The updates are already flowing out of developer Turn 10, and both the present and future of Forza Motorsport are bright. To top it off, Forza Motorsport delivers the bleeding-edge graphical realism we've come to expect from this franchise, with multiple graphical and performance settings allowing you to favor framerate or fully maxed-out raytraced visuals. Though there's still plenty of that, too. A focus on tuning – with an in-game economy built to reflect that – encourages you to tweak builds of existing cars, really getting under the hood with them, rather than simply lusting for the next shiny new car. The new Motorsport promises to be a platform that will evolve and grow over time, and it's already off to a tremendous start. It was a long wait between last-gen's Forza Motorsport 7 and the new-gen Forza Motorsport, but oh was the wait worth it. It is truly the roleplaying game where solutions are limited only by your own imagination, and for that it deserves every accolade it gets. Baldur’s Gate 3 levels up the traditional CRPG in the same way that Xbox legends Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic and Mass Effect did in their day. But from our experience playing it on other platforms, it’s patently obvious that it should be included on this short list of the best Xbox games of the year. Look, we know that Baldur’s Gate 3 just dropped on Xbox last week after developer Larian Studios did its best to wrestle split-screen multiplayer onto the Xbox Series S before Phil Spencer and the Xbox leadership team wisely bent their parity policy and allowed the Series S version to ship without said same-screen co-op while the Series X version included it. Alan Wake 2 looks gorgeous, it sounds amazing, its story is full of surprises, and mechanically it’s a damn good survival horror game – itself an unexpected change of genre pace from the original action-adventure romp.

In fact, Remedy knew that the overwhelming majority of players will have not played the original, and so FBI agent Saga Anderson effectively becomes the player’s avatar as the strangeness of Bright Falls envelops everyone in the town.

It’s delightfully weird, and it’s built so smartly that playing Alan Wake 1 was not required homework. Alan Wake 2 is a triumph of unique and compelling narrative storytelling, survival horror gameplay, and a beautiful visual aesthetic – all delivered by a cast of talented live-action and motion-captured performers. The Finnish wizards at Remedy Entertainment have been making outstanding video games for over 20 years now, but somehow they’ve just made their best one ever.

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