I know I’ve said it before but I always enjoy putting together what’s now become a bunch of annual features around now! This time around, they began with Wonderful Sights in Gaming – Part Four at the end of November, then after the seasonal recap of Gaming Pickups and the monthly Retro Rewind old magazine flick-through at the start of December, there was the regular Christmas deep-dive, Rediscovering Deathsmiles II: Makai No Merry Christmas – Arcade on Nintendo Switch. This was followed by my favourite of all, The Retro Arcadia Game of the Year Top Ten Countdown 2024, and we had the Retro Arcadia Weekly Spotlight Christmas Special, and then my Big Retro Arcadia Rundown of Games Completed 2024… And here we now are in the brand new year, and the very last of them! Following on from that game of the year countdown I just mentioned, there’s no better time to start thinking about the next one, so that’s what we’re doing today – checking out what’s on the way in 2025 and picking out the main contenders! Of course, half the fun is not having a clue yet about half the stuff that’s going to be released throughout the year, but that doesn’t stop us speculating about what we do know, so let’s dive in!

I’ll go in order of release where I know it, then the order I’ve written them down where I don’t, and I’ll throw in trailers wherever I can too, starting with this one for Star Wars Episode:1 Power Battles, which is coming to PlayStation, Xbox, PC and Switch on January 23rd. This is a remake-remaster thing built on the original Dreamcast source code from 2000, and is a kind of platforming beat ‘em up following on from The Phantom Menace, with couch co-op and various new gameplay features and modes. Looks like it’s still a lot of fun too!

If its 2022 predecessor is anything to go by, then Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector might well be the first serious contender for my game of the year this time around! I’ll be playing on Xbox (via Game Pass I’m very pleased to say!) without delay when it finally gets here on 31st January, when it’s also out on Switch, PlayStation and PC. And once again, it’s taking that unique, not nerdy in the slightest, dice-driven, narrative-heavy RPG template from the original, and seemingly adding more depth to all of the above, as you take your escaped “Sleeper” android off in a commandeered ship, finding yourself a crew, then balancing contracts across the Starward Belt against the demands of your own malfunctioning body. Looking very special!

Given that Cash Cow DX from the same developer made an appearance in the aforementioned game of the year countdown for 2024, and their previous game, Donut Dodo, did the same when that came out too, I’m hoping for a repeat performance from their next game, Looney Landers, this year! Like its predecessors, it’s a fast-paced, super-vibrant and super-retro arcade romp, as you skydive your way through wacky, hazard-filled environments and grab yourself the highest scores, although this one has a bit more of a competitive party vibe, which is my only concern really, despite it being advertised for solo play as well as for two players. We’ll see when it looney lands on PC via Steam on 2nd February!

First-person action-survival with a bit of stealth wouldn’t generally sound like my cup of tea but Atomfall’s post-nuclear disaster mystery premise, set across northern England’s Lake District in an alternate 1960s, certainly does! Looks like there’s a strong whiff of Fallout with a hint of BioShock to the gameplay, with plenty of strangeness to add plenty of opportunity for some wild visuals (and wild encounters) on top of what looks like some very authentic presentation. Coming to Xbox Game Pass too, so I’ll be all over it, as well as PlayStation and PC, all on March 27th.

I’m terrible at including a fighting game or two in these things, getting myself all hyped-up about them, then never actually getting around to getting them! Maybe Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves is going to be the one to change all that, but either way, it’s out on Xbox, PlayStation and PC on 21st April. I am genuinely pretty excited about this – it’s the first game in the series since the fantastic Garou: Mark of the Wolves in 1999, and as well as carrying over a few of that game’s tricks, there’s a new “Rev” mechanic for cooking all your moves, an RPG-ish mode, and loads of old and new characters. Looks gorgeous too!

Apart from the Atari ST port of the original, when I didn’t know any better, I’ve never been that into Double Dragon, but I’ll always give it another chance whenever the opportunity arises again, and the next opportunity is set for October 23rd, when Double Dragon Revive comes to PlayStation, Xbox and PC. That said, this one is going to have to blow me away with its bombastic beat ‘em up gameplay because I really can’t see the post-apocalyptic storyline being a reason to buy it, familiar faces or not, and the Mortal Kombat-styled presentation really isn’t doing it for me so far – just not Double Dragon to me but, like with my old ST game, what do I know…

Let’s get proper nerdy now with Dune: Awakening, arriving on PC sometime in early 2025 (which also means that from here on in, we’re in no fixed release date at the time of writing territory). I think PlayStation and Xbox are set to follow at some point too but not sure when yet. It’s set in an alternate history version of the desert planet Arrakis, or Dune, where all the events in the books never happened, the people in them never existed, and the familiar local desert folk have all gone missing. Finding them is where you begin, surviving the elements and other bad things, scavenging, crafting, exploring and trading, and generally working your way up Dune’s insanely convoluted but quite wonderful food chain in an open-world MMO fashion. Not sure my crappy PC is up to this, but wherever I eventually get to it, I reckon I might be spending a lot of time here!

By my reckoning, Doom The Dark Ages makes that eight mainline Dooms now, the first of which I bought on launch day on the original PlayStation, the third of which is my all-time favourite first-person shooter, and the last two of which have caused me terrible motion sickness! Hoping for a bit less of that whenever this arrives on PlayStation, Xbox (Game Pass) and PC sometime in 2025, although as what will no doubt be a staggeringly cinematic prequel to 2016’s Doom and 2020’s Doom Eternal, I’m not holding my breath! This is the origin story of our legendary Doom Slayer, which I’m sure will become totally irrelevant as soon as you start slaughtering the entire population of techno-Hell with all kinds of wild, demon-slaying super-weapons… I can feel the nausea already!

I’ve only ever dabbled with the previous Fable games but I enjoyed what I played of them, and us Xbox owners can’t be choosers regardless! The new one, simply titled Fable, is by Playground Games (the Forza Horizon folk) rather than Peter Molyneux, and it’s built on the stunning Forza engine, so definitely worth a look for its pedigree alone whenever it appears on Xbox Game Pass (and I assume its Windows flavour too) sometime this year. Apart from that, it’s potentially a reboot, it’s definitely a third-person, open-world RPG, it looks very cinematic, has the trademark humour, and it’s got Super Hans off the telly in it too!

Project X: Light Years is, indeed, an official reimagining of the classic Commodore Amiga side-scrolling shoot ‘em up from 1992, which indie dev MK Games (in partnership with Team 17) has already released a Steam demo for, so I’m hoping it’s not too far off now! The original was one of the most stunning games on the Amiga but one of the most brutal too – to the point of being totally unfair and unenjoyable, although I assume this one will be taking a leaf out of the 1993 revised edition instead, which balanced it considerably! And obviously, all mod-cons everywhere else too. No word on release date beyond sometime this year, or news on any other formats yet either.

I’m going to call it now… Assuming it actually comes out in 2025, Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater is my game of the year! Staggeringly perhaps, I only “discovered” MGS last year, having dismissed it for decades because I don’t like stealth, but have been making my way through each entry in my new-found favourite series (plus the original Metal Gear titles as well as spin-offs), on original hardware as far as possible, ever since. I love it and I can’t wait to get involved in this remake of 2004’s intricately crafted, super-cinematic action-stealth prequel, Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, the second it launches! The bonkers narrative combined with the jungle setting and all those systems, all brought up to date, just promises to be off the charts whenever it comes to PlayStation, Xbox and PC!

And on a related subject, while I’ve not even played the first game yet (although I do now own it), as a born-again Metal Gear fanboy, it’s about time I got in on something by Kojima himself at launch too! That said, PS5 only for now at least, so I expect I’ll be waiting a while for Death Stranding 2: On The Beach regardless, but what the hell, I can still be excited about it! And if the last game we looked at promises a bonkers narrative, then this will no doubt be something else again, with a new tale of saving humanity from extinction – seemingly reflecting the impact of COVID-19 – to attempt to unravel at some point this year.

I’ll finish with NULLPTR on PC, and having played tons of the demo on Steam almost a year ago, I’ll give you a full preview too, because I also think it deserves it! It’s an indie action-puzzler in a hacking skin that involves careful thought and planning, as well as quick and precise movement once you think you know where things are headed. You’re trying to steal all the data from a bunch of mega-corporation servers, which involves manipulating their security measures and increasingly complex structures to open up safe routes to what you’re after, against a time limit, of course! It’s deceptively simple, presented like some old sci-fi movie computer terminal, with nothing more than coloured shapes representing actions you need to take in order to hack each one and move to the next. Way more intuitive to play than to describe, and once you get it, that time mechanic becomes really compelling, to the point your whole purpose will be to go back and beat your own times, for no other reason than because you have to! Really glad I happened upon this and can’t wait for the full release, hopefully very soon now.

I’m going to keep a watching brief on both Turok Origins and Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound but only really for their retro pedigree than for any great interest in their respective franchises, although I’d have said the same about Metal Gear this time last year so I’ll always keep an open mind! And that also goes for whether or not Hollow Knight: Silksong finally makes an appearance and takes its rightful place at the business end of my countdown in December… We continue to live in hope! As said at the beginning though (and also as demonstrated by my 2024 top ten), the most exciting stuff can be what we don’t even know about yet, so I’ll hopefully see you in just under twelve months to find out how it all turned out, and in the meantime, I also hope you had fun with everything we’ve just looked at so far!

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