5 Game Series That Should Take Five

Call of Duty

The Assassin’s Creed series returned to our consoles and PCs last week after having taken 2016 off. Ubisoft opted to take some time out to “take advantage of new technologies” and “give the brand a new dimension.” Now that the series has returned with the rather excellent Origins, we decided to take a look at five other series that could benefit from taking five.

Call of Duty is one of the industry’s biggest juggernauts. Each and every year, without fail, we get another eight to 10-hour campaign, a substantial multiplayer mode, and sometimes, a co-op Zombies mode to sweeten the deal. Sure, it’s fun, but as the series that essentially shaped the landscape of modern day FPS titles, we can’t help but feel it could be pushing the boundaries even further.

Rather than the minor changes to the loadout system we’ve seen in the recent entries’ multiplayer modes, let’s see an overhaul of the whole system. New and interesting game modes, a thorough overhaul of the physics and graphics engines to bring even more immersive gunfights to your living room, and well-designed maps that echo the sheer brilliance of those found in Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare.

While it’s often overshadowed by the multiplayer mode, campaigns are just as in need of a breath of fresh air. Be it more engaging and interesting characters and relationships, bombastic set-pieces, or perhaps even a choices system to help personalize the experience to a player. The rest of the market is finding novel ways to make their shooters stand out from the crowd, and Call of Duty needs to do the same.

It remains to be seen whether or not Call of Duty: WWII may be the breath of fresh air that the series needs as it takes it back to its roots and tries to shake up the typical campaign and multiplayer experiences.

Need for Speed

Need for Speed used to be the pinnacle of car customization and that arcadey- style racing that players just loved. Alas, in recent years it went the way of horrific live-action cutscenes, half-baked customization options, and empty, boring open-worlds leaving fans to look elsewhere for their fix of fast cars and rebellious racing.

In the case of Need for Speed, it’s not like Ghost Games has to reinvent the wheel. The core racing experience doesn’t need to have a bunch of fancy bells and whistles on it. Instead, Need for Speed needs to go back to its roots and recapture the magic of the likes of Need for Speed Underground and its sequel.

Give us a city that’s actually interesting to drive around in, filled with other drivers and interesting events to take part in and sights to see. A plethora of customization options is, of course, a must, and top it all off with a story and cutscenes that don’t make us want to claw our eyes out. It’d certainly be worth the wait if Ghost Games could crack it.

Telltale Series

Telltale Games’ episodic series often tell us great stories with plenty of painfully tough choices and emotional moments that they stick with us for a long time. The likes of Tales From the Borderlands or the first season of The Walking Dead have long stuck with me simply because I spent so long weighing up the pros and cons of each choice. Making these decisions and seeing how they play out is one of the core components in Telltale’s formula. Alas, once you’ve finally made your choice, particularly in some of their recent ventures, things fall flat.

Ultimately, the choices you make along the way don’t really matter too much. They may alter the way a character is with you, or funnel you towards one of two majorly different endings, but that’s it. Some you may never even know how they affect your story. Considering how popular Telltale’s episodic series have become in recent years, it only seems right that the studio takes some time off to really look at how they can make their personalized, episodic adventures even more unique and personal to each individual player. Though there obviously has to be a limit to the number of branching dialog options and storylines at some point, the likes of Life Is Strange has highlighted that there’s still room for Telltale to improve.

Handling iconic properties and the characters they contain such as Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy and DC’s Batman is a match made in heaven for Telltale’s natural talent of storytelling and character development. However, the engine which all of this is running on, which according to Waypoint, didn’t even have a physics system around the time of The Walking Dead, isn’t doing their hard work justice.

LEGO

The LEGO games are often a go-to for parents looking for family-friendly titles for their kids. Something that’s easy and accessible enough for them to get to grips with, while ensuring the worst gore they’ll see is a little LEGO figurine getting blasted into its respective blocky parts. The gameplay remains simple with combat being as simple as pressing a button, and most of the puzzle sections requiring little more than smashing something and rebuilding the pieces into something new. That, or using a particular character’s unique ability. Again, these are meant for kids, but there’s certainly room for improvement in the formula we’ve been playing through for a decade now.

Most significantly, LEGO was essentially the sandbox for creativity before the time of Minecraft, so why are puzzle solutions confined to building predetermined objects? Give players a ton of blocks, maybe a few suggested objects to build, and let them have at it.

If we were only getting one LEGO game every 18 months or so, the current formula wouldn’t be too bad. However, with LEGO getting involved with just about every major movie franchise, as well as nurturing its own properties, there’s seldom six months between the latest LEGO video game releases. Each one the same, tired foundations with a new skin draped over the top. TT Games had a cool idea back in 2007. Now it’s time to take a break, ramp it up to the next level, and put the same-old experience into retirement.

Halo

I remember playing the Halo mission in Halo 3 with a sense of awe and nervousness as I guided my Warthog through a deteriorating path to freedom. I remember scaling and defeating a Scarab for the first time, and that very first mission in Combat Evolved as I crawled through the vents of the ship and pushed back an attack. Alas, since Bungie parted ways with the Halo series, these magical moments have felt sparse, and the core Halo gameplay ultimately isn’t as fresh as it once was.

It’s been two years since Halo 5: Guardians hit the Xbox One, and though by no means a bad game, it continued the downward trend for the series’ critical reception. As the flagship series for the Xbox brand, ensuring that Halo gets back to its peak should be paramount to Microsoft and 343 Studios. There’s a world rich with lore and iconic characters, let’s just hope the time is taken to refine the gameplay into something that feels fresh and offers up just as many memorable moments as the original trilogy.