins is available now on PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC.
Do you love deduction games like Return of the Obra Dinn? How about Succession? The Roottrees are Dead is somewhere in between those two things. This PC detective game begins when a famous family dies in a plane crash. It’s up to players to not just deduce the identities of the victims, but untangle their entire family tree dating. That’s accomplished by searching through files on an old computer and trying to find clues as to who each family member was. That small task turns into a sprawling, multi-generational mystery about a messy family business gone awry. It’s loaded with complicated interpersonal drama that reminds us how much one decision can snowball into decades of consequences. I’ve barely scratched the surface of that mystery, but I can’t wait to dive back in already.
The Roottrees are Dead is available now on PC.
This one’s for the Apple Arcade subscribers out there — however many of you there are. Apple’s mobile gaming subscription service got a slew of new games to start off the new year, including a Three Kingdoms-themed tactics game and a Final Fantasy port. The game I keep coming back to from that bunch, though, is Skate City: New York. A sequel to one of Apple Arcade’s best launch games, Skate City: New York has players skateboarding around 2D New York City landscapes. Doing tricks is as easy as swiping the screen in different directions. It’s a little simple, but that makes for a hypnotic mobile game that should feel familiar if you’ve played games like Alto’s Odyssey. It’s the ideal couch game, which is exactly how I’ve been enjoying it.
Skate City: New York is available on iOS devices via Apple Arcade.
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.