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Holiday Game Releases

bagogames / Flickr / Creative Commons

Thanksgiving is coming up fast, and with that, the biggest shopping season of the year. This is typically when all the biggest games are released.

The Xbox One has a few big exclusives this holiday. Halo 5, which I talked about a few weeks ago, and the sequel to 2013’s fantastic reboot of the Tomb Raider series. The new game, Rise of the Tomb Raider, is a cinematic adventure with a story that should be at turns tragic and uplifting, but with the tight, responsive gameplay the series is known for.

Star Wars fans will certainly be playing EA’s new Star Wars: Battlefront. Battlefront puts you in huge, 40-player matches pitting the Rebel Alliance against the Galactic Empire in locations familiar to anyone who has watched the Star Wars films. One such encounter has the Rebels defending their base on Hoth from the Empire, reenacting the beginning of The Empire Strikes Back. You can call airstrikes from TIE Fighters, take down massive AT-AT walkers, and occasionally you may even get to play as Luke Skywalker or Darth Vader.

The biggest game this holiday season, in terms of both anticipation and actual game size, is Fallout 4. It’s set in a future post-apocalyptic Boston, and has hundreds of quests and enough to keep you busy for literally hundreds of hours if you care to invest that much time in it. The strength of the Fallout series has always been its writing and the fact that, in every interaction, you can choose your response: you can be a good citizen of the wasteland, helping every settlement you encounter, or you can tell people to deal with their own problems. Depending on the personality you play with, you develop a reputation that can follow you, and different people will treat you with the respect, or disgust, you deserve.

Samuel McConnell is a games enthusiast who has been playing games in one form or another since 1991. He was born in northern Maine but quickly transplanted to Wichita.